ABSTRACT
In June 1981, the Central Committee of the Communist party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced that the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee meeting of December 1978 “marked a crucial turning point of far-reaching significance” in the history of the party. 1 Not only was it acknowledged that Mao Zedong, the author of “Mao Zedong Thought,” had made egregious errors in the course of his revolutionary activities, but it identified the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that had occupied China between 1966 and 1976 to have been an economic and political catastrophe. The people of China were informed that “the ‘cultural revolution’... 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.” Moreover, it was affirmed that the entire devastating sequence of events had been “initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong,” 2 the founding father of the People’s Republic and the “greatest Marxist-Leninist of our time.” 3 It was argued that although Mao Zedong was a “great Marxist,” he had committed “gross blunders” with considerable regularity and had violated the “principles” of Mao Zedong thought itself. 4 By 1981 it became clear that the People’s Republic of China had embarked on a course that was to distinguish its future from the entire period that had preceded it.
