Commentary on the Hebei Provincial Party Committee’s Report Concerning the Sixth-Level Cadre Conference (March 17, 1959)

Comrade Xiaoping [1]: The Hebei Provincial Party Committee’s report of March 16 [2] is highly instructive. Please transmit it immediately by telephone to the party committees of all provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. Mao Zedong, March 17.

Printed from the manuscript. Notes [1] Xiaoping refers to Deng Xiaoping, who at that time served as General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council. [2] This refers to the second report submitted by the CPC Hebei Provincial Committee to the Central Committee and to Mao Zedong on March 16, 1959, concerning the sixth-level cadre conference. The report stated that the Hebei Province sixth-level cadre conference concluded yesterday afternoon. The conference decided that production teams (i.e., the former advanced people’s communes) should serve as the basic units for accounting and distribution within the communes. Where an advanced commune had already been divided into several production teams, it must be treated as a single unit for economic accounting and distribution; where a single village had previously comprised several advanced communes, with the consent of the masses, these were to be merged, whenever possible, into one such unit. As for villages containing smaller advanced communes, again with the approval of the masses, they might be combined with neighboring villages to form a single unit for economic accounting and distribution. With regard to the issue of distribution, the conference discussed and determined that the proportion retained by the commune and the production team (including agricultural tax) would generally amount to about forty percent of total income. Of this retained portion, apart from the agricultural tax, the commune’s share would typically range from four to ten percent of total income. In order to strengthen leadership at both the commune and production-team levels, the provincial party committee also decided to resolutely dispatch a contingent of cadres with experience in rural work to the communes, while all cadres transferred from the former advanced communes to the communes or management zones were to be reassigned without exception back to the production teams.