Ten Major Relationships
On the Ten Major Relationships is a speech by Mao Zedong which outlines how the People's Republic of China would construct socialism different from the model of development undertaken by the Soviet Union. It was delivered by Mao during an enlarged session of a Politburo meeting of the Chinese Communist Party on April 25, 1956, and further elaborated in the 7th Supreme State Conference on May 2 the same year.
In official account, the speech is celebrated as the landmark of the search for an alternative mode of socialist development that fit the specific conditions in China and it also marks the beginning of Mao's denouncement of the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. In fewer than 13,000 words in Chinese, Mao stressed that China had to avoid repeating "certain defects and errors that occurred in the course of their building socialism." Covered in the speech are the economic, social, political, and ethnical aspects of building socialism in China. Mao further charted a strategy of forming alliance and splitting enemies in international sphere.
The speech was made in front of the party secretaries of various provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, and was subsequently circulated among the middle and top cadres for political study. It was not published until after Mao's death in September 1976.
Background
In January 1956 Mao Zedong noticed that Liu Shaoqi was receiving reports from some committees of the State Council and became interested in those reports. Beginning from late last year, Liu was preparing for the political report for the forthcoming party congress and Mao then instructed to arrange different bureaus to report to him. As Mao said, the formulation of the ten major relationships was the result of communicating with the cadres in those bureaus.From February 14 to April 24, Mao listened to the reports from 34 different bureaus, plus the report from the State Planning Commission on the Second Five-year Plan. During those 41 days, Mao listened to reports for four to five hours every day in Zhongnanhai. Other top leaders including Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, and Deng Xiaoping had also participated in these meetings and expressed their opinions. The reporting began with heavy industry, then proceeded to light industry, handicraft industry, transportation and telecommunication, agriculture and forestry, finance, and other areas. During the same period, Mao was also involved in the drafting of another document titled On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which, published on April 5 on the People's Daily, was an immediate response of the Chinese Communist Party to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
After listening to the first round of reports, from April 12 to 17 Mao visited an exhibition of mechanics to see the latest development in the industry. Then from April 18 onwards, Li Fuchun reported to Mao on the Second Five-year Plan. The entire process was Mao's longest and most comprehensive investigation on economic affairs after 1949. In the enlarged Politburo meeting from April 25 to 28, Mao made the speech on its first day. As the original agenda was about issues like agricultural cooperative, attendants did not expect Mao to make such a speech on the ten major relationships and it became the focus for the rest of the meeting.
Domestic sphere
After the founding of the new country in 1949, the party had consolidated its control over Chinese society through mass campaigns like Land Reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns, the Campaign to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, and the Sufan Movement. The government also completed the Ethnic Classification in 1954 which aimed at sorting and categorizing the hundreds of distinct ethnic communities within the country, the result of which served as the basis for future policy on nationalities.In terms of economic development, China had followed the Soviet model of socialism ever since Mao's decision to lean on the side of the Soviet Union. As his speech On the People's Democratic Dictatorship in June 1949 states,
"We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are. We must esteem them as teachers, learning from them respectfully and conscientiously. We must not pretend to know when we do not know. We must not put on bureaucratic airs. If we dig into a subject for several months, for a year or two, for three or five years, we shall eventually master it. At first some of the Soviet Communists also were not very good at handling economic matters and the imperialists awaited their failure too. But the Communist Party of the Soviet Union emerged victorious and, under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, it learned not only how to make the revolution but also how to carry on construction. It has built a great and splendid socialist state. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it. The situation both at home and abroad is in our favour, we can rely fully on the weapon of the people's democratic dictatorship, unite the people throughout the country, the reactionaries excepted, and advance steadily to our goal."Following Mao's visit to Moscow from late 1949 to early 1950, on February 14, 1950, the two countries signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance which promised the Soviet Union's commitment to help build socialism in the newly founded People's Republic of China. From 1950 to 1956, a total of 5,092 Soviet experts were sent to China for technical assistant and the total number of visits of the Soviet experts was over 18,000 throughout the years. The areas they provided assistance included government bureaus, military, large enterprises, and higher institutions. In the countryside, from late 1955 to early 1956, China's agricultural sector completed the Socialist High Tide, transforming from having only 14.2% of peasant families collectivized to 91.2% of them joining the co-operatives and 61.9% joining collectives. Likewise in the cities, private factories and shops were either turned into cooperatives or nationalized in the name of joint public-private ownership.