The Second Meeting in Zhengzhou

The Second Enlarged Meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held in Zhengzhou from February 27 to March 5, 1959. The Meeting was attended by 20 leading comrades of the Central Committee and 27 first secretaries of Party committees of various provinces, cities and autonomous regions. The main agenda of the Meeting was to address the new problems found in the consolidation of the rural people's communes, to study the guidelines and methods for further consolidation and construction of the people's communes, and to solve the problems of ownership of the people's communes and correction of the "communist wind" of "equalitarianism and indiscriminate transfer of resources". The Meeting discussed the problem of tension between the Party and the peasants. It pointed out that there were three main elements of the communist wind: Firstly, the poor and the rich were flattened; secondly, there was too much accumulation and too much compulsory labor; and thirdly, there were various kinds of "production" in the "commune". In order to overcome this "communist wind", it was necessary to correct two tendencies in the work of the Party, namely, egalitarianism and over-centralization. The Meeting proposed the policy of rectifying and building people's communes at that time. During the discussion, the "Records of the Zhengzhou Conference" were drawn up, setting out 14 sentences as the guidelines for the rectification and construction of people's communes, namely: unified leadership, team-based; hierarchical management, decentralized authority; three-level accounting, each accounting for profits and losses; distribution plan, decided by the community; appropriate accumulation, reasonable transfer; material labor, equal exchange; distribution according to labor, recognizing differences. The Meeting also drew up "Regulations on the Management System of the People's Commune (Draft)", which made a specific division of the terms of reference among the commune, the management area (or production brigade), and the production team. Management districts and production brigades, which were equivalent in size to the former senior agricultural production cooperatives, were the basic accounting units of the people's communes, and they had the right to make unified arrangements for their agricultural production, distribution of earnings, construction and management of small factories, as well as cultural, educational, health and public welfare undertakings, and good labor management in accordance with the commune's plans and relevant regulations.

The Meeting played a positive role in overcoming the "communist wind" which advocated "equalitarianism and indiscriminate transfer of resources" within the people's communes, and it showed that the Party had made another step forward in correcting the “Left” mistakes of the People's Communes Movement. However, the commune was still a production brigade in terms of accounting units, and the supply system was not abolished in the distribution system. On the issue of correcting the "communist wind", Mao Zedong put forward the view that old accounts from the past should not have been counted in general. This also shows that the correction of “Left” mistakes was not fully achieved at that time.