Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the PRC (1981)
건국 이래 당의 약간의 역사 문제에 관한 결의 (1981)
The historical resolution adopted unanimously by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee on 27 June 1981, one of the party’s three historical resolutions with those of 1945 and 2021. It defined the Cultural Revolution as the most severe setback and the heaviest loss since the founding of the People’s Republic and placed chief responsibility on Mao Zedong, while concluding that his merits outweighed his errors and keeping Mao Zedong Thought as the party’s guiding ideology.
In depth
Deng Xiaoping announced in January 1980 that a resolution on historical questions would be drafted, and Hu Qiaomu led the work for fifteen months. Deng had the draft revised again and again so that it would affirm Mao’s contributions as well as his errors, and at a discussion by 4,000 cadres in October 1980 some called for stronger criticism of Mao. Having accepted Hua Guofeng’s resignation as party chairman on 26 June, the plenum adopted the Resolution the next day. On the Cultural Revolution it said:
19. The “cultural revolution”, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic. It was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.
The Resolution divided the Cultural Revolution into three stages, ending with the Ninth Congress of 1969, the Tenth Congress of 1973 and October 1976, and separated the crimes of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing “counter-revolutionary cliques” from Mao’s “errors”. Of Mao it concluded that “his merits are primary and his errors secondary”; the formula “70 per cent right, 30 per cent wrong”, absent from the text, became its accepted gist. It called the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 necessary but “too broad”, endorsed the Eighth Congress’s judgment that class struggle should not be the key link and the change of course at the Third Plenum of 1978, and affirmed the Four Cardinal Principles of the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, party leadership and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. A three-year campaign to “totally negate” the Cultural Revolution followed.