Critique and Revision of Peng Zhen’s[1] Draft Speech for the Seventh Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee
(October 9, 1955)
Return immediately to Comrade Peng Zhen:
This draft is very good. I have made a few revisions,[2] please consider them at your discretion.
Mao Zedong
October 9

The peasants are our friends, and we should know their strong points—this is their fundamental aspect. At the same time, we should also know their shortcomings, especially their shortcomings in the stage of the socialist revolution. Only by soberly understanding the two-sided situation that they are both labourers and small private owners, and understanding the two-sided situation that they have a conservative nature, but that this conservative nature of theirs can be persuaded and thus changed, can we properly help and educate them, and lead them to carry out self-transformation in the process of socialist construction and socialist transformation. Only in this way can we thoroughly consolidate the worker-peasant alliance, and finally integrate the workers and peasants into one body, building a communist society.

The so-called "Four Great Freedoms," namely freedom to lease land, freedom to hire labour, freedom of trade, and freedom of lending, constitute a manifestly bourgeois programme, a manifestly rich peasant line, which is completely different from our Party's line of restricting the bourgeoisie and restricting the rich peasants. They do not restrict the freedom of exploitation by the bourgeoisie and rich peasants, but instead use laws and decrees to permit the bourgeoisie and rich peasants to carry out unrestricted exploitation, and even advocate it.

IV
The agricultural co-operative movement is a struggle to finally and thoroughly eliminate the private ownership of the means of production in the countryside and eliminate the rich peasant class. It is an earth-shaking social reform movement of the five hundred million peasant masses. It is a movement of the socialist revolution that will thoroughly isolate the urban bourgeoisie, creating a situation in which they have no choice but to accept socialist transformation, and thereby thoroughly eliminate all traces of urban capitalism.

[1] Peng Zhen, at that time, was an alternate secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.
[2] Refers to sections II, III, and IV of this text, in which the text printed in Song typeface was added and rewritten by Mao Zedong.