Revolutionary Transition and the Party’s General Line for the Transitional Period

In December 1953, Mao Zedong wrote and rewrote three additional paragraphs when he reviewed the draft titled as "Struggle to Mobilize All Forces to Build Our Country into a Great Socialist Country: An Outline of Study and Publicity on the Party's General Line in the Transitional Period", prepared by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the CPC. It was included in the Volume 6 of the Collected Works of Mao Zedong.

Mao Zedong began to put forward the general line of the Party in the transitional period in the second half of 1952. He made a relatively complete statement at the meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on June 15, 1953, and formally wrote it to Zhou Enlai's conclusion at the 1953 the National Conference on Financial and Economic Work in August.

Since then, there has been an upsurge of studying and publicizing the Party's general line in the transitional period.

In order to make the whole Party and the people of all ethnic groups clear about the complicated problems in the first few years of China's transitional period, especially the scientific understanding of the change in the nature of China's revolution and the complexity of the work tasks brought about by it, Mao Zedong wrote this document, in which he determined the complete description of the general line of the transitional period.

(1) We should have a scientific understanding of the change in the nature of the revolution and our tasks in the past three years.

"What marks the change of the revolutionary nature, the basic end of the new democratic revolutionary stage and the beginning of the socialist revolutionary stage is the change of political power, the demise of the counter revolutionary regime of the KMT and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. It does not mean that such a great task as socialist transformation can be accomplished immediately after the founding of the People's Republic of China, all aspects have been implemented.”

In the past two or three years, in order to prepare for socialist transformation, we have begun to solve the contradiction between feudalism and democracy in the countryside, and have successively completed agrarian reform; we have accepted bureaucratic capitalist enterprises in the cities, established socialist state-owned commerce and cooperative commerce, and adopted state capitalist measures against private capitalist enterprises.

(2) The complete content of the Party's general line in the transitional period is: "From the founding of the People's Republic of China to the basic completion of socialist transformation, this is a transitional period.

The general line and task of the Party in this transitional period is to gradually realize the socialist industrialization of the country and gradually realize the socialist transformation of agriculture, rival industries and capitalist industry and Commerce in a fairly long period of time."

This general line should be the beacon illuminating all our work, and wherever we deviate from it, we shall make right or “Left” deviationist errors.

(3) To realize the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicraft industry and capitalist industry and Commerce by the state is conducive to the rapid development of social productive forces, to a revolution in technology, to changing the backwardness of China's industry and agriculture, to improving people's living standards, to stabilizing national defense and consolidating people's political power.

Mao Zedong also put forward a timetable for completing the general line of the transitional period: "to complete this task, it will take about three five-year plans, that is, about 15 years (from 1953 to 1967, it will be basically completed, plus the three years of economic recovery, it will be 18 years. Four of these 18 years have passed). At that time, China can basically complete the transition. We will build China into a great socialist country.