Second Plenary Session of the 7th CCP Central Committee (1949)
중국공산당 제7기 중앙위원회 제2차 전체회의 (1949)
The plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee held at Xibaipo in Jianping county (now Pingshan), Hebei, on 5–13 March 1949. On the eve of victory in the civil war it shifted the centre of the party’s work from village to city, set a new-democratic economic structure built on the confiscation of bureaucrat-capital, the leadership of the state sector and the “restriction” of private capital, and decided to convene a new Political Consultative Conference. Mao Zedong warned against “sugar-coated bullets” and called victory “only the first step in a long march of ten thousand li”.
In depth
Thirty-four full and nineteen alternate Central Committee members attended; twenty were absent, partly because of transport. The plenum endorsed the Politburo’s leadership since the First Plenum of 1945, raised Liao Chengzhi, Wang Jiaxiang, Chen Boda and Huang Kecheng to full membership, and approved Mao’s statement on the situation of 14 January 1949 and the proposal for a new Political Consultative Conference without “reactionaries” and a democratic coalition government. On Mao’s proposal it banned birthday celebrations for party leaders and the naming of places after them, and passed a resolution on the army flag.
Mao’s report described the new economy as five sectors: a socialist state sector, a semi-socialist co-operative sector, private capitalism, the individual economy and state capitalism. Private capital, he said, must neither be restricted too much nor eliminated too quickly, and he predicted that “restriction versus opposition to restriction will be the main form of class struggle in the new-democratic state”. The report already contained the course of transforming the country from an agricultural into an industrial one and from a new-democratic into a socialist society.
The concluding remarks were summed up as the twelve points of “Methods of Work of Party Committees”. The session is widely remembered for its call to remain modest and prudent and to keep the style of plain living and hard struggle. In late March the party centre moved to Beiping.