---
title: "Lushan Conference Definition and Significance"
description: "The Lushan Conference was a 1959 meeting where Mao Zedong purged Defence Minister Peng Dehuai for criticizing the Great Leap Forward's failures."
url: "https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/glossary/lushan-conference"
---

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Model Diplomat Research Team · Last reviewed June 22, 2026

TL;DR

- The Lushan Conference was a 1959 meeting of the Chinese Communist Party leadership at which Mao Zedong purged Defence Minister Peng Dehuai for criticising the Great Leap Forward.
- Who was purged at the 1959 Lushan Conference and why?
- What was the consequence of the Lushan Conference for the Great Leap Forward?
- When was Peng Dehuai rehabilitated?
- How does the 1959 Lushan Conference differ from the 1970 meeting at Lushan?

[Civil Service & Diplomatic Exams](https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/civil-services/glossary)Updated June 22, 2026

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## Positions at a glance

### Supporters

Mao circulated Peng's letter to delegates, denounced it as an anti-Party programme, and forced the conference to choose between supporting him or Peng. Marshal Peng Dehuai—hero of the Korean War and a Politburo member—was joined in disgrace by Chief of General Staff Huang Kecheng, Hunan Party secretary Zhou Xiaozhou, and Vice-Foreign-Minister Zhang Wentian, branded the "Peng-Huang-Zhang-Zhou anti-Party clique." The plenum stripped Peng of his defence portfolio, replacing him with Lin Biao, who would thereafter cultivate the cult of Mao within the People's Liberation Army. Crucially, the conference reversed the brief liberalisation, intensified the Leap rather than restraining it, and silenced internal dissent—contributing directly to the Great Chinese Famine that killed an estimated 15–45 million people between 1959 and 1962.

### Opponents

The Lushan Conference (庐山会议) refers to the enlarged Politburo meeting and Eighth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), held from July to August 1959 at the mountain resort of Lushan in Jiangxi province. Convened ostensibly to correct the excesses of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and Mao Zedong's commune and backyard-furnace campaigns, the conference instead became a watershed in intra-Party politics when it turned on its critics. Its central document, Peng Dehuai's private "Letter of Opinion" (万言书) addressed to Mao on 14 July 1959, candidly catalogued the famine, falsified grain statistics, and "petty-bourgeois fanaticism" of the Leap, prompting Mao to recast a corrective meeting into a struggle against "right opportunism."

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In July 1959 at Lushan, Marshal Peng Dehuai handed Mao Zedong a private letter criticising the Great Leap Forward; Mao branded him a "right opportunist" and stripped him of the defence ministry, installing Lin Biao.

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