should continue wherever possible. Mao nonetheless agreed that specific objectives had to be made more realistic and that the absurd bureaucratic boasting regarding production quotas had to be stopped. Mao bitterly criticised Peng for being part of a group that wavered in the face of difficulties and who were "only 30 kilometres away from the rightists". Mao also announced in August that the conflict at the conference is a class struggle and that the conflict "is the continuation of the life-or-death struggle between the two great antagonists of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the process of the socialist revolution during the past decade." Peng was subsequently dismissed and arrested. In September 1959, he was replaced by Lin Biao. As indicated by Mao in a September 1959 speech, Mao believed that Peng and others had gone "behind the back of our fatherland to collude with a foreign country." Although the criticism of Peng Dehuai resulted in a victory for Mao Zedong, it also led the leadership to conclude that he had been treated unfairly and that the party's norms had been violated. Zhou Xiaozhou, along with Huang Kecheng and Zhang Wentian, who lent their support to Peng Dehuai in questioning the wisdom of the Great Leap Forward, were also branded as traitors, stripped of their positions, and sent to re-education through labour. Li Rui, one of Mao's private secretaries, was also stripped of party membership and sent to a labor camp for refusing to denounce Peng. Consequences of the conference Not long after the Mountain Lu Conference, Mao removed himself from the day-to-day workings of the party. Historian Maurice Meisner argues that Mao must have understood that Peng's criticisms were widely shared by the Party leadership and that Mao could not command sufficient support from the Central Committee to continue the radical policies of the Great Leap Forward, had he been so inclined. Mao himself summarized the Mountain Lu Conference in the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, as he self-criticized and argued the Mountain Lu Conference should be focused on the works; however, "then up jumped Peng Dehuai and said 'you fucked my mother for forty days, can I fuck your mother for twenty days?'", and the conference became a mess. See also Great Leap Forward The Second Plenum of the 9th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, held in 1970. Because