Directive on Properly Handling the Incidents in Wanxian and Jiangjin, Sichuan
(March 30, 1953)

Comrade Deng Xiaoping[1]:

This document[2] merits attention. The Wanxian incident and the Jiangjin incident you mentioned earlier were both cases where the local authorities made mistakes. Material on Wanxian can be found in the internal reference from a few days ago; it involved the County Party Secretary Zeng Rong during the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns.

[1] Deng Xiaoping was then Vice Premier of the Government Administration Council and First Secretary of the Southwest Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.
[2] Refers to the report on the serious situation in the cooperatives of the Southwest region after commercial readjustment, sent to the All-China Federation of Cooperatives by its Southwest Regional Office on March 20, 1953. The report states that after the Central Committee issued the directive on readjusting commerce, transactions with non-members were generally halted throughout the Southwest region. In Sichuan Province, according to incomplete statistics up to early March, a total of 2,207 establishments, including butcher shops, barbershops, restaurants, and tailor shops, were abolished, along with 1,334 processing and production units, the two categories combined representing a decrease of 56.77% compared to the pre-readjustment period. Except in a few isolated areas, the business turnover of cooperatives everywhere declined generally. This contraction caused operational chaos in the cooperatives and dissatisfaction among members. In the cooperative of the Fifth District of Jiangjin County, Sichuan, unsold pork was not dared to be sold and was instead eaten by the cadres themselves. Even more seriously, some cooperatives even reduced the supply of means of production to peasants. Quite a few cadres made unprincipled concessions to private merchants, resulting in the merchants becoming arrogant and seizing the opportunity to disrupt the market. The county magistrate of Jiangjin County, Sichuan, actually ordered the cadres of the cooperatives and the state trading companies to make public self-criticisms to the private merchants, forced the cooperatives to shut down their processing departments within a set deadline, and wanted the Federation of Industry and Commerce to exercise unified leadership over the cooperatives and state trading companies. Many private merchants seized the chance to force down prices when buying and force up prices when selling. The main reasons for the above situation are that, when carrying out the readjustment in various localities, the spirit of the Central Committee’s directive on readjusting commerce was not earnestly implemented, detailed and concrete investigations into the relative shares of public and private sectors in different places were lacking, and there was no overall plan and sequence of steps. Some leading cadres simplistically believed that readjusting commerce meant passive contraction, which further aggravated the ideological confusion among the cadres below.