Comments on the Hebei Provincial Party Committee’s Report on the Rural Rectification and Commune Reorganization Campaign (February 20, 1963) This document [1] is hereby circulated to all comrades attending the meeting [2]. Please study it together with the Hunan report [3] (already printed). Each of the two reports has its own distinctive features; both are excellent documents and deserve careful examination by comrades throughout the country as well as by the various departments of the central authorities. Mao Zedong February 20

Based on the manuscript for publication. Notes [1]

Refers to the report dated February 17, 1963, submitted by the CPC Hebei Provincial Committee to Mao Zedong, the Central Committee, and the North China Bureau, concerning the implementation of the Resolution of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee in the countryside and the conduct of the rectification and commune reorganization campaign. The report states that, in order to thoroughly implement the Resolution of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee, our province launched a rectification and commune reorganization campaign in the rural areas to provide socialist education to the peasants. Last October, the provincial committee convened a working conference attended by cadres at the provincial, prefectural (city), and county levels; subsequently, each county held three-level cadre meetings involving cadres from the commune, production brigade, and production team levels. Following these meetings, training sessions were organized at the commune level for Party members, Youth League members, cadres, and active elements among the poor and lower-middle peasants, reaching approximately three million people across the province. Thereafter, the three documents adopted at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee—the Communiqué of the Tenth Plenary Session, the Decision on Further Consolidating the Collective Economy of People’s Communes and Developing Agricultural Production—and Chairman Mao’s draft revised Regulations on the Work of Rural People’s Communes—along with his instructions on the three major issues of class, the situation, and contradictions, were conveyed and explained to the broad masses of peasants, thereby launching a socialist education campaign that reached about eighty percent of all commune members. At present, the socialist education phase has been completed, and full-scale implementation of the Sixty Articles is underway. The basic approach adopted in this campaign was to convey and implement the three documents of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee exactly as they stood; secretaries of party committees at all levels took the lead in going deep into communes and production teams to deliver lectures themselves; the work proceeded from top to bottom, first within the Party and then among non-Party members, first among core cadres and then among the general populace, mobilizing step by step and advancing layer by layer; pilot projects were carried out to accumulate experience and guide the overall effort. [2]

Refers to the comrades who were then in Beijing attending a working conference of the CPC Central Committee. [3]

See note [1] on pages 2