Teng Hsiao-P'ing's Self-Criticism at the Central Work Conference on October 23, 1966

Abstract

[When the 11th Central Committee Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party was held in the first half of August 1966, President Liu Shao-ch'i and Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing were accused of having put forth a "bourgeois reactionary line" and of undermining Chairman Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and they were demoted. However, they were not completely removed from the political scene and were present in the company of Mao and other top Party leaders at several big Red Guard rallies in Peking after August 18. This may have led many Party officials at the center and in the provinces (except those in Mao's inner circle) to believe that Liu and Teng were still in reasonably good standing and continued to exercise power within Party councils — a belief that seemed to have emboldened many Party officials in the provinces to resist Mao's Cultural Revolution. When it became evident that the Cultural Revolution had not made the headway expected by Mao and his supporters, they convened a "Central Work Conference" from October 8 to 25, 1966, to further clarify the question of "two lines" in the Cultural Revolution and to eradicate the influence of the erroneous "bourgeois reactionary line" pursued by Liu and Teng (see Lin Piao's speech to the conference on October 25, Chinese Law and Government, Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 13-15, 30-31). It is in this political context that both Liu and Teng were forced to submit their "self-criticism" on October 23. A translation of Liu's confession appeared in the April 1967 issue of Atlas. Teng, like Liu, conceded that dispatching the work teams had been an error, and he attributed the error to his failure to comprehend the thought of Mao Tse-tung, without admitting political culpability as charged by Mao's followers. The Chinese text was reproduced by Chung-kung yen-chiu (Studies on Chinese Communism), Taipei, Vol. 3, No. 11 (November 1970), pp. 91-94.