The First Meeting in Zhengzhou

From November 2 to November 10, 1958, Mao Zedong hosted a working conference in Zhengzhou attended by some central leaders, the heads of regions and some first secretaries of provincial and municipal committees. This Meeting was originally convened by Mao Zedong to prepare for the upcoming Wuchang Conference and the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee. However, in the process of listening to the report, Mao Zedong felt that some issues involved the understanding of socialism and communism and were of great importance, so that the scope of the Meeting was expanded three times in succession. Firstly, from Shanxi, Gansu, Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, five provinces expanded to nine provinces including Shandong, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan; later the directors of the major collaborative areas were called to participate the Meeting; finally, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping, Tan Zhenlin, Yang Shangkun, so forth, also rushed to Zhengzhou to attend the Meeting. The Meeting had two topics and prepared two documents, namely the "Resolution of the Zhengzhou Meeting on Some Issues of the People's Commune (Draft)" and "Forty Articles of the Fifteen-Year Socialist Construction Program".

At the Meeting, Mao Zedong led a reading from the book Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. by Stalin and made several speeches. In response to the widespread confusion between socialism and communism and between collective ownership and social ownership, in his speeches and book talks at the Meeting, while affirming that the people's commune was the best form for implementing the transition to social ownership and the transition to communism, he opposed the mistake of rushing the transition to social ownership and the rush to communism. The Meeting extensively discussed the problems arising in the people's commune movement and refuted the erroneous proposition of abolishing commodity production, the law of value and commodity exchange and implementing commodity transfer at the present stage. The Meeting also laid down the policy of combining work and rest, and focusing on both production and life, in response to the actual situation that the whole nation needed to take a break from the continuous hard work of running iron and steel, promoting water conservancy, and deep plowing of the land.

The First Zhengzhou Meeting discussed and recognized the problems on the premise of fully affirming the general line of socialist construction, the "Great Leap Forward" and the people's commune movement, so that it still did not get rid of its unrealistic estimation of the economic development situation in China and continued to put forward some high targets. This Meeting also failed to recognize the "communist wind" within the people's communes, and therefore did not solve this problem. However, the First Zhengzhou Conference and its aftermath made everyone realize that there should have been a line between collective ownership and social ownership, between socialism and communism, and that there should have been no confusion. This basically corrected the erroneous idea of rushing the transition to communism. Some important guidelines and policies put forward at the Meeting played an important role in ensuring the stable development of agricultural production in China. This was the beginning of the CPC's efforts to correct some of the “Left” mistakes it had already perceived.