Sixty Articles of Agriculture

“Regulations on the Work of Rural People's Communes (Draft)” is an important document issued by the CPC Central Committee on the nature, economic system, organization, scale and management of rural people's communes.

In March 1961, the CPC Central Committee held a work conference in Guangzhou to systematically solve various problems of the rural people's communes, especially the two egalitarianism problems between the production teams and the production brigades and between the members of the production teams. Mao Zedong personally led the “Regulations Concerning Rural People's Communes (Draft)”, which consisted of 10 chapters and 60 articles.

The draft stipulated: the rural people's commune is an organization that combines politics with society, a grass-roots unit of our socialist society in the countryside, and a grass-roots unit of the socialist power in the countryside.

The three-level ownership of communes, production brigades and production teams, based on the collective ownership of the production brigade, was the fundamental system of the people's commune at this stage. The size of communes should not be too large to hinder egalitarianism in distribution. The draft also stipulates the internal organizational structure, relations between Party and government, economic relations, production organization and management, and distribution within the people's communes.

At the Beijing Work Conference of the CPC Central Committee held in May 1961, the “Draft” was revised and amended on the basis of feedback received from various parts of the country, thus the “Regulations on the Work of Rural People's Communes (Revised Draft)” was promulgated which stipulated that the principle of distribution according to work should be implemented and the ration based supply system should be abolished and the decision of whether to run public canteens shall be made by commune members.

In 1962, the Central Committee issued another letter of instruction, determining the production team as the basic accounting unit within the people's communes. In 1982, the Fifth Session of the Fifth National People's Congress amended the Constitution decided and abolished the system of integrating government and community (social-economic) functions under the people's communes and re-established the township administrative system saying: “people's commune" shall be changed into "township and nationality township" and "basic accounting unit of a people's commune" shall be changed into "rural collective economic organization," thus the mission of the “Sixty Articles in Agriculture” had ended.

The formulation and implementation of “Sixty Articles in Agriculture” was an important policy paper developed by the CPC to explore improvements in the people's commune system and which aimed adjust relations among people, and played a positive role in correcting the “Left” mistakes in rural work since rural commune movement was launched, it promoted peasants' enthusiasm, helped consolidation and development of rural collective economy as well as promoted the development of agricultural production.