(March 16, 1958)


For discussion. Tractor model names should not use foreign characters. The designs and performance of all tractors must be suited to China’s climate and terrain; they must also be versatile for multiple uses; and their costs must be reduced as much as possible.
Mao Zedong
February 16
[1]


Refers to the report submitted on February 27, 1958, by the CPC Committee of the First Luoyang Tractor Factory to the Luoyang Municipal Party Committee and the Henan Provincial Party Committee, concerning the factory’s Great Leap Forward plan for the years 1958 to 1968. The main points were: 1) To expand the product range, increasing it from the originally designed single model to seven basic models and eleven variant models. 2) To increase production, raising output from the original design capacity of 54,000 standard units to 99,466 standard units by the end of the first phase in 1961 (with formal production scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 1959, aiming for 8,233 standard units by year-end, and reaching the designed level by July 1960); subsequent expansions in the second and third phases would further raise capacity to 192,866 standard units, so that by the end of the Third Five-Year Plan the factory could have cumulatively produced 1,116,891 standard units. 3) By the end of the Third Five-Year Plan, the total cultivated area served by the factory’s products would reach 631.96 million mu. 4) Over twelve years, the factory’s cumulative output would equal Britain’s tractor stock in 1972; that is, by 1969 the factory could have cumulatively produced 713,450 mixed units, surpassing Britain’s domestic stock of 700,000 units by 13,450 units. Attached to the Great Leap Forward plan was a “Table of Product Diversification and Annual Production Volumes over Ten Years,” which included tractor models such as the “T-54” and “J;T-75” in its “Model Name” column. Mao Zedong’s comments on this plan, along with the plan itself, were distributed at the Chengdu Conference as official meeting documents.