Excerpt From a Comment on a Directive From the South-Western Bureau of the Central Committee to the North Sichuan Prefectural Committee of the Communist Party of China

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Excerpt From a Comment on a Directive From the South-Western Bureau of the Central Committee to the North Sichuan Prefectural Committee of the Communist Party of China has been translated, prepared, and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the following edition: On Suppressing Counter-Revolutionaries, in the Collected Works of Mao Zedong, First Chinese Edition, Vol. 5, People's Publishing House, Beijing.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an excerpt from a comment written by Comrade Mao Zedong on a directive on the Movement to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries from the South-Western Bureau of the Central Committee to the North Sichuan Prefectural Committee of the Communist Party of China on the 3rd of April, 1951. It was first published in the Collected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. 5.

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#EXCERPT FROM A COMMENT ON A DIRECTIVE FROM THE SOUTH-WESTERN BUREAU OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE TO THE NORTH SICHUAN PREFECTURAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA

#Mao Zedong

#3rd of April, 1951

#★

Don't executive too many people. If you execute too many people, you will lose public sympathy and waste labour-power. The principle is that anyone who has incurred blood debts or has committed major crimes must be resolutely executed if the people's anger cannot be sated without their execution, so as to benefit production by way of the people's anger. Anyone who has not incurred blood debts or committed a major crime that caused public outrage, but is guilty of a crime worthy of capital punishment, such as some spies, secret agents, counter-revolutionaries in educational and economic circles, and so on, may be sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, during which time they should be made to work, so as to see how they will behave. If they can be reformed through labour, the death penalty can be commuted to life imprisonment, and later to imprisonment for a fixed amount of time. (Those who have been sentenced to more than one year's imprisonment should generally be organized to perform labour and not be allowed to be idle.) In this way, the initiative is in our hands, and we can do whatever we want from then on.