Comrade Zihui [1] :

I have read both the directive [2] and the editorial [3] , and have only altered a few characters. As for the resolution on mutual aid and cooperatives, I have made revisions in three places [4] . Please review it, then send someone to pass it around for Gao Gang, Zhu De, Dong Biwu, Lin Boqu, Peng Zhen, Peng Dehuai, and Deng Xiaoping [5] to read (to be circulated and completed within one day). If you and they all agree, please ask Comrade Liao Luyan [1] to make a fair copy of the revised sections before sending it to the newspaper for publication. Comrade Chen Boda [2] has already reviewed the revisions to the mutual aid and cooperative resolution.

Mao Zedong

March 24

As for the editorial, Comrade Chen Boda has some opinions; please consult with him for further refinement.

[3]

This resolution was issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on December 15, 1951, in draft form to Party committees at all levels for trial implementation. By February 15, 1953, it was adopted by the Central Committee as a formal resolution, with partial revisions made.

III

The Central Committee has assessed their dual nature, namely, the nature of private ownership and the nature of cooperation. For members of elementary mutual aid teams, their means of production are entirely privately owned, yet they also embody the nature of collective labor, which represents the sprout of socialism. Year-round mutual aid teams allow this sprout to grow further. Agricultural producers’ cooperatives, insofar as they are founded on the basis of private property, where peasants retain the right to private ownership of land and other means of production, and where peasants may receive a certain share of the harvest based on the land they have contributed as shares, as well as reasonable compensation for tools and livestock contributed as shares—under these conditions, they preserve the nature of private ownership. However, insofar as peasants, after pooling their land as shares, can achieve unified use of the land, rational use of tools, collective labor, the implementation of work-based remuneration, distribution according to labor, and the accumulation of certain public property—under these conditions, they possess more elements of socialism than year-round mutual aid teams.

IV

In rural areas, the work that overrides all else is agricultural production work; all other work revolves around and serves agricultural production work. Any so-called work tasks or methods that hinder agricultural production must be avoided.

V

(13) After resolving many issues related to agricultural mutual aid and cooperation, the Party Central Committee deems it necessary to repeatedly call the attention of Party committees at all levels and all comrades engaged in rural work, as well as non-Party activists, to the need to fully, warmly, and without estrangement care for, assist, and patiently educate peasants farming individually. It must be recognized that their individual farming is lawful (as stipulated by the Common Program and the Agrarian Reform Law). Do not ridicule them, do not scold them as backward, and still less permit the use of threatening or restrictive methods to strike at them. Agricultural loans must be reasonably granted to both mutual aid and cooperative organizations and to peasants farming individually; loans should not be granted solely to mutual aid and cooperative organizations while denying or reducing loans to peasants farming individually. In any village, even if the overwhelming majority of peasants have joined mutual aid teams or cooperatives, and only a very small number remain as individual farmers, an attitude of respect and unity toward this minority must be adopted.