Nanning Meeting

A meeting to discuss and study the national economic plan for 1958, the state budget and working methods.

From January 11 to January 22, 1958, the Central Committee of the CPC held a working conference in Nanning, Guangxi with 25 participants, including some central leaders, some central ministries and commissions and the heads of party committees of nine provinces and two cities, also known as the "Nanning Working Conference".

On the 15th, the Meeting heard Bo Yibo's speech on the "Summary of the Report on the 1958 Plan (Draft)", which pointed out that the center of the plan was to mobilize all possible positive factors, vigorously organize the climax of industrial and agricultural production, meet the "Great Leap Forward", and pave the way for the Second Five-Year high-speed development of production and construction. The Meeting also heard Li Xiannian's report on the 1958 state budget and Wang Heshou's report on the target of steel production. At this Meeting, Mao Zedong, in his speeches and interjections, criticized more severely than the Hangzhou Meeting what he called the "anti-progressive". Mao accused the editorial of the People's Daily of June 20, 1956 of being wrong in principle and wanted to check the comments and messages that had been propagated since then to counter the advances. In his speech at the Meeting on the evening of the 19th, Zhou Enlai took responsibility for the examination of the anti-adventurous progress from the second half of 1956, saying that the anti-adventurous progress was a period of directional wavering and mistakes.

At the Meeting, Mao Zedong proposed that "more speed, better savings" as a method of work. This Meeting proposed that both the central and local governments should have worked on the method of two accounts, that is, the central and local governments should have had two accounts, one was the plan that must have been completed, which was announced; the second was the plan that would be completed, which was not announced. The result was a subjectivistic high target, production plans layer upon layer, and the target was arbitrarily increased, contrary to the objective economic laws.

The Meeting criticized more severely the "anti-adventurous progress", which led to the rapid development of the "left-leaning" ideology in the Party, which was eager for success. In the two or three months after the Nanning Meeting, in the atmosphere of criticism of "anti-adventurous progress", unrealistic slogans such as the slogan of catching up with Britain in three Five-Year Plan and the call for a three-year struggle to bring about a fundamental change in the appearance of some regions were raised in the Party.