(January 13, 1965)
Issued to the Working Conference[1] Comrades. This letter[2] from a deputy to the People’s Congress is very well written. The criticisms he raises are correct. From now on, we must absolutely refrain from doing foolish things that harm (endanger) the interests of the people.

Mao Zedong
January 13, 1965

[1] Refers to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Working Conference then being held in Beijing.
[2] Refers to a letter written to Mao Zedong on January 3, 1965, by Ma Jianyou, a deputy to the Third National People’s Congress and director of the Rice Research Institute of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, while attending a meeting in Beijing. The letter stated: I boldly report to you the hidden worries and doubts I have kept in my heart for five years. One matter is: In the summer of 1958, Hubei and other provinces reported high yields of several thousand jin per mu of rice. Our province organized a delegation to go and learn from their experience. During the visit, I discovered that these high yields were exaggerated and falsely reported, and that imitating them would inevitably cause enormous losses in production. I therefore raised this with the leader of the delegation, but was immediately criticized. After the visit, when writing a report to the provincial party committee, we were not permitted to state the true situation we had investigated and learned, but could only write according to what the commune secretary introduced. After returning to the province, I used private correspondence to report the real situation I had seen during the visit to the relevant leaders. A deputy commissioner of the Luzhou Prefectural Office once said to me: “Why don’t you write a letter and report this to Chairman Mao?” As a result, in 1959 someone came to investigate the conversation between this deputy commissioner and me. I have never been able to understand this. Is a revolutionary cadre not allowed to report the situation to the Chairman? Is there any restriction on the content of reporting the situation to the Chairman? Another matter is: In March 1959, I was sent down to Shidong Commune in Lu County. In early April, I saw a letter written by the Chairman to the production team leaders. At that time, I could not wait and immediately read this letter to the commune members, and all of them were overjoyed. Subsequently, I returned to my own unit and read it to the staff and workers. Unexpectedly, a few days later, I heard that this letter from the Chairman was not being distributed to the production teams, and many production teams did not even know the Chairman had written such a letter. The Party branch secretary of my unit also criticized me, saying that my reading the Chairman’s letter to the commune members and staff and workers distorted the Chairman’s intention in writing the letter. The practice of withholding the Chairman’s letter and not publicizing it was not limited to a few counties or a few units in Sichuan. Cadres were very dissatisfied with this, but dared not speak out. What exactly is the reason behind this? It is worthy of the Chairman’s attention and understanding.