Comments on Three Documents, Including “A Thorough Refutation of the Rich Middle Peasants’ Fallacies Opposing the ‘Eight-Point Constitution’”〔1〕 (December 1959)  To be read by all comrades; return to Mao. The issue concerns educating the rich middle peasants. Printed from Mao Zedong’s manuscript.  Note 〔1〕 These comments were written on No. 266 of the CCP Central Office’s “Briefing on Current Situations,” compiled and printed on December 25, 1959. That issue contained three articles. The article titled “A Thorough Refutation of the Rich Middle Peasants’ Fallacies Opposing the ‘Eight-Point Constitution’” reported that Guangdong Province had once again achieved a bumper harvest this year, particularly in the late rice crop. However, a considerable number of upper-middle and elderly peasants with serious right-leaning tendencies attributed the success to such factors as “favorable weather, relaxed standards, adoption of sparse planting, and reliance on experienced old farmers,” thereby seeking to oppose the Party’s leadership and the agricultural “Eight-Point Constitution” and undermining the masses’ confidence in another leap forward next year. Consequently, a large-scale debate on the agricultural “Eight-Point Constitution” was launched throughout the province in the countryside. Following this mass discussion, the ideological awareness of cadres and the general populace was further raised, vigorously promoting winter production and laying a solid ideological and technical foundation for more comprehensive implementation of the “Eight-Point Constitution” and for an even greater leap in agricultural production next year.

The article “Hebei Conducts In-Depth Inspection of the Rural Rectification Campaign” stated that the development of the rectification movement in Hebei Province’s rural areas had been normal and healthy, thoroughly discrediting capitalist ideology and the capitalist road represented by the rich middle peasants and strengthening the masses’ confidence and resolve to follow the socialist path. Nevertheless, certain problems had also arisen during the campaign: in some localities, the scope of those targeted for criticism had been somewhat too broad. Owing to unclear policy instructions, grassroots cadres and rich middle peasants harboring serious capitalist ideas, fearing that the people’s communes would reclaim livestock and fruit orchards they had retained beyond the permitted limits, resorted to slaughtering pigs and sheep and indiscriminately felling trees. In order to deepen and thoroughly carry out the campaign, the provincial party committee instructed all localities to ensure that those few rich middle peasants with deeply entrenched capitalist views who persisted in taking the capitalist road were subjected to thorough and incisive criticism.

The article “The Gansu Provincial Party Committee Further Strengthens Leadership over the Rural Commune Rectification Movement” noted that the rectification campaign in Gansu Province’s rural areas had already been fully launched. The provincial party committee had since made additional arrangements and deployments, emphasizing that the central focus of the campaign was the struggle between the two roads and socialist education—namely, conducting socialist education among the broad masses while waging a struggle along the lines of the two roads against the rich middle peasants. The method of this struggle was to stick to presenting facts and reasoning logically, persuading people with sound arguments. The primary targets of criticism generally accounted for no more than one percent of the total population, and none were publicly labeled.