Beidaihe Conference (1958)

[2] The major topics of the Beidaihe Conference in 1958 were the national economic plan in 1959, current problems of industrial and agricultural production, and rural work.

[10] The document adopted in Chengdu Conference said "if we implement Chairman Mao's directives, our speed of socialist industrialization might be faster than the Soviet Union, and overtake the United Kingdom in less than fifteen years.

From May 5 to 23, the CCP held the Second Session of 8th National Party Congress, which formally adopted the General Line - which was suggested by Mao - "go all out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, faster, better, and more economical results (鼓足干劲，力争上游，多快好省地建设社会主义的总路线)."

[12] When the Politburo convened a meeting on June 17 (Mao did not attend), Bo Yibo said the steel production was expected to be 9 million tons.

[8] After the meeting, Mao told Bo that the agriculture had found the approach leading to the Great Leap Forward, which was called "take grain as the key link and achieve overall development (Chinese: 以粮为纲，全面发展)."

In the first half of 1958, the agricultural sector kept "launching satellites", which meant rural areas in the country constantly reported extremely high production output.

[16] In Chengdu Conference, Mao Zedong put forward the idea of merging agricultural production cooperatives and endorsed the winter mergers.

[19] On July 1, Chen Boda, the Chief Editor of the party journal Red Flag, released the article named "New Society, New People."

Without being discussed by the Central Committee, the article claimed that China had found its way to communism,[20] and first mentioned the term "people's commune.

"[5] On the same day, in his speech to students at Peking University, Chen quoted Mao and said that people needed to gradually and systematically form large communes combining agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, and education, and militia.

"[23] After an increase of the divergence between the two socialist countries, including the revisionism of Yugoslavia and the landing of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the supreme leaders of the two sides met in the summer of 1958 secretly.

[25] The Politburo Members: Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping and others.

Mao was ambitious since the CCP transferred the ownership in rural areas peacefully; meanwhile, the agricultural outputs would be promising due to the surprisingly good weather in the first half of 1958.

To be specific, Mao urged local leaders to take steel production as the crucial task, and when they returned home, they should "establish the proletarian dictatorship with effective regulations.

Many capital construction projects (Chinese: 基本建设项目) were set up, which dispersed the limited iron and later hindered the national industrial objective.

[26] Ironically, it was Chen Yun, one of the two leading architects of Anti-Rash Advance, who assured the doubled steel target could be met, devised methods to that end and invoked Party discipline to guarantee it.

[27] Meanwhile, the Central Committee could not transfer raw materials efficiently among areas and sectors, because local governments did not adjust the country's newest production objective.

[27] At the end of the conference, Bo Yibo called all the provincial secretaries responsible for steel to meet Mao, and one by one they guaranteed fulfillment of their targets.

When Mao was on his ten-day tour in early August, he told the cadres (leaders of Shandong provinces) that they could combine workers, peasants, merchants, students, and soldiers by establishing people's communes.

[26] According to Mao, re-centralization of industrial production would stop the backyard steel furnaces built by cooperatives and communes, which could dampen the masses in rural areas.

[3] It would popularize the experience of agricultural production, for instance, how to use water, fertilizer, and soil efficiently and how to plant close and plow deeply.

[37] Ke Qingshi, who was present at the conference, had read out to Zhang, the propaganda minister of Shanghai Municipal Committee, over the telephone his notes of Mao's thoughts on bourgeois right.

[26] On the one hand, Mao thought that the bourgeois right had been almost eradicated after the rectification, which manifested that the leading cadres served the people humbly.

[26] Mao repeatedly underscored that the CCP should bring back the rural work style and guerrilla practices, which could prevent the party from being detached from the masses.

In the Second Session of 8th National Party Congress, Mao said that the practice of the CCP had surpassed Marx, so he hoped to create another way to develop faster and better than the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

[45] Specifically, it included following points: First, eradicating bourgeois right was one of the effective political mobilization slogans of people's communes.

[43] In people's communes, the masses cooperated with each other and did not earn piece wage, which represented precisely the germ of communism and the disruption of bourgeois right.

During the conference, Mao made the final decision to bombard Kinmen (Quemoy) Island, which was controlled by the Nationalist Government in Taiwan.

The substantially higher rates of growth reported for 1958 and the first half of 1959 have resulted chiefly from the mass movement in industrial construction and production in 1958,[49] during which Beidaihe Conference was convened.

[50] The high tide of establishing people's communes caused severe tensions within the state administrative apparatuses and between cadres and peasants.