Note On The “Charter Of The Anshan Iron And Steel Company”[1]

March 22, 1960

[SOURCE: Peoples Daily, March 22, 1960.]

This report of the Anshan party committee is very good. The more one reads it the more delighted one gets. It doesn’t strike one as too long, in fact, one would be willing to read it even if it were longer; this is because the problems raised in the report are factual, well reasoned, and very absorbing. With more than 100,000 workers and staff members, the Anshan Iron and Steel Company is the country’s biggest enterprise. Formerly, people there thought that their enterprise was a modernized one and there was no need for technical revolution. They were opposed to launching vigorous mass movements, to the principle of cadre participation in productive labor and worker participation in management, of reform of irrational and outdated rules and regulations and of close cooperation among cadres, workers, and technicians, and opposed to putting politics in command..; they relied on just a few people working in seclusion. Many favored the system of placing responsibility solely on the factory director and were against the system of the factory director designated to undertake responsibility under the leadership of the party committee. They held that the “Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine” (a set of authoritative rules practiced in a big steel plant in the Soviet Union) was sacred. That was the situation up to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, which marked the first stage. The year 1959 marked the second stage, when people began to think things over, began to have faith in the mass movement, and began to question the system of placing responsibility solely on the factory director and the Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine. During the Lushan Meeting of July 1959, the Central Committee received a good report from them, which spoke in favor of the Great Leap Forward, of opposing the right deviation and making utmost exertions; it also put forward a high but practicable target. The Central Committee was extremely pleased with the report and had it circulated ! to the comrades concerned with its comment. They immediately relayed it by telephone to their respective provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, thus helping the struggle going on at the time to criticize right opportunism. The present report (March 1960) takes another step forward; it does not smack of the Charter of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Combine, but has given birth to a Charter of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company. Here emerges the Charter of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company in China, in the Far East. This marks the third stage. Now this report is being passed on to you and you are asked to transmit it to the large and medium-sized enterprises under your administration and to party committees of all large and medium-sized cities and, of course, you may also transmit it to prefectural party committees and other cities. It should be used as a document for study by cadres in order to stimulate their minds and make them think about the affairs in their own units, so that under due leadership a great Marxist-Leninist movement of economic and technical revolution will be carried out link by link and wave upon wave in the cities and the country side during the whole year of 1960.

Notes

[1.] The Anshan Iron and Steel Works, constructed in the period of Japanese rule in Manchuria was China’s first large modern enterprise and the center of its heavy industry. The focus of industrialization during the first five-year plan, today it is an advanced complex with more than 100,000 workers supplying 25 percent of the nation’s steel, the foundation of the industrial economy. The Charter of the Anshan Steel Company was proposed by the workers of Anshan.

Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung