Hu Qiaomu

Communist Party of China Marxism–Leninism 1912–1992 ○ Natural causes

Mao’s secretary who drafted the 1981 Resolution and became a leading conservative theorist of the 1980s

From Yancheng in Jiangsu, he joined the Communist Party in 1932 and led anti-Japanese student and worker movements in Beiping. He was Mao Zedong’s secretary from 1941 to 1969; after 1949, as head of the Xinhua News Agency and deputy head of the Propaganda Department, he edited People’s Daily closely, and in 1951 wrote Thirty Years of the Chinese Communist Party. He became an alternate Politburo member in 1956. Persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and later rehabilitated, he became the first president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1977 and in 1980 was chosen to draft the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party. In the 1980s, with Deng Liqun, he was the party’s leading conservative theorist, putting “party spirit” before “people’s spirit”, attacking the theory of alienation and launching the 1983 campaign against spiritual pollution. He died in 1992.

Also known as: Hu Ch'iao-mu