Lushan Conference

1959 meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party

The Lushan Conference was a meeting of the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held between July and August 1959. The CCP Politburo met in an "expanded session" (Kuoda Huiyi) between July 2 and August 1, followed by the 8th Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee from August 2–16. The major topic of discussion was the Great Leap Forward. The Lushan Conference saw the political purge of the Defense Minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, whose criticism of some aspects of the Great Leap Forward was seen as an attack on the political line of CCP Chairman Mao Zedong. The Conference also marked the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 that disagreement over the direction of policy spilled into open conflict between party leaders. The conference's name is derived from the meeting place, a resort on Mount Lu in Jiujiang, China.

The original objective of the conference was to review the events of the Great Leap Forward and solve practical issues brought forth by those events. When the Lushan Conference began, the leadership was divided on questions of how the crisis had developed and what the response going forward should be. Mao was critical of his own role in the failures of the Great Leap Forward. He described the backyard steel campaign he had promoted as a "great catastrophe" and criticized himself for pushing communization so fast. A major specific focus of the Lushan Conference was the distortion created by false production reports. During the Great Leap Forward, lower bureaucratic levels were asked to fulfill unrealistic production quotas. The ensuing false statistics impeded central coordination of the economy. Peng attributed the problems to "petty bourgeois fanaticism." Peng's position found no support among other conference attendees, as it amounted to "political suicide" for the party. By the time of the Plenum, which immediately followed the Lushan Conference, Peng had become politically isolated and stripped from his position as Defence Minister, replaced by Marshal Lin Biao. The Lushan Plenum adopted a resolution denouncing "the anti Party clique headed by Peng Duhai." Mao continued to believe that the experiment of giving the peasantry a political role should be continued. Mao also announced in August that the conflict at the conference is a class struggle and that the conflict "is the continuation of the life or death struggle between the two great antagonists of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the process of the socialist revolution during the past decade." Peng was subsequently dismissed and arrested. In September 1959, he was replaced by Lin Biao. As indicated by Mao in a September 1959 speech, Mao believed that Peng and others had gone "behind the back of our fatherland to collude with a foreign country."

Not long after the Lushan Conference, Mao removed himself from the day to day workings of the party. Historian Maurice Meisner argues that Mao must have understood that Peng's criticisms were widely shared by the Party leadership and that Mao could not command sufficient support from the Central Committee to continue the radical policies of the Great Leap Forward, had he been so inclined.