Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee

After the fall of the Gang of Four, people eagerly hoped for a new path of socialist development. From November to December 1978 the Central Committee held a work conference, at whose closing Deng Xiaoping delivered the speech “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future,” which in effect became the keynote report of the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee that followed. From 18 to 22 December 1978 the plenum was held in Beijing. It thoroughly repudiated the erroneous “Two Whatevers” policy, highly praised the debate on the criterion of truth, and reestablished the ideological line of emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts. It ended the erroneous slogan of “taking class struggle as the key link,” and made the great decision to shift the focus of the work of the Party and the state to economic construction and to implement reform and opening-up. It also examined and resolved a number of major historical questions and the merits and demerits of some important leaders, rehabilitating those involved in the Tiananmen Incident and others, and added Chen Yun to the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, forming a second-generation central leadership with Deng Xiaoping at its core. The plenum was a turning point of far-reaching significance in the Party’s history since 1949, opening a new period of reform, opening-up and socialist modernization. In the four-plus decades that followed, China’s economy rose to second in the world and living standards improved greatly. In 2018 a grand meeting was held to celebrate the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up.