Lesson 7: The Great Turning of History

The Third Plenary Session of the Tenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

After the turmoil of the "Cultural Revolution", many serious political and social problems have been accumulated. After the "Gang of Four" was crushed, people demanded that the wrongful cases in the Cultural Revolution be vindicated and the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution be corrected. On February 7, 1977, the People's Daily, the Red Flag magazine and the People's Liberation Army Daily published editorials in which they openly proposed the policy that "we will resolutely uphold all decisions made by Chairman Mao, and we will consistently follow all of his instructions. In 1978, the ideological and theoretical circles launched a great discussion on the question of truth standards. This was a profound ideological liberation movement. It made people realize that practice is the only criterion for testing truth.

In December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing. This Plenum broke through the severe fetters of the long-standing "leftist" error, set the guidelines of emancipating the mind, opening up the brain, seeking truth from facts, and uniting to look ahead, and decisively stopped using the slogan "class struggle

The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee was a historic decision to shift the work center of the Party and the state to economic construction and to implement reform and opening up.

The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was a great turnaround of far-reaching significance in the history of the Party since the founding of New China and opened up a new period in the history of China's reform and opening up. This meeting actually formed the second generation of the Party's central leadership with Deng Xiaoping as the core. After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the CPC made a comprehensive setback in ideology, politics and organization.

Setting things right

Along with the great tide of ideological emancipation, the work of vindicating unjust and false cases was carried out across the country. "The cadres of the Party, political and military organs at all levels who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated one after another, and the democrats and intellectuals who had been attacked, falsely accused or persecuted were also rehabilitated. In 1980, the CPC Central Committee decided to withdraw the charges imposed on Liu Shaoqi during the Cultural Revolution and to restore his reputation as a great Marxist and proletarian revolutionary, and one of the major leaders of the Party and the state, thus vindicating the greatest injustice since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

In 1981, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held and adopted the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Certain Historical Problems of the Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, marking the completion of the Communist Party of China's rectification of its guiding ideology.（528words）