Letter to Kang Sheng [l]
(September 9, 1964)
Comrade Kang Sheng:
Please ask the Beijing Library and Peking University Library to locate for me some works on American history. I do not need any large-scale tomes, such as a complete History of the United States; what I require are books of only tens of thousands of characters, or perhaps up to a hundred thousand at most—no more than three hundred thousand. It would be ideal if there were both works written by Marxists and those penned by bourgeois scholars. I wonder whether it would be possible to find such materials? I would be very grateful for your assistance!
Mao Zedong
September 9th
[I]
Kang Sheng was at that time an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and a secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee.