User:Colipon/Seven Thousand Cadres Conference

The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference was a national-level meeting of the Communist Party of China that took place between January 11 and February 7, 1962, in Beijing. The goal of the conference was to sum up the lessons learned from the Great Leap Forward. The conference is named for the 7,118 delegates who attended the conference, which included national, provincial, and county-level officials, as well as those responsible for state-owned enterprises.

The Conference is known to be one of the clearest indications that Chairman Mao Zedong and his principal lieutenant Liu Shaoqi had split along ideological lines and was a crucial event in the build up to the Cultural Revolution which began in 1966.

Background
The Great Leap Forward was a mass mobilization campaign spearheaded by Mao which began in 1956. People's Communes were formed all over rural China and vast segments of the population were mobilized to produce steel at backyard furnaces across the country. The Great Leap was an economic catastrophe in addition to producing a humanitarian crisis of immense proportions.

七千人大会