The Mountain Lu Conference, also referred to as the Lushan Conference, was a meeting of the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held between July and August 1959. The CCP Politburo met in an "expanded session" (Kuoda Huiyi) between July 2 and August 1, followed by the 8th Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee from August 2–16. The major topic of discussion was the Great Leap Forward. The Mountain Lu Conference saw the political purge of the Defense Minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, whose criticism of some aspects of the Great Leap Forward was seen as an attack on the political line of CCP Chairman Mao Zedong. The Conference also marked the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 that disagreement over the direction of policy spilled into open conflict between party leaders. The conference's name is derived from the meeting place, a resort on Mountain Lu in Jiujiang, China. The conference The original objective of the conference was to review the events of the Great Leap Forward and solve practical issues brought forth by those events. Mao himself was critical of his own role in the failures of the Great Leap Forward. He described the backyard steel campaign he had promoted as a "great catastrophe" and criticized himself for pushing communization so fast. In a July speech before the Mountain Lu Conference, Mao states, "The chaos caused was on a grand level and I take responsibility for it." Mao also defended the policies of the Great Leap Forward in general and communes in particular. A major specific focus of the Mountain Lu Conference was the distortion created by false production reports. During the Great Leap Forward, lower bureaucratic levels were asked to fulfill unrealistic production quotas. Ignoring the actual conditions at even lower levels, officials frequently claimed that the production goals had been achieved. These behaviors were prompted by higher-level officials who overly emphasized production and addressed the peasants as "rural Stakhanovites." The ensuing false statistics impeded central coordination of the economy. At mountain lu, addressing these issues implicated a broader political tension over centralization and decentralization. As academic Alessandro Russo writes, the party's former strength of coordinating peasant political power had now created a major obstacle. Mao Zedong also intended to use the conference to contain the "leftist tendency" (zuoqing) elements in the Great Leap Forward. Peng Dehuai’s complaints