Dear Colleagues on the Standing Committee and other relevant comrades:  I am forwarding to you a letter from Geng Changsuo of Wugong Commune, Shen County, Hebei Province [1]; one set of documents from the Shandong Provincial Party Committee’s March 1961 symposium on contradictions between large and small production teams [2]; one report dated September 25 from the Hubei Provincial Party Committee [3]; one record of the Handan symposium held on September 27 [4]; and also a batch of materials from Hebei [5].  Please review these documents and discuss them with your assistants.


After that, we will convene a meeting to deliberate.


These materials indicate that we have yet to fully resolve the serious problem of egalitarianism in agriculture; it remains an outstanding issue.


As the peasants put it, the Sixty Articles [6] are lacking precisely this one point.  What is that point? It is the situation where production rights reside with the small team while distribution rights are concentrated in the brigade—namely, the so-called “three guarantees and one reward” system [7].


Unless this problem is addressed, the vigorous development of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, sideline industries, and fisheries will continue to be constrained, and the masses’ enthusiasm for production will remain dampened.


If we wish to achieve a more substantial increase in agricultural output in 1962 compared with 1961, we should resolve this issue at the December work conference this year [8].


My view is “ownership at three levels, with the team as the basic unit”—that is, the fundamental accounting unit should be the team rather than the brigade.  The brigade’s “unified leadership” must be clearly defined; our comrades in Hebei have specified nine such boundaries [9].  Without such delineation, many of the eight rights vested in the teams [10] would remain hollow, as the brigade would simply continue to appropriate them.


On this very issue, at the Guangzhou Conference in March of this year [11], I had circulated a document from Shandong that vividly exposed this grave contradiction.  I also distributed a document concerning a certain commune in Guangdong that had imposed rigid, inflexible task quotas [12], appending a few remarks suggesting whether such practices might be extended nationwide.  However, that proposal was not adopted.


Once you have examined the materials from Hubei, Shandong, Guangdong, and Hebei, and after we have discussed them together, I propose that these documents, accompanied by a letter from the Central Committee [13], be transmitted downward.  All Central Bureaus, provincial, municipal, and regional party committees, as well as prefectural and county party committees, should dispatch their own leading cadres to the grassroots level and also send out robust investigation and research teams to conduct field studies lasting two or three weeks.  They should hold several symposiums with representatives from the county, commune, brigade, team, and individual commune members to determine which approach works best: whether it is preferable to implement the “three guarantees and one reward” system at the brigade level or to base operations on the team.  In order to stimulate the masses’ initiative in collective production and to achieve substantial increases in the output of grain, cotton, edible oil, hemp, silk, tea, sugar, vegetables, tobacco, fruits, medicinal herbs, miscellaneous crops, and livestock—including pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese—over the coming year and subsequent years, I believe there is no alternative but to proceed along this path.