Three Red Banners
세 개의 붉은 깃발
The collective name for the General Line for Socialist Construction, the Great Leap Forward and the people’s communes put forward by Mao Zedong in 1958; the General Line was “go all out, aim high and build socialism with greater, faster, better and more economical results”. During the Leap the banners became a sanctum beyond criticism: at Lushan in 1959 Peng Dehuai’s criticism was branded a challenge to them, and even after the self-criticism of the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962 Mao kept the banners themselves off limits.
In depth
The slogan of the General Line, “greater, faster, better and more economical”, had been used by Mao since 1955 and became his weapon against the “anti-rash advance” of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun in 1956. The second session of the Eighth Party Congress adopted it in May 1958 as the General Line for Socialist Construction, and with the Great Leap and the people’s communes resolved at Beidaihe in August it became the “Three Red Banners”. The banners are seen as the ideological frame that sparked the fanaticism of 1958: under the General Line’s pressure to “go all out”, no one dared to “pour cold water” on harvest reports, and conspiracy theories that peasants were hiding grain justified procurement.
At Lushan in 1959 Mao saw the criticism of Peng Dehuai and Zhang Wentian as an attempt to shake the banners and break the whole party’s will to leap. After Liu Shaoqi’s “three parts natural disaster, seven parts human error” and Mao’s self-criticism at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, the banners’ leading status declined and the eight-character policy of “adjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards” took precedence. But Mao said the line of the past four years had been correct and its achievements primary, and at the Tenth Plenum in September 1962 he raised class struggle again. Attitudes to the banners became one of the yardsticks for attacking Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the Cultural Revolution.