Mao's Life

It also launched the movements against the "three evils" of corruption, waste and bureaucracy and against the "five evils" of bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing of economic information. At the suggestion of Mao Zedong in 1953, the CPC Central Committee announced the Party's general line for the transition period and started systematic socialist industrialization and the socialist transformation of private ownership of the means of production. In 1954 the Constitution of the People's Republic of China that was drafted under Mao Zedong's leadership was adopted at the First Session of the First National People's Congress, and he was elected the first President of the People's Republic and had a tenure till 1959. In April 1956, he delivered a speech "On the Ten Major Relationships," which was a tentative discussion of the road to building socialism in light of China's particular conditions. Before long he put forward the principle of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend at an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. In 1956, the socialist transformation of private ownership of the means of production was in the main completed.

In September of the same year, the CPC convened its Eighth National Congress and pointed out that the chief task of the whole nation had a changeover to concentrating on developing the productive forces. But this policy was not well implemented afterwards, leading to a series of subsequent mistakes and setbacks in the Party's guidance. In February 1957, Mao Zedong delivered a speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," formulating the theory of correctly distinguishing and handling the two types of contradictions in socialist society that are different in nature - those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.

In July of the same year, Mao Zedong called on the Party "to create a political situation in which there are both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness." In 1958, he launched "the Great Leap Forward" and the movement to establish people's communes in rural areas. In 1959 he presided over the Lushan Meeting. Originally he wanted to correct the mistakes that had been found, but in the later stage of the meeting, he erred in initiating the criticism of Peng Dehuai and in launching a Party-wide struggle "against Right opportunism" after the meeting. From the winter of 1960 through 1965, the CPC Central Committee headed by Mao Zedong followed the national economic principle of "adjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards" and preliminarily corrected the mistakes of "the Great Leap Forward" and the movement to establish people's communes. As a result, the national economy recovered and developed rapidly. During the period, he put forward a number of measures and preliminarily corrected the "Left" mistakes in rural work and other mistakes. However, at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee in September 1962, he overestimated, in absolute terms, the scope of class struggle that existed only within certain limits in socialist society and further developed the idea he put forward after the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957 that the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie remained the principal contradiction in Chinese society. Between 1963 and 1965, Mao Zedong carried out the socialist education movement in the rural and urban areas and pointed out that the main target of the movement should be "those Party persons in power taking the capitalist road." From the 1950s, he led the CPC in firmly combating the great-power chauvinism advocated by leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their attempts to interfere in China's affairs and bring the country under their control.