Hu Qiaomu

Early Life

Hu Qiaomu, born Hu Dingxin on 4 June 1912 in Yancheng, Jiangsu, studied history at Tsinghua University from 1930 to 1932 before transferring to the foreign literature department of Zhejiang University. He joined the Communist Youth League in 1930 and the CCP in 1932, working in left-wing cultural and youth movements before going to Yan'an.

Mao's Penman

In February 1941 Mao Zedong personally chose Hu as his secretary, also making him secretary to the Politburo; he would work at Mao's side for more than two decades. Valued for his theoretical grounding and command of language, he helped compile Party-history collections such as Since the Sixth Congress and Before the Sixth Congress, and took part in drafting the 1945 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party." In the early PRC he directed the work of Xinhua and People's Daily and served as Deputy Head of the Propaganda Department; in 1956 he was elected to the Central Committee at the Eighth Party Congress.

Cultural Revolution and Return

During the Cultural Revolution Hu came under attack and was pushed out of the political center. When Deng Xiaoping returned to run day-to-day affairs in 1975, Hu returned with him as head of the State Council's Political Research Office. In 1977 he became the first President of the newly founded Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and at the Third Plenum in December 1978 he was co-opted onto the Central Committee.

The 1981 Resolution and Ideological Leadership

In 1980–81 Hu headed the drafting group that, under the direction of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, produced the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," adopted at the Sixth Plenum in June 1981. From 1982 to 1987 he sat on the Politburo as one of the Party's leading figures in ideology and theory. In 1983 he objected to Zhou Yang's report on humanism and alienation; during the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution he went to People's Daily at the end of October, accompanied by Deng Liqun, to announce that director Hu Jiwei's resignation had been accepted and deputy editor-in-chief Wang Ruoshui dismissed. On 3 January 1984 he delivered "On Humanism and Alienation" at the Central Party School, a systematic rebuttal of humanism and the theory of alienation.

Final Years

Hu continued to help draft major documents in his later years, including the speech marking the CCP's seventieth anniversary in 1991. He died in Beijing on 28 September 1992, aged 80. He is regarded as one of the CCP's most important drafters of official texts, a role spanning both the Mao and Deng eras; in the ideological debates of the reform period he is usually placed on the Party's more conservative side.