February 7
The Xinhua News Agency broadcast a long report entitled “Model of County Party Secretaries—Jiao Yulu.” After that, a nationwide movement to learn from Jiao Yulu was initiated.
March 8 and March 22
The area of Xingtai in Heibei Province was hit by two successive earthquakes with magnitudes of 6.8 and 7.2 on the Richter scale. Under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee, the State Council and the CPC Central Military Commission and thanks to the unstinting support from people around the country and the PLA, people of the disaster-stricken areas spared no efforts to carry out the earthquake relief work.
May 4–26
An enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee was held. The meeting adopted the Circular of the CPC Central Committee (known as the “May 16 Circular”). From August 1 to 12, the 11th Plenary Session of the 8th CPC Central Committee was convened, which passed the Decision of the CPC Central Committee on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The two meetings marked the all-round launching of the “Cultural Revolution.” The decade-long “Cultural Revolution” caused the gravest setbacks and losses to the Party, state and Chinese people since the founding of the PRC.
October 27
China successfully launched and detonated its first surface-to-surface missile with nuclear warheads.
From: Chronicle of the People's Republic of China (October 1949 — September 2019) ,edited by The Institute of Party History and Literature of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, PP66-67