Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee and the 1981 Resolution on Party History

Origins and Guiding Principles

After the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, the CCP needed to reach a verdict on its record since 1949 — above all on the Cultural Revolution and on Mao Zedong's merits and errors. Drafting began in March 1980 under the leadership of the Politburo and the Secretariat, directed by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, with a drafting group headed by Hu Qiaomu. On 19 March 1980, in a talk with Hu Yaobang, Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun and others, Deng said that affirming Mao's historical position and upholding and developing Mao Zedong Thought was "the most essential point" of the resolution. Over more than a year of revisions he repeatedly stressed that "the banner of Mao Zedong Thought must not be abandoned," that Mao's errors "must not be overstated," and that Mao's merits were primary and his errors secondary. Chen Yun proposed adding a review of the twenty-eight years of Party history before 1949 so that Mao's contributions could be assessed more fully, and the suggestion was adopted.

The "Discussion of the Four Thousand"

From mid-October to late November 1980 the draft was circulated for discussion among senior Party officials — about 1,000 from central organs and about 3,000 from the localities and at provincial and army level, divided into 35 groups — an exercise later known as the "discussion of the four thousand." According to Guo Daohui, who took part as secretary of the First Group of state organs, many participants voiced sharp criticism: some argued that the draft wrongly attributed the errors of the seventeen years before the Cultural Revolution to "the whole Party" when they were chiefly Mao's own; some held that defining Mao Zedong Thought as comprising only his correct ideas, with his mistaken ideas excluded, was logically untenable; others traced the roots of the "voluntarism" and personal autocracy of Mao's later years. Each group's views were compiled into briefing bulletins and submitted upward; the resolution then went through repeated further revisions, and the final text was settled along the lines Deng had laid down.

Adoption and Principal Conclusions

The Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee met in Beijing from 27 to 29 June 1981 and on 27 June unanimously adopted the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China." The resolution is divided into eight parts, running from a review of the twenty-eight years before 1949 to "the great historic turning point" and Mao Zedong's place in history. It concluded that the Cultural Revolution had brought the Party, the state and the people "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses" since 1949, that it "was a domestic upheaval initiated by a leader laboring under a misapprehension and capitalized on by counter-revolutionary cliques, which brought serious disaster to the Party, the state and the whole people," and that it "was not and could not have been a revolution or social progress in any sense." At the same time it held that Mao's "contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes. His merits are primary and his errors secondary," and defined Mao Zedong Thought as "the crystallization of the collective wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party." The resolution also found that the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign had been "made far too broad."

Concurrent Leadership Changes

The same plenum criticized Hua Guofeng for promoting, and long failing to correct, the erroneous "two whatevers" policy, and accepted his resignation as Chairman of the Central Committee and of the Central Military Commission. It elected Hu Yaobang Chairman of the Central Committee, Zhao Ziyang and Hua Guofeng Vice-Chairmen, and Deng Xiaoping Chairman of the Central Military Commission. The plenum closed and issued its communiqué on 29 June.

Historical Significance and Assessments

The document is the second "historical resolution" in the CCP's history: the first, the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party," was adopted by the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee in April 1945; the third, the "Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century," by the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee in November 2021. Official Party histories treat the 1981 resolution as marking the completion of "setting things right" in the Party's guiding ideology, and it long served as the authoritative basis for judging major questions of post-1949 history. Foreign scholars have focused on the balance it strikes between "thoroughly negating the Cultural Revolution" and preserving Mao's historical standing, and on how the Party used it to reassert its authority over historical interpretation even as social memory remained divided. In 2010 Guo Daohui published an account of the discussion of the four thousand in Yanhuang Chunqiu, revealing the extent of the criticism of Mao voiced at the time; other scholars promptly published rebuttals accusing the article of challenging the Party's historical resolution — an indication that the conclusions the resolution laid down remain contested.