ON THIS DAY ·
Seven Thousand Cadres Conference
11 Jan–7 Feb 1962 — More than 7,000 officials meet in Beijing, the largest working conference in the Party’s history. Liu Shaoqi tells them the disaster was mainly man-made; Mao makes a limited self-criticism and accepts responsibility in general terms. The meeting licensed the retreat, and Mao never forgot who had criticised him.
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The moment in context
The retreat from the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s failed drive of 1958 that ended in famine, worked because leaders finally saw the countryside for themselves. In the spring of 1961 Liu Shaoqi, head of state and second only to Mao in the Communist Party that ran every level of government, spent 44 days in rural Hunan and found empty granaries and peasants who blamed the disaster on officials and their orders. The mess halls closed, farming units shrank to the production team of a few dozen households, and peasants could again raise pigs, tend private plots and sell at markets. In Anhui its leader Zeng Xisheng allowed “responsibility fields”, in which a household contracted to farm a plot and kept what it produced above a quota, much like a tenant who pays a fixed rent and keeps the rest. Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, defended such methods in July 1962 with a Sichuan proverb: it does not matter whether a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice. Food production recovered quickly because peasants again had a reason to work hard.
From Recovery after the Great Leap, chapter 8 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1964).
The place: Seven Thousand Cadres Conference — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The famine could no longer be denied. The evidence of mass death from places such as Xinyang had reached Beijing by 1960–61 through the Party’s own investigators, and grain had to be…
- The turn — The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, January 1962. The conference was the hinge because the frankness that made the recovery possible also convinced Mao that his colleagues might one day repudiate…
- What it changed — Mao turns on the Party. The Socialist Education Movement and the Twenty-three Articles of January 1965 pointed Mao’s suspicion at “power-holders” inside the Party. In 1966…
Then ask the room: Why did the recovery of 1961–65 lead to the Cultural Revolution instead of to lasting reform? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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