Spread the Mass Movements in the Base Areas and Propagate the «Ten Great Policies»

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of Spread the Mass Movements in the Base Areas and Propagate the «Ten Great Policies» has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the following editions:

Spread the Campaigns to Reduce Rent, Increase Production, and «Support the Government and Cherish the People» in the Base Areas, in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, First English Edition, Vol. 3, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1965.
Directive of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Regarding Reducing Rent, Production, Supporting the Government and Cherishing the People, and Propagandizing the Ten Major Policies, in Mao's Road to Power, First English Edition, Vol. 8, Routledge, New York and London, 2015.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an inner-Party directive drafted by Comrade Mao Zedong for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in Yan'an, Shaanxi, China. It was first published in the Jiefang Ribao (1st of October, 1943).

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#SPREAD THE MASS MOVEMENTS IN THE BASE AREAS AND PROPAGATE THE «TEN GREAT POLICIES»

#DIRECTIVE OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA

#Mao Zedong

#Before the 1st of October, 1943

#★

#1. REDUCE RENT

As the time for autumn harvest is come, the leading bodies in the base areas must ask Party and government organizations at all levels to check up on the application of our policy of rent reduction. Wherever it has not been carried out in earnest, rents must be reduced this year without any exception. Wherever this work has not been thorough, it must be done thoroughly this year. Party committees should immediately issue directives based on the agrarian policy of the Central Committee and conforming to local conditions, and they should inspect a few villages at first hand, pick out good examples, and so expedite the work in other places. At the same time, the press should carry editorials on rent reduction and reports of good examples. As rent reduction is a mass struggle by the peasants, Party directives and government decrees should guide and help it instead of trying to bestow favours on the masses. To bestow rent reduction as a favour instead of mobilizing the masses to achieve it by their own action is wrong, and the results will not be solid. Peasant organizations should be constituted or reconstituted in the struggle for rent reduction. The government's standpoint should be one of enforcing the decree on rent reduction and adjusting the relative interests of the landlords and the tenants. Now that the base areas have shrunk in size, it is of more immediate importance than at any time in the past six years for the Party to win the masses there by patient, conscientious, and thorough work, and to share weal and woe with them. If during this autumn we check on how far the policy has been carried out and perform the task of rent reduction thoroughly, we shall be able to mobilize the initiative of the peasant masses and, in the coming year, intensify our struggle against the enemy, and give impetus to the production movement.

#2. INCREASE PRODUCTION

In the base areas behind the enemy lines, most cadres have not yet learned how to get the personnel of the Party and government organizations, the troops, and the people (including everyone, men and women, old and young, soldiers and civilians, and people in public and private employment) to undertake production on a wide scale. During this autumn and winter, the Party committee, the government, and the army in each base area must get ready to launch a big area-wide production movement next year, covering both public and private farming, industry, handicrafts, transport, animal husbandry, and commerce, with the main emphasis on farming — a mass movement for overcoming difficulties by our own efforts (the slogan of «ample food and clothing» should not be raised for the time being except in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region). There should be planning household by household and mutual aid in labour (known as labour-exchange teams in northern Shaanxi and once known as ploughing teams or mutual-aid working groups in the former Red areas in Jiangxi), labour heroes should be rewarded, emulation in production should be practised, and cooperatives serving the masses should be promoted. Carry out the movements to emulate Wu Manyou (a farming labour hero), Zhao Zhankui (an industrial labour hero), and Huang Lide (a vegetable-growing hero of organizations and schools). In the financial and economic field, the Party and government personnel at the county and district levels should devote 9/10 of their energy to helping the peasants increase production, and only 1/10 to collecting taxes from them. If pains are taken with the first task, the second will be easy. In the present war conditions, all organizations, schools, and army units must make great efforts to grow vegetables, breed pigs, collect firewood, make charcoal, expand handicrafts, and raise part of their own grain supply. Apart from the development of collective production in all units, whether big or small, every individual (except for those in the army) should also be encouraged to engage in some spare-time agricultural or handicraft production (but not in trade), the proceeds of which they can keep for themself. Seven- to ten-day training courses should be given on vegetable-growing and pig-farming, and on the preparation of better food by the cooks. Thrift should be stressed, waste combated, and corrupt practices forbidden in all Party, government, and army organizations. At all levels, the directors and cadres in the Party, government, and army organizations and in the schools should master all the skills involved in leading the masses in production. No one who fails to study production carefully can be considered a good director. Any soldier or civilian who is not serious about production and who likes to eat but does not like to work cannot be considered a good soldier or a good citizen. Village Party members who are not diverted from production should realize that one of the qualifications for becoming a model among the masses is to work well in increasing production. In the mass movement for production, it is wrong to take a conservative and purely financial standpoint, which concentrates on revenue and expenditure to the neglect of economic development. It is wrong to have a handful of government cadres busying themselves with collecting grain and taxes, funds and food supplies to the neglect of organizing the enormous labour-power of the rank and file of the Party, the government, and the army, and that of the people, for a mass movement of production. It is wrong simply to demand grain and money from the masses (as does the Nationalist Party) without making every effort to help them to increase production. It is wrong to have a few economic departments organizing a small number of people for production and to neglect the launching of extensive mass movements for production. It is wrong to consider it dishonourable and selfish either for Communists in the countryside to engage in household production in order to support their families or for Communists in government organizations and schools to engage in private spare-time production in order to improve their own living conditions, for all such activity is in the interests of the revolutionary cause. It is wrong simply to exhort people in any base area to endure hardship in the bitter struggle without encouraging them to increase production and thereby try to improve their material conditions. It is wrong to regard the cooperatives as money-making concerns run for the benefit of the small number of cadres or as stores run by the government and not as economic organizations run by and for the masses. It is wrong not to introduce the model methods of work used by some of the agricultural labour heroes of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region (for example, mutual aid in labour, repeated ploughing, frequent hoeing, and ample manuring) on the pretext that these methods are not applicable in certain base areas. It is wrong, in production movements, to shift the task of production to the heads of the local departments in charge of economic development, the army supply chiefs, or the administration chiefs in governmental and other bodies, instead of ensuring that the directors themselves assume responsibility and participate personally, that the leading group links itself closely with the masses and general calls are combined with particular and specific guidance, that research is undertaken and priority is given to what is urgent and important, that efforts are made to bring everyone into production — men and women, young and old, and even the loafers — and that cadres are trained and the masses given education. In the present circumstances, the organization of labour-power is the key to increasing production. In each of the base areas, even under present war conditions, it is possible and altogether necessary to organize the labour-power of tens of thousands of people regardless of gender in the Party, the government offices, and the army, and hundreds of thousands of the people for production purposes (that is, to organize on a voluntary basis all people who are capable of performing part-time or full-time labour, using the forms of household-by-household planning, labour-exchange teams, transport teams, mutual-aid working groups, or cooperatives, and keeping to the principle of exchange of equal values). Communist Party members must attain a full grasp of all the principles and methods of organizing labour-power. Rent reduction carried out universally and thoroughly in all the base areas this year will stimulate a broad increase in production next year. And the great production movement that will be carried on next year by Party and government, soldiers and civilians, men and women, and young and old, to increase the supply of grain and other necessities and to prepare against natural disasters, will lay the material foundation for the continued maintenance of the anti-Japanese base areas. Otherwise, we will encounter grave difficulties.

#3. «SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT AND CHERISH THE PEOPLE» AND «SUPPORT THE ARMY AND GIVE PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT TO THE FAMILIES OF SOLDIERS WHO ARE FIGHTING THE JAPANESE»

For the Party, the government, and the army to be at one with the people in developing next year's anti-Japanese struggle and mass movement for production, the Party committees and the leading army and government bodies in every single base area should prepare to launch a large-scale mass movement in the first month of the coming lunar year to «support the government and cherish the people» and to «support the army and give preferential treatment to the families of soldiers who are fighting the Japanese». The troops should publicly renew their pledge to «support the government and cherish the people», hold meetings for self-criticism, arrange get-togethers with the local people (to which representatives of the local Party and government organizations should also be invited), and apologize and give compensation for any past infringements upon the interests of the masses. Under the leadership of the local Party, government, and mass organizations, the masses on their side should publicly renew their pledge to support the army and give preferential treatment to the families of the soldiers fighting the Japanese, and should set going an ardent movement for greetings and gifts to the army units. In the course of these movements, the army on its side and the Party and the government on theirs should thoroughly examine the shortcomings and mistakes of 1943, and should resolutely correct them in 1944. From now on, such movements should be launched everywhere in the first month of every lunar year, and in the course of them the pledges, to «support the government and cherish the people» and «support the army and give preferential treatment to the families of the soldiers who are fighting the Japanese» should be read out time and again, and there should be repeated self-criticism before the masses of any high-handed behaviour by the troops in the base areas toward the Party or government personnel or towards civilians, or of any lack of concern for the troops shown by the Party or government personnel or the civilians (each side criticizing itself and not the other), in order that these shortcomings and mistakes may be thoroughly corrected.

#4. PROPAGATE THE «TEN GREAT POLICIES»

The objective of this directive is to explain the importance of the movements to reduce rent this year, to develop production next year, and to «support the government and cherish the people» next spring. All the other policies have been explained in other directives already and thus will not be repeated here. But it should be kept in mind that the «Ten Great Policies» are currently the most important Party policies in the base areas. These ten policies are:

Fight against the enemy!
Better troops and simpler administration.
Unified leadership.
Support the government and cherish the people.
Develop production.
Rectify subjectivism, sectarianism, and stereotyped Party writing.
Check up on cadres' histories.
Education on the current situation.
The «three-in-one» combination.
Reduction of rent and interest.

These «Ten Great Policies» are interrelated and cannot be divorced from one another. This autumn and winter, all central bureaus, sub-bureaus, and regional and district Party committees should sum up their work during this year regarding the «Ten Great Policies». (No big and long conferences are necessary; simple check up and discuss the ten policies individually.) In the meantime, the idea of the interrelation and unity of the «Ten Great Policies» must be widely propagated within the Party, allowing all Party members, above all the cadres, to realize that we cannot meet our goal of overcoming difficulties and winning victory unless these ten interrelated, unified policies are carried out completely rather than incompletely (for example, saying that it is not necessary to «support the government and cherish the people», or to learn from Wu Manyou's method of production only in certain places), and carefully rather than haphazardly. But if all Party comrades diligently carry out the «Ten Great Policies», we will definitely create many favourable conditions and will attain our goal of overcoming difficulties and winning victory. We have full certainty that we will overcome our difficulties, and our future is infinitely bright. We will assuredly defeat Japanese imperialism and build a free and equal New China!