Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

the practice of big communes involving several villages in which
absolute equality was the norm and in which labour supervision could
not be adequately implemented. By making smaller-scale production
teams the accounting unit, involving only a dozen households, the
system would allow diversity and differentiated distribution among
different villages and would make supervision of labour easier. To this
point Mao added that the system of production teams as the basic
accounting unit should not be changed for at least seven years (in fact
the system lasted until the early 1980s). This change by Mao was
intended to give the grassroots a sense of stability and certainty.
In point seven the original letter stipulated that 70 per cent of the
produce should be distributed as salary and only 30 per cent in the
form of equal supply. Mao commented that the collective system
should not be state owned but collectively owned, and therefore
‘salary’ was not the right word and that distribution should be ‘to each
according to one’s labour’, not ‘to each according to one’s needs’. Mao
also inserted, as his fourth comment, that the principle of ‘to each
according to one’s labour’ should not be changed for at least 20 years.
Mao further stressed that the CCP should be whole-heartedly (yi xin yi
yi) devoted to production and that this letter should be read by party
officials at every level three times. Mao also changed the sentence
‘Commune members should be allowed to raise pigs themselves’ in the
original document into ‘Commune members should be encouraged to
raise pigs for themselves’ (my emphasis).
Referring to the percentage of income to be kept in the commune
coffers for public goods and services rather than distributed directly to
the commune members, the original letter stipulated a level of 10 per
cent. However, Mao wanted more to be distributed and less to be
reserved and therefore changed this to 5 per cent. In the original letter
it was stated that in poor communes or areas that had suffered a
decline of production the percentage to be reserved can be even lower
or none at all; Mao changed ‘can be’ into ‘ought to be’.
The letter, revised according to Mao’s comments, was sent out on
that very day. This is only one example to show that if one cares to
examine documentary records there is evidence for a known but
different story, a story shows that Mao, did care about production and
the livelihood of the farmers and was more ‘right wing’ than some of
his comrades
Other documentary evidence
MAO: THE KNOWN STORY
In fact as early as 29 April 1959, Mao (1959) wrote a letter to address six
crucial issues about food, grain production and the truthful reporting of
production outputs, all stressing moderation and calling for cooling down
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