Chapter 41 Chapter 12: The Gate of Destiny Opens to China

The meeting was broken up, and the participants of the Central Working Conference were not members of the 11th Central Committee. Except for nine people who proposed to make up the Central Committee, they all returned to their regions or departments to convey the spirit of the Central Working Conference and focus on work. At the closing of this meeting, it was clearly explained: the spirit of the Central Working Conference was conveyed together with the two meetings of the Third Plenary Session to be held immediately, but the comrades who returned could first talk about the spirit of the Central Working Conference in a small area.

I come from a small unit called the Research Office of the State Council, and other comrades have been handling the daily work in the unit; I was the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at the time, and my job was the long-term planning of various disciplines. Retreat is a job with a larger component and greater flexibility. It is not like the person in charge of other units who leaves the unit for many days and has many important tasks waiting to go back to deal with.After the Central Work Conference adjourned, I, Hu Jiwei, Zeng Tao and others were kept in the Jingxi Hotel, saying that maybe the conference needed us for work.But in fact, I was not asked to do anything during these five days, and I was allowed to continue to observe and think comfortably for a few days.

For this Central Working Conference, the speeches of the three Central Standing Committee members on December 13 were summed up.Our Northwest Group passed a comprehensive briefing on December 15th, which can be said to be a summary of our Northwest Group to some extent.And I personally didn't think at that time that I should also summarize my experience of participating in this conference. Now writing this "postscript" is an opportunity to make up for this work.Therefore, I decided to write about my experience of the spirit of the meeting after describing the process of the meeting until I wrote the section "Adjournment".

First, what I want to write is that this conference is indeed a conference under the guidance of scientific thinking. In the important meetings of the Central Committee that I know, full preparations were made on the theory of Marxism before the meeting, and the theory was fully used during the meeting, and there were not many problems in contact with the actual problems.The Party's Seventh National Congress is such a meeting.Before the meeting, on the one hand, he criticized the dogmatism of Marxism, summarizing the history of divergent lines during the Agrarian Revolutionary War; theoretical point of view.After this, perhaps the Central Work Conference can be counted.

This meeting was characterized by the discussion of "practice is the only criterion for testing truth" under the guidance of scientific ideas and its victory.In principle, seek truth from facts and proceed from reality. This is the similarity between this conference and the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China.The Seventh National Congress of the Party was held on the basis of scientifically summarizing the history of the Party from 1927 to 1937.Because of criticizing and correcting the political, ideological, and organizational mistakes made by the party's leading institutions, especially the mistakes of Wang Ming's "Left" line that ruled the entire party during that period, it was possible to formulate the seven correct lines and policies. , It is possible to strive for the final victory of the democratic revolution.

After the "Gang of Four" was smashed, the problem we encountered was that Mao Zedong's "instructions" and "decision-making" who were old and frail and unable to work and think normally appeared in the party as gods, and we must firmly and consistently follow them. Putting forward the "two whatevers" policy, on the one hand, directly protects many erroneous viewpoints put forward in the "Cultural Revolution" and hinders the rectification of chaos; The new policy line of the new socialist China.If we continue to follow the wrong path during the "Cultural Revolution", although the "Gang of Four" no longer exists, there is still the danger of "destroying the party and the country".

Compared with the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China, after the smashing of the "Gang of Four", our Party is in a different era, the conditions are different, and the tasks we face are different. However, the rule that we must work under the guidance of scientific thinking cannot be violated. In guiding revolutions and constructions we ask people to study it.After the "Gang of Four" was smashed, I once said three sentences: Religion as religion requires people to worship it; law as law requires people to obey it; and science as science requires people to study it, understand it, respect and use it in their own activities.

Since Marxism is a science, people will never be allowed to worship and obey it.Marxism as a science should not be worshiped or obeyed, not to mention the "two whatevers" that emerged after the smashing of the "Gang of Four", which require people to worship and obey what is said and done in the name of Marxism.During the "Cultural Revolution", Kang Sheng, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, etc. created ideas such as "continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat", "implementing a comprehensive dictatorship over the bourgeoisie", "distributing according to work to produce new bourgeois elements", "criticizing the theory of productive forces", etc. Anti-Marxist fallacies.Since 1976, after the smashing of the "Gang of Four", the theoretical circles in our country have criticized these fallacies in the fields of economics and political science.Of course, these fallacies are under the banner of Marxism-Leninism. This is not a problem for the theoretical circles, and it is easier to expose these distortions.However, some fallacies were affirmed by Mao Zedong, and some originally came from Mao Zedong's point of view.For example, Mao Zedong said in October 1974:

"Our country is currently implementing a commodity system, and the wage system is not equal. There is an eight-level wage system, etc., which can only be restricted under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, it is very easy for Lin Biao and others to come to power, and it is very easy to establish a capitalist system." Although criticizing these fallacies tried to avoid Mao Zedong at that time, they still encountered the accusation that "you are targeting Chairman Mao".In addition to several major cases such as the "Tiananmen Incident", there is also a problem that Mao Zedong nodded and spoke too much, which is not easy to solve.It seems that if we do not rise to the height of philosophy, the problem cannot be solved.So in the spring and summer of 1978, my country's theoretical circles wrote the article "Practice is the only criterion for testing truth" in the field of philosophy.Regarding this article, discussions first started in the academic circles, and later expanded to leading cadres of the party, government, and military, first in Beijing, and later expanded to other provinces and cities, and the reaction was strong.At the same time, it was quickly criticized severely by some people.This requires a more thorough theoretical analysis and debate.

In August and September before the Central Work Conference (the specific time is not written down in my notebook), Deng Xiaoping once talked to some of us who work in the Academy of Social Sciences.He was very concerned about the criticism of the fallacy of the "Gang of Four" on the issue of distribution according to work, and asked whether we had sufficiently addressed the issue of distribution according to work.He said that practice is mainly a matter of testing the standard of truth, which is the common sense of Marxism, and he said that "common sense should not be a problem."

In this talk, Deng Xiaoping encouraged our theoretical circles to speak.He said, you don't think that the theoretical circles are authoritative.He also said that your Academy of Social Sciences is a theoretical institution, and you cannot make concessions on theoretical issues. I do not advise you to accommodate theoretically, otherwise you will lose your principles.He asked the theoretical community to stand higher and talk about some methods, which are conducive to problem solving and unity.He said that the facts and truths must of course be stated clearly, but it is necessary to consider when to speak clearly. Deng Xiaoping asked us to consider how to resolve this debate.On the day of our conversation, Deng Xiaoping hoped to find a way to resolve this dispute, and he did not want to "emerge up at work meetings", but hoped that the two sides in the theoretical circles could have some communication in terms of ideas.But after the work meeting started, this debate really "emerged", and it "emerged" with considerable weight.After the debate on this issue started, Deng Xiaoping once talked to Hu Yaobang and me during the meeting, and said that he wanted to talk about the importance of theoretical issues.At this time, he said: The debate on the standard of truth is very good, the more you look at it, the better, and the more you look at it, the more it is a political issue.Later, in his speech at the closing meeting, he said that "judging from the situation of the debate, the more you look at it, the more important it is." "The more you look, the more important" shows that even for Deng Xiaoping, there was a process of deepening his understanding.Participants in the meeting felt this way. I feel that this meeting has such a characteristic, and it has had it from the beginning.Because Ye Jianying and Deng Xiaoping talked about this spirit before the meeting, and there were preparations for two years of theoretical work after the crushing of the "Gang of Four".I agree with what Hu Yaobang said one month after the Third Plenary Session: "The ideological and theoretical work of the past two years, in terms of its scale, its combat effect, and its improvement of the theoretical level of the whole party, has surpassed any period since the founding of the People's Republic of China. It can be said that the Yan'an Rectification Movement In the future, the theoretical work will be the best and the most fruitful two years." Not only comrades who specialize in theoretical work, but comrades who are engaged in practical work are also very interested in theory.In this Central Work Conference, many of the participants' speeches talked about following scientific thinking, scientific spirit and scientific attitude.