ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong was the all-powerful figure people have been portraying, how was it that his efforts to 'cool down' had such a limited impact, even to the extent that he complained that others failed to understand what he was driving at and treated his efforts as 'rightist and retrogressive'. Both Western and official Chinese sources have noted the effort to rein in excesses from the time of the Zhengzhou conference, and the central role of Mao in that effort. Meanwhile, Bo Yibo participated in a visit by delegates to the Beidaihe conference to nearby Xushui County where they viewed bountiful cotton fields. Xushui was particularly significant as a national model, a status conferred after Mao's enthusiastic if not completely unsceptical visit in August. The Chairman's ill temper and inevitable hesitations among his colleagues notwithstanding, the Shanghai meetings did give a boost to efforts to introduce greater realism into Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy.
