April 7
The CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the Directive on Nationwide Large-Scale Afforestation.
April 22
The Monument to the People’s Heroes, situated at the Tiananmen Square, was completed.
May 5–23
The 2nd Session of the 8th CPC Congress was held. The Session adopted the general line of “going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism.” Following the meeting, the campaign of the “Great Leap Forward” unfolded throughout the country.
August 17–30
The Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held an enlarged meeting in Beidaihe. The meeting set a number of high targets for industrial and agricultural production. After the meeting, a mass movement for making steel and to form people’s communes swept across the country, and the “Leftist” deviationist errors, mainly characterized by excessively high targets, causing problems by issuing wrong orders, and a proneness to boasting and exaggeration as well as the “tendency to effect the transition to communism prematurely” spread unchecked, causing great harm.
September 2
Beijing Television, China’s first television station, started to broadcast. On May 1, 1978, it was renamed China Central Television.
September 4
The Chinese government promulgated the Declaration of the Government of the People’s Republic of China on China’s Territorial Sea.
November 2–10
Mao Zedong convened a work conference of the CPC Central Committee in Zhengzhou (known as the first Zhengzhou Meeting). Before the Lushan Meeting held in July 1959, the CPC Central Committee convened in succession the 6th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee, the second Zhengzhou Meeting and the 7th Plenary Session of the 8th Central Committee, starting to tentatively rectify the “Leftist” mistakes emerging in the “Great Leap Forward” and the people’s commune movement.
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, PP42-44