Rebirth: I am in Jin-Cha-Ji

The Prime Minister had originally planned to return to China to attend the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee. However, due to the atomic bombing, not only European countries, but also leading countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, such as Yugoslavia and Egypt, took advantage of the Prime Minister's presence in Europe to meet with him. Consequently, the Prime Minister's work in Europe suddenly increased, and he was unable to attend the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee.

The successful atomic bomb explosion brought joy to the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee. Most of the current Central Committee members and alternate members came from the military, so they were particularly delighted by the successful atomic bomb explosion.

Wei Hongjun delivered the opening speech at the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee. After the opening speech, Wei Hongjun once again announced the good news of the successful explosion of the atomic bomb.

After everyone cheered and celebrated, Wei Hongjun delivered the Politburo's work report for 1958 on behalf of the Politburo.

Comrade Xiuyang made a work report for the National People's Congress, especially at several standing committee meetings of the National People's Congress in 1958, which mainly focused on the continuous revision of laws.

As China's economy develops, various contradictions are becoming more and more numerous. These include the contradiction between the state-planned economy and the free economy at the grassroots level, the contradiction between heavy industry and light industry, the contradiction between economic development and monetary policy, the contradiction between the need for overall economic cooperation and local protectionism, and the contradiction between different economic entities.

To address these contradictions, one approach requires constant policy adjustments to adapt production relations to new productive forces. Another approach requires the introduction of more laws directly addressing these contradictions, ensuring that everyone has clear rules and understands how to resolve them. For example, the content of the early "Contract Law" of New China is completely different from the current "Contract Law."

Economic development has brought about various forms of "contract models." In order to adapt to these new situations and new "contract models," the "Contract Law" undergoes new adjustments almost every year.

The National People's Congress is the legislative body and needs to constantly adjust these laws to adapt them to the current situation.

Comrade Xiuyang gave a very detailed report on the legislative work of the National People's Congress over the past year.

Chen Yun, representing the Finance and Economics Committee, delivered the economic report for the year. He discussed both achievements and current problems, openly addressing issues such as steel and electricity shortages.

Marshal Nie, representing the Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and Deng Xixian, representing the State Council, each delivered a work report for 1958.

On behalf of the Foreign Affairs Committee, General Secretary Chen reported on the current breakthroughs in diplomatic work. His report received rounds of applause from the conference delegates.

This was due to the remarkable success of China's diplomatic work in 1958. Within a single year, China established diplomatic ties with seven new countries, and having already broken through the ranks of European and Middle Eastern nations, it was certain that even more diplomatic ties would be established in 1959. By the time this diplomatic offensive was over, China would have established diplomatic ties with more than half of the world's nations.

By then, the US diplomatic blockade of China will basically fail.

Then, Deng Zhihui presented his 1958 rural work report. It covered everything from grain production to rural credit cooperative deposits and loans, as well as nationwide rural tax revenue and commodity consumption. It was all hard-core data.

In the two years of 1957 and 1958 after the Ninth National Congress, including the conversion of grain into RMB, the average annual income of farmers across the country increased by 37 yuan.

This is no small amount. Calculated on a household basis, the average annual income of a rural household increased by about 150 yuan over the past two years.

As rural incomes increased, the first product to enter the countryside on a large scale was thermoses. Due to the dramatic surge in demand for thermoses in rural areas over the past two years, production also increased dramatically. In 1958, China's thermos production reached 8700 million units, perfectly coinciding with the Patriotic Health Campaign.

Supervisory Commission Secretary Tan Zhenlin reported on the cases the Commission investigated over the past year. In addition to overall data, he also reported on the handling of some key cases.

These are work reports, reporting to the Central Committee on the past year's work.

Then, various proposals were introduced. Chen Tanqiu, representing the Central Organization Department, proposed a "Draft for Party Member Withdrawal." This draft was very detailed, quantifying the issues surrounding party member withdrawal. Party member withdrawal isn't a haphazard decision; it must be made if a member has violated certain regulations. Only then can the Party group decide to allow a member to withdraw.

A channel for appeals for withdrawn Party members will also be established. In particular, the functions of the Letters and Calls Bureau will be further strengthened. The Organization Department will regularly dispatch staff to the Letters and Calls Bureau. The Provincial and Municipal Party Committee Organization Departments will also annually review the withdrawal of Party members based on a certain percentage to determine if they comply with regulations.

Xia Houwen, on behalf of the Central Bureau of Letters and Calls, drafted a "Draft System for Letters and Calls Inspections." This was Wei Hongjun's first step toward formalizing the inspection system.

The Central Bureau of Letters and Calls' draft "Complaint Inspection System" primarily involves the Bureau requesting relevant ministries and local governments handle petitions based on their content. The Bureau will then oversee the handling of these cases through inspections.

Then, the Supervisory Commission proposed a draft of the Supervisory Inspection System. This draft was also relatively minor, not specifically aimed at tackling major issues like bribery among officials.

Instead, the Supervisory Commission primarily inspects specific regulations within ministries and localities. For example, central government regulations stipulate travel standards, cadre meal standards, and cadre office standards. The Supervisory Commission's inspections primarily target these issues, combating local extravagance and waste.

The draft inspection system drafted by the Supervisory Commission and the Central Bureau of Letters and Calls is intended to make the inspection system more easily accepted within the Party. Once everyone becomes accustomed to this inspection system over a year or two, a central inspection team will be established to more clearly define the Party's inspection system.

Deng Zhihui, on behalf of the Ministry of Rural Affairs, proposed the "Draft National Grain Reserve Management Regulations," which set out general regulations for the management of grain reserves at the central government, provincial and municipal levels.

Currently, every province, city, and even some counties and townships have their own grain reserves. However, because the state has not established clear regulations, each province, city, county, and township reserves grain according to its own circumstances. Some provinces have more grain reserves, while others have less.

When they report, they sometimes exaggerate or conceal information. Furthermore, the data on grain reserves in rural areas at the county and township levels is even more inaccurate. Therefore, the central government's understanding of local grain reserves is skewed.

This is a serious problem. After all, if a disaster strikes and central government assistance is needed, incorrect data could be fatal.

The draft "National Grain Reserve Management Plan" proposed by Deng Zhihui on behalf of the Ministry of Rural Affairs begins to establish clear regulations for national grain reserves. Different requirements will be set based on different regions, grain production, and populations. These provinces and municipalities will be required to set aside a certain percentage of their grain reserves, which is mandatory.

At the same time, it was also formulated that if the grain reserve quantities reported to the central government by local provinces and cities are incorrect, the cadres will have to bear certain penalties depending on the extent of the error.

This is the first time that national grain reserve requirements have been stipulated at the policy level.

At the same time, Deng Zhihui proposed the establishment of a central material reserve warehouse and a central material reserve bureau. Material reserve is not an easy task. How to ensure the storage of materials is not spoiled, how to ensure the integrity of materials, and how to ensure the accuracy of material reserve data? All of these require a dedicated department and the support of scientific storage. The central government previously established a similar national material management committee, but with the formalization and adjustment of various ministries and commissions under the State Council, this management committee has become increasingly unsuitable for the current situation.

Finally, there is the "Draft Plan for the Management of State Farms." This was the product of a compromise reached by the Ministry of Rural Affairs in response to new issues.

When the central government established the Ministry of Agricultural Reclamation, it incorporated the then military reclamation, state-owned farms, and the South China Reclamation Bureau into the Ministry of Agricultural Reclamation.

However, after the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation was established, many localities and the military reclaimed a large number of farms, which were still very large.

Therefore, starting in 1956, conflicts arose between local state farms and military farms and the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation. The Ministry argued that, according to regulations, these state farms and military farms all belonged to it. However, local governments and the military disputed this, arguing that these farms were newly established after the Ministry's establishment and therefore did not belong to it.

Eventually, the conflict escalated, leading to a lawsuit against Deng Zhihui, the Minister of Rural Affairs. After discovering these problems, Deng Zhihui didn't forcefully merge these state-owned farms and military farms into the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation. It wasn't that Deng Zhihui couldn't handle the pressure from local governments and the military.

It was because after Deng Zhihui understood the reason, he was worried that the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation would blindly annex these state-owned farms and military farms, which would affect the enthusiasm of local governments and the military.

The most typical example is Jiangxi. Because Jiangxi is a former revolutionary base, the state provides preferential treatment for public grain and state-controlled purchase and marketing. Under normal circumstances, Jiangxi's annual public grain and state-controlled purchase combined would require approximately 60 billion jin (approximately 50 million jin) of grain. However, due to the preferential treatment afforded to these areas, the annual public grain and state-controlled purchase amounts are less than billion jin (approximately million jin).

Of this less than 50 billion catties of grain requisitioned, local state-owned farms and military state-owned farms controlled by the Jiangxi Provincial Government and the Jiangxi Provincial Military Region contributed approximately 30 billion catties annually. In other words, the major rural areas in Jiangxi contributed less than 20 billion catties.

This significantly reduced the burden on rural Jiangxi. Jiangxi was able to have so many state-owned farms because the majority of cadres in the Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government were from the Cadre Corps of North China. Many had been local cadres in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei region since the Anti-Japanese War, participating in the large-scale "do-it-yourself" land reclamation campaign.

After Wei Hongjun first proposed the "self-reliance" policy, Marshal Nie was the first to fully implement it throughout Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei. Therefore, many local cadres in Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei, including young students who had just joined the Eighth Route Army, had grown up reclaiming wasteland and cultivating the land. Therefore, they possessed extensive experience in this area.

As a result, after many state-owned farms established after the founding of the People's Republic of China were taken away by the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation, the Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government still used various methods to open up wasteland, increase arable land, and build a large number of state-owned farms.

The Jiangxi Provincial Military Region was similarly involved. Not only did local officials participate in the land reclamation effort, but military officials also participated. The North China Military Region was the first military region to establish a production and construction corps to cultivate land. Not to be outdone, the Jiangxi Provincial Military Region also opened up considerable arable land in Jiangxi and established state-owned factories within the region.

In the more than six years since the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Jiangxi Provincial Government and the Jiangxi Provincial Military Region have built a total of 479 local state-owned and military-state-owned farms, forestry farms, orchards, tea plantations and fisheries.

Furthermore, the Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee, the Jiangxi Provincial Government, and the Jiangxi Provincial Military Region, while constructing state-owned farms on a large scale, did not compete with local farmers for arable land. Instead, under the slogan of developing the economy of "old revolutionary areas," they chose to cultivate land in the mountainous areas of these old revolutionary bases. By leveraging water conservancy projects, they established one state farm after another in these mountainous areas.

And efforts are being made to build roads in the mountainous areas for the transportation of grain and other agricultural products from these farms.

Therefore, Jiangxi Province has a higher per capita grain output than the six surrounding provinces, namely Anhui, Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hunan and Hubei.

From the Eighth National Congress to the present, a total of seven years, Jiangxi, in addition to fulfilling the national procurement task, has also sold about 7 billion catties of grain to surrounding provinces. In other words, it sells about 50 million catties of grain to surrounding provinces every year.

This created a conflict. Jiangxi Province's state-owned farms were flourishing, accounting for nearly half of the country's grain purchases in Jiangxi. Logically, or according to regulations, these state-owned farms should have been affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation.

But the regulations are like this, but in reality, the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation cannot take over these state-owned farms. After all, these are state-owned farms that have been developed with great difficulty by local governments and provincial military regions. Why should they be handed over to the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation?

Jiangxi is just one example, currently the province with the best development of state-owned farms among all the provinces in China. Many other provinces have also developed state-owned farms in recent years.

For example, in Henan, Luo Weilin has carried out a lot of water conservancy projects in Henan in recent years, reclaiming a lot of new arable land. In addition to some arable land belonging to local collectives, a lot of reclaimed arable land has become state-owned farms.

These state-owned farms were collective property of local governments, so why would the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation take them away without doing anything? Consequently, there were significant conflicts between the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation and these local governments over the ownership and management of state-owned farms.

After investigation, Deng Zhihui realized that once the Ministry of Agriculture and Reclamation took back all these local state-owned farms, it would greatly dampen the enthusiasm of local governments.

This is different from the early years of the Liberation Era. At the beginning of the Liberation Era, state-owned farms in those areas were primarily cultivated by the military, and were less entangled with local governments. While there was some resistance to reclaiming the land, it wasn't a major problem.

But things are different now. Those local state-owned farms were cultivated by local governments using their own manpower and resources. They can't just be taken away simply because they belong to the central government. If that happened, who would bother reclaiming wasteland in those local governments?

Therefore, Deng Zhihui's third proposal was a compromise. State-owned farms currently being reclaimed by local governments would be considered collective assets of local governments, while farms reclaimed by the Ministry of Land Reclamation using its own personnel would be managed by the Ministry. This was intended to be a way of using the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee to definitively resolve this issue.

After several days of discussion, the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee formally passed the "Draft of Party Member Withdrawal", "Draft of Letters and Visits Inspection System", "Draft of Supervision and Inspection System", "Draft of Grain Reserve Management", and "Draft of State Farm Management".

It was also formally approved to establish the "Central Material Reserve Bureau", which was directly under the Politburo.

On March 1959, 3, the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee concluded successfully.

1063 Ambition of Advanced Weapons

After the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee was held.

The discussion was primarily about personnel changes. The newly established Central Material Reserve Bureau's most important resource was, of course, grain. However, beyond grain, several other materials crucial to national economy and livelihoods were also included in the national reserve.

In fact, seriously speaking, the central government has been continuously reserving this aspect. China's current political system largely retains the centralized system of two thousand years of Chinese history, combined with Marxist-Leninist ideological reforms and the absorption of some functions of modern Western governments.

Therefore, many of the central government's policies are also a continuation of many historical policies. Since the founding of New China, the central government has always attached great importance to the storage of various materials. This is an instinct.

It's not just the central government; local governments will also store some supplies within their capabilities.

It’s just that China was in a state of severe material shortage and insufficient market supply before, so the central government had to save up the materials from the gaps between its teeth.

But with the development of China's economy and the abundance of materials, the central government needs to merge these and manage them in a coordinated manner.

So the Central Material Reserve Bureau had just been established, but it wasn't a bare-bones operation, built from scratch. On the contrary, the foundation was already strong, and the material reserve agencies previously operated by various ministries and commissions were directly incorporated into the Material Reserve Bureau.

Just like the central grain reserves, after the 1958 collection, although most of them were put on the market, the Central Material Reserve Bureau still had more than 500 billion jin of reserves.

So, despite being newly established, the Central Material Reserve Bureau is quite powerful. It not only has various material warehouses, but also many research institutes. Their main research area is material reserves.

Regarding the rank of the Central Material Reserve Bureau, the Political Bureau, after discussion, decided that it would be a military corps-level or deputy corps-level officer, or an administrative level 5 or 6 cadre.

Finally, the Politburo decided to draw cadres from the military and appointed Fu Qiutao, then head of the Mobilization Department of a certain unit of the General Staff of the Central Military Commission and head of the People's Armed Forces Department, as director of the newly established Central Material Reserves Bureau.

The reason why cadres are constantly being drawn from the military is because there are too many senior military cadres, most of whom are in their 40s and 50s, which seriously affects the normal promotion channels for military cadres.

Therefore, the transfer of a senior cadre from the military will bring about a series of cadre changes, which is a good thing for the normalization of the entire military.

Furthermore, many high-ranking military officials, who previously managed military region logistics during wartime, or served as military region leaders in charge of local affairs, are now considered a waste of resources. They would be better off transferring to the local areas to oversee local affairs.

In addition to the issue of the Central Material Reserve Bureau, the Politburo began to discuss the establishment of an economic cooperation zone.

Taking into account historical relationships and political and economic needs, China was divided into seven cooperation zones (Northeast China, North China, East China, South China, Central China, Southwest China, and Northwest China). These economic cooperation zones have no hierarchy and are not administrative bodies. They are simply economic coordination organizations among several provinces.

Of course, some provinces don't participate in the cooperation zone. Xinjiang, Tibet, and Shandong, for example, all develop independently. This is because their economic ties with other provinces aren't as strong, and they don't require as much economic cooperation.

The East China Economic Cooperation Zone is comprised of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui. The South China Economic Cooperation Zone is comprised of Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Fujian. The Central China Economic Cooperation Zone is comprised of Henan, Hubei, and Hunan.

The provincial party committee and government leaders hold two or three meetings each year to coordinate issues arising from economic development. Some key projects require collaboration from several provinces.

Moreover, after the establishment of the economic cooperation zone, large-scale industrial backbones and economic centers will be established in each district as soon as possible to form several economic regions with relatively complete industrial systems.

In fact, it is to further strengthen the role of important cities in the region. For example, the Central China Economic Cooperation Zone will further highlight the status of industrial cities and transportation hubs such as Luoyang in Henan and Wuhan in Hubei.

Cities like Zhuzhou in Hunan will become one of the economic regions with certain industrial strength.

The final topic of the meeting was proposed by the Chairman, that all institutions across the country should establish leadership bodies in the form of committees.

Just like the current Party Central Committee, the daily work is handled by the Political Bureau Standing Committee. The daily work of the State Council is also handled by the State Council Standing Committee.

Due to historical reasons, although the system of division of labor and responsibility among cadres under the collective leadership of the Party committee is implemented nationwide, some places still have not fully implemented the committee system.

Therefore, the Chairman's opinion is that this must be implemented. Only by implementing the collective leadership system of the Party Committee can inner-party democracy be fully exerted.

After the Politburo passed it, all that remained was for the Secretariat to implement it. Immediately after the Politburo meeting, Wei Hongjun convened an internal meeting of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

During the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee, the Chairman specifically asked Wei Hongjun about China's hydrogen bombs and missiles, as well as the integration of the two. The Chairman meant that having the atomic bomb was a good thing, but it was only the beginning.

The Chairman hopes that the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense can quickly start developing hydrogen bombs, missiles, and a combination of the two, and even launch China's own satellites.

Wei Hongjun is the secretary of the Science Work Committee and is directly responsible for the work of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

With the Chairman's urging, Wei Hongjun immediately convened a meeting of cadres from the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, as well as cadres from the General Armaments Department and General Logistics Department of the Central Military Commission, as well as some heavyweight scientists involved in these core projects.

Everyone was in a very good mood. If we were to say that the most glorious department during the Ninth Congress was the Ministry of Petroleum, which represented the Songliao Oilfield at the time.

At the Third Session of the Ninth Central Committee, the most glorious people were the cadres from the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.