--- Notes

Comments and Revisions on Deng Xiaoping’s Speech Draft at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee (October 7, 1955)

I. To Comrade Deng Xiaoping: This document is very good. I have made a few minor revisions [2]; please consider them carefully. Mao Zedong, October 7. Printed from the manuscript.

II. Among Communist Party members who hold right-leaning views on the socialist transformation of agriculture, there are indeed some who breathe the same air as the bourgeoisie; they are capitulators to bourgeois ideology. The majority, however, merely reflect the outlook of the well-to-do middle peasants. Printed according to Mao Zedong’s revised version.

III. All comrades who have committed rightist errors on this issue, because they share certain common ground with bourgeois ideas outside the Party, will lose their vigilance and lay down their arms when bourgeois elements launch an offensive against the Party, and will be unable to refute those bourgeois fallacies with firmness and conviction. For example, in 1953 there were voices both inside and outside the Party crying out about the so-called “hardships of the peasantry,” and in 1955 similar cries emerged again—this time about “low morale among the peasants.” How can we expect such comrades to confidently refute these fallacies propagated by non-Party elements? Printed from Mao Zedong’s manuscript.

Notes [1] Deng Xiaoping was then Secretary-General of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council. [2] Mao Zedong’s revisions to Deng Xiaoping’s speech draft on the issue of agricultural collectivization at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Seventh CPC Central Committee are found in sections (ii) and (iii) of this text. The passages printed in Song typeface represent text added or rewritten by Mao Zedong.