ABSTRACT
The Eighth National Party Congress (1956-66) had experimented with diluting the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) highly concentrated power structure; part of the effort was to divide power between the Politburo and the Secretariat. Although the efforts in the mid-1950s and early 1980s to increase innerparty democracy through establishing the Central Secretariat both failed, they nevertheless left a significant mark on Chinese politics. From the history of the Secretariat, one can see the difficulties in establishing inner-party democracy in the CCP. The establishment of the Central Secretariat system in both the Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping eras was a political reform aimed at changing the Stalinist totalitarian system—but both efforts failed. When Mao established the Secretariat system in 1956, he also proposed the principles of the "double hundreds" (cultural liberalization) and "ten great relationships" (economic liberalization), all directed against the Stalinist political, economic, and cultural systems.
