The Report on Second Plenary Session of Seventh Central Committee of CPC

On March 5, 1949, Mao Zedong made a report at the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the eve of the national victory of the Chinese revolution. It was included in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 4. The report discussed the historical change of the Party's focus of work from the countryside to the city, and the period when the city leads the countryside, and makes the principle provisions on how to carry out the work in the city.

It is proposed that we must whole-heartedly rely on the working class, unite with the rest of the labouring masses, win over the intellectuals and win over to our side as many as possible of the national bourgeois elements and their representatives who can co-operate with us.

From the very first day we take over a city, we should direct our attention to restoring and developing its production. Only when production in the cities is restored and developed, when consumer-cities are transformed into producer-cities, can the people's political power be consolidated. Other work is around the production and construction of this central work and services for this central work.

The report also sets out the basic policies that the Communist Party of China should adopt in politics, economy and foreign affairs after the national victory. The report also mentions that after the country-wide victory of the Chinese revolution and the solution of the land problem, two basic contradictions will still exist in China. The first is internal, that is, the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The second is external, that is, the contradiction between China and the imperialist countries. The two basic policies of the state in the economic struggle will be regulation of capital at home and control of foreign trade. So far as possible, we must first of all trade with the socialist and people's democratic countries; at the same time we will also trade with capitalist countries.

The report discusses the general tasks and main ways for China to transform from an agricultural country to an industrial country and from a new democratic society to a socialist society. It is pointed out that before the Anti-Japanese War, the proportions of industry and agriculture in the entire national economy of China were, modern industry about 10%, and agriculture and handicrafts about 90%.

Mao Zedong said that this is our basic point of departure for all questions during the period of the Chinese revolution and for a fairly long period after victory. This gives rise to a series of problems regarding our Party's strategy, tactics and policy. The state-run economy is socialist in character and the co-operative economy is semi-socialist; these plus private capitalism, plus the individual economy, plus the state-capitalist economy in which the state and private capitalists work jointly, will be the chief sectors of the economy of the people's republic and will constitute the New-Democratic economic structure.

The report made the following call: the comrades must be taught to remain modest, prudent and free from arrogance and rashness in their style of work, they must be taught to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle. This call put forward an important topic for strengthening the construction of the Marxist ruling party. The report also solemnly commented: “We can learn what we did not know. We are not only good at destroying the Old world, we are also good at building the new.”

This report is a program of action to guide the development of the CPC from a Marxist revolutionary party leading the Chinese revolution to a Marxist party in charge of state power. This report and Mao Zedong’s article “On the People's Democratic Dictatorship”, written in June, the same year, formed the basis for the policies embodied in the “Common Programme of the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference”, which served as a provisional constitution after the founding of New China.