On the Cooperative Transformation of Agriculture

Report of Mao Zedong at the Meeting of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees called by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on July 31, 1955. It was included in the Volume 6 of Collected Works of Mao Zedong.

In the summer of 1955, the Party had different opinions on the issue of agricultural cooperation. Deng Zihui, vice premier of the State Council and head of the Rural Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, advocated appropriately slowing down the pace of cooperative development, while Mao Zedong advocated speeding up the development. In order to discuss the issue of agricultural cooperation, the CPC Central Committee held a Meeting of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regional Party Committees in July 1955. Mao Zedong made a report on “The Issue of Agricultural Cooperation”.

The report made a comprehensive summary of the basic experience of the agricultural cooperation movement, clarified the basic road, basic principles and basic policies of agricultural cooperation, and made a comprehensive discussion on the relationship between agricultural cooperation and mechanization, social reform and technological reform. It is another important document to guide agricultural cooperation after the two resolutions of the CPC Central Committee on agricultural mutual assistance and cooperation.

The report expounds the policy that the steps of agricultural cooperation should be adapted to the steps of socialist industrialization. Mao Zedong emphasized that: “If we cannot basically solve the problem of agricultural co-operation within roughly three five-year plans, that is to say, if our agriculture cannot make a leap from small-scale farming with animal-drawn farm implements to large-scale mechanized farming, along with extensive state-organized land reclamation by settlers using machinery (the plan being to bring 400 to 500 million mu of waste land under cultivation in the course of three five-year plans), then we shall fail to resolve the contradiction between the ever-increasing need for commodity grain and industrial raw materials and the present generally low output of staple crops, and we shall run into formidable difficulties in our socialist industrialization and be unable to complete it.”

According to this report, the consolidation and development of cooperatives are feasible.

Mao Zedong stressed that the guiding principle of the CPC Central Committee for the issue of agricultural cooperation is correct. We should believe that the poor peasants, the lower middle peasants among the new middle peasants and the lower middle peasants among the old middle peasants have a kind of enthusiasm to take the socialist road. I think we should be confident, secondly, that the Party is capable of leading the people of the whole country to socialism.

Mao Zedong reiterated that strengthening cooperatives and ensuring conditions for increasing production should adhere to the principle of voluntariness and mutual benefit, improve management, improve farming techniques and increase means of production.

After the meeting, China's agricultural socialist transformation entered a climax stage. However, in the report, Deng Zihui's Rural Work Department was wrongly accused of making "Right opportunistic mistakes" and being a "little footed woman" who stood behind the mass movement, thus describing the normal inner-Party debate as a divergence of two lines.