ABSTRACT
Mao’s successor, Hua Guo-feng, announced reform to the initial economic model designed by former premier Zhou En-Lai and introduced the Four Modernizations – of industry, agriculture, defence, and science and technology – which became the new national goal and lasted until 2000 (Zhu and Warner 2000a). However, political and ideological struggles continued among the party leadership, between the extreme left wing led by Hua and the reformist branch led by Deng Xiao-Ping who had regained his power in 1977. Hua insisted on the ‘principle of two principles’ – everything that Mao said was ‘truth’ and everything that Mao did was ‘right’ (the so-called liangge fanshi principle). This principle blocked any attempt to break away from the then existing economic
was 3:7 (san qi kai). For the Party and the people, the principle was ‘seeking the truth from facts’ (shishi qiushi) and the ‘liberation of thought’ (jiefang sixiang). This new belief led to a search for a new direction in economic development for China. The outcome of the struggle was that Deng’s ideology gained the support of the Party (Zhu and Warner 2000a: 120). Eventually Deng’s reform agenda and Open Door policy were formally adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978 as the central Party policy (Korzec 1992).
