ABSTRACT
The Party rectification campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party in 1982 represents an interesting attempt to come to terms with several of the dilemmas that have faced the new leaders since they initiated their ambitious reform program at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee (CC). Mao Zedong thought has been linked with public morality in China so long and so well that to repudiate it is fraught with more risk to the system’s legitimacy than Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalinism. The organization of the campaign represents a contrast to the campaign practices of the Cultural Revolution and, more generally, the period of Mao’s ascendancy. There are about 40 million Party members, attached to 2.5 million Party organs from the grass roots level to the CC, of whom about 9 million are cadres. About 18 million were recruited before the Cultural Revolution, and 4 million have been recruited during the post-Mao period.
