Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee (1978)
제11기 중앙위원회 제3차 전체회의 (1978)
The plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee held at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing on 18–22 December 1978. Abandoning “class struggle as the key link” and shifting the party’s focus to socialist modernisation, it is regarded as the start of reform and opening and as the moment when Deng Xiaoping took real power from Hua Guofeng.
In depth
At the Central Work Conference that preceded it, opening on 10 November, Chen Yun raised “six issues”, among them the case of the “sixty-one renegades” including Bo Yibo, the cases of Peng Dehuai and Tao Zhu, the 1976 Tiananmen incident and Kang Sheng’s errors, and Deng Xiaoping set the tone with his speech of 13 December, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future”. The plenum’s communiqué declared that “large-scale turbulent class struggles of a mass character have in the main come to an end” and made the Four Modernisations the party’s central task.
The plenum passed no open resolution on Mao, but it checked the personality cult by ruling that no leader’s personal view be called an “instruction” and by avoiding the titles “Chairman Mao” and “Chairman Hua”. It repudiated the campaign to “counter the Right-deviationist reversal of verdicts”, rehabilitated Peng Dehuai, Tao Zhu, Bo Yibo and Yang Shangkun and reassessed the 1976 Tiananmen incident. There was no great reshuffle, but Chen Yun became Standing Committee member, vice-chairman and first secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Deng Yingchao, Hu Yaobang and Wang Zhen joined the Politburo, and nine members including Huang Kecheng were co-opted to the Central Committee. In agriculture it allowed devolving responsibility only to work groups. Full repudiation of the Cultural Revolution was left to the Resolution of the Sixth Plenum in 1981.