The Second Plenary Session of the Eighth National Congress of the CPC

It was held in Beijing from May 5 to May 23, 1958. The Plenum was attended by 977 official delegates and 389 attendees (including some county Party secretaries, secretaries of large city district committees, secretaries of provincial municipal committees, secretaries of enterprise Party committees or grass-roots Party committees, and cadres in charge of the military, selected by provinces, cities and autonomous regions). A total of 117 people spoke at the Plenum and also other 140 people made written statements. Twenty-eight central ministries and commissions presented their reports to the Central Committee.

The Plenum continued to criticize the anti-progressive movement and made a formal conclusion that the differences of opinions and controversies that had occurred in the Party over socialist transformation and socialist construction were wrongly attributed to two different guiding ideologies and leadership methods: "faster is better" and "slower is worse". The Plenum also criticized many people who were more pragmatic and skeptical about the "Great Leap Forward" and the high target as the "tide watchers" and the "account settlers", saying that they were not raising the red flag but the "white flag". After the Plenum, the struggle to "pull up the white flag" and criticize the "tide watchers" and the "accounts settling after the autumn harvest" was widely carried out in various places, and the "Great Leap Forward" was purged ideologically and organizationally. Though, the "Great Leap Forward" was to remove the ideological and organizational obstacles.

The Plenum fully affirmed the situation of the "Great Leap Forward" and believed that China was experiencing the great period of "one day equals twenty years" as predicted by Marx, and that the economic and cultural undertakings were fully capable of developing at a speed far exceeding that of the developed countries in the West. The Plenum incorporated the Second Five-Year Plan of national economic development into the track of the "Great Leap Forward". It proposed that enterprises originally managed by departments of the State Council should have been handed over to local management, and that economic management authority originally held by the central government should have also been delegated to localities. The Plenum adopted the "Resolution on the Report on the Work of the Central Committee", the "Resolution on the Moscow Conference of National Communist and Workers' Parties", and the "Resolution on the National Agricultural Development Program from 1956 to 1967", and co-opted 25 alternate members of the Central Committee.

The Plenum adopted the general line of socialist construction, the goal of catching up with and surpassing Great Britain in 15 years, the goal of completing the national agricultural development program five years ahead of schedule, and the slogan "Work hard for three years to change the face of China". It made some correspondingly correct decisions on shifting the Party's work focus to economic construction but made a wrong analysis of such important issues as the situation of the class struggle and the main contradictions in China, rashly changing the correct conclusions of the First Plenary Session of the Eighth Congress on the situation of the class struggle and the main contradictions in China and providing a theoretical basis for the mistake of expanding the class struggle. Before and during this Plenum, the Party's democratic centralism and the collective leadership of the Central Committee were undermined by the continuous criticism and accusation of the correct proposition of the 1956 "anti-invasion", which led to the growth of “Left” impetuous thinking in the Party.