Party Central Committee Research Articles

Speech While Receiving the Report of the National Conference of Directors of Family Planning Commissions (January 20, 1988)

Family planning work throughout the country as a whole has achieved considerable success. In particular, since the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, under the leadership of the party Central Committee, and owing to the joint efforts of the people of the entire country, the achievements have been even more remarkable than before. This is chiefly expressed by the fact that in the last few years, the natural growth rate of the population of our country has generally been controlled between 11 percent and 14 percent. This growth rate is lower than that in the 1950s and the 1960s, and lower than the average of the world's developing countries; indeed, it is lower than the world average at large. This is a result attained because we have carried out a rigorous policy of population control and family planning. Had we not done so, China's population today would not be 1.07 billion but would be a much larger number. If we were to project from the actual population growth rate of 1970, we would have, today, 200 million more people than we actually do have. So, to put it another way, in the last sixteen years, we have given birth to 200 million fewer people. Practice proves that the family planning policy our state has formulated is an accurate and successful one. It has had a tremendous impact on, and has made great contributions to, enhancing the quality of our Chinese nation and the prosperity of our nation. The attaining of this achievement can be attributed to the correct leadership of the party Central Committee and to the people's extraordinary efforts; this achievement also represents the condensation of the diligent and indefatigable labor of the broad ranks of those who work in the area of family planning. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to express, on behalf of the State Council, our deepest affectionate concern and heartfelt thanks to the comrades in the audience who are involved in the work of family planning and, through you, to the broad ranks of the people who work on the family planning front throughout the country!

Editor's Introduction

Serious Soviet scholars have long sought to extend the intellectual and ideological framework of Soviet sociology beyond the narrow confines of textbook Marxism. While this process has been under way for decades, it has obviously accelerated in recent years. One illustration is provided by A. G. Zdravomyslov's discussion of the various ways in which the concept of rationality has been used in the sociological literature ("The Principle of Rationality in Contemporary Sociological Theory"). Zdravomyslov examines the variety of meanings attached to rationality in the writings of Marx, Weber, Habermas, and others. Of special interest is the author's distinctly positive assessment of Weber's thesis of the paradox of rationality, the view that "the growth of rationality in all spheres of social life results not in emancipation but in increased dependence on the rules and norms of bureaucratized structures." In this connection Zdravomyslov cites Weber's highly skeptical attitude toward socialism, which he associated with the triumph of bureaucracy—"by no means a nonsensical prediction, as it turned out." When this article was published, Zdravomyslov was still a department head of the Institute of Marxisim-Leninism attached to the party's central committee, but holding such a position was apparently not incompatible with an appeal for assimilating "the achievements of all schools of sociological thought."

He shang and the plateau of ultrastability

A six-part television series entitled He shang (Yellow River elegy) caused an immediate national sensation when it was first broadcast on China Central Television (CCTV) beginning on 12 June 1988. A script of the documentary was published simultaneously and immediately became a best seller. In the following months the production inspired heated debates in China and in Chinese communities abroad. While local audience response was quite enthusiastic, some high-level leaders such as the veteran military commander and vice president Wang Zhen called the program “cultural nihilism” and accused it of advocating wholesale Westernization and of attacking the party and socialism. Reformers countered that He shang advocated official policies of “reform and opening up,” but in July the head of party ideology, Hu Qili, banned further broadcasts and began fostering criticism of the film. Nevertheless, with the blessing of a high-level party leader, most likely Zhao Ziyang himself, plus strong audience demand, He shang was rebroadcast nationwide on 15 August. Finally, at the September Party Central Committee Plenum it was once again banned from export and public broadcast.

The "Identity of Thought and Existence" Is Idealist Apriorism (November 1975)

Abstract In the movement to criticize Lin Biao, the party Central Committee also called for criticism of apriorism, which would greatly raise the philosophical level and increase the ability to distinguish idealism of the cadres of the whole party and the whole country. Nevertheless, it was a shame that the problem of the apriorist "identity of thinking and being" has not been touched on in the movement of criticizing apriorism. The identity of thinking and being is both objective and subjective idealism, and apriorism. But some in China's philosophical circle regard it as materialism, even as Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism, and as being affirmed by Engels, so that ideological confusion on the philosophical front has lasted over twenty years without being exposed and criticized. Now it is time to settle accounts.

Enforce the Party Discipline and the State Law, Safeguard the New Enrollment System

Abstract Editor's note: This year's college entrance examination has come to a successful end. Our work in grading papers and evaluating candidates has begun. Enrollment reform is a profound revolution in education. Party committees at all levels must implement the relevant policies and guidelines of the party central committee under Chairman Hua and strengthen their leadership in admissions work. They must commend in a timely fashion comrades who carry out such duties in a conscientious and responsible way, and take stern actions against people, like Lu Hengdou, who violate the law and party discipline to play favoritism and engage in fraudulent practices.

Schoolchildren's Self-education

The social demands that our society is making on our schools have posed the problem of self-education in secondary school. This means that we must not only transmit a sum total of knowledge to pupils but also cultivate in them the ability to replenish their knowledge independently, and independently to make their way in the rapid flow of scientific and political information (see: [Proceedings of the XXV session of the Communist Party Central Committee]). This means that even under conditions of universal mandatory secondary education, the school ceases to be the final stage of self-education, and becomes the foundation, or starting point, for constant, ongoing self-education, an education that continues after completion of elementary school and even after completion of secondary or higher education.

The Evolution of the One-child Policy in Shaanxi, 1979–88

A crucial element in China's modernization effort is the control of population growth. Months before the historic Third Plenum of the 11th Communist Party Congress in December 1978, the leadership decided that only a drastic limitation of fertility would ensure achievement of its economic goals for the year 2000. The policy to encourage all couples to limit themselves to one child was announced in January 1979. In September 1980 the Party Central Committee took the unusual step of publishing an “Open Letter” announcing a drastic programme of 20 to 30 years’ duration to restrict population growth, and calling on all Party and Youth League members to take the lead in having only one child. Thus was launched the world's most ambitious family-planning programme.

The Future of Socialism?

On Sunday evening February 4, the largest Soviet protest demonstration in more than seventy years was held in Moscow to demand the end of the Communist party's monopoly over political power. Naturally, one cannot fail to have noticed that the event was called on the eve of the opening of a meeting of the party's Central Committee, where President Mikhail Gorbachev was widely rumored to plan to call for the end of the one party state. At the demonstration of 200,000, some people carried signs with the simple phrase 1990, an unmistakable reference to the February, 1917 revolution. 1 Some Russians were hoping that the unfulfilled promise of that democratic uprising, cut short by the Bolshevik October would be redeemed. Nevertheless, even if the demonstration was not oppositional to the leading party group's program, recalling the February revolution in which the popular goal was to establish a republic, a multiparty political system, civil liberties, and greater popular participation in processes of governance implied a severe critique of the Great October Revolution, which introduced the principle of proletarian dictatorship, a complex doctrine in whose name the Soviet state and party oligarchy ruled in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's call for a multiparty political system and for the return of limited market relations has followed a year during which all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. The explanations for this astonishing turn of events are, by now, fairly well known: the palpable failure of really existing socialist economies to meet the basic needs of the underlying population, especially after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund eliminated loans to many countries in the mid '80s; visible corruption by a decrepit oligarchy softened by generations of largely unchallenged power; the disaffection of intellectuals after Khruschev's downfall in 1964 and, more comprehensively, after the brief spark of Czech socialism with a human face was ruthlessly snuffed out by Soviet tanks in 1968; and, of course, the surfacing of the unresolved nationalities question, particularly within the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Most of these weaknesses might have been controlled and displaced if the working classes of Eastern Europe had not demonstrated their own impatience and protest. Beyond the well-known Polish Solidarity movement which holds majority government power today, Soviet Miners and Czech and East German workers developed their own grievances which became the basis for strikes and demonstrations.

Vietnam: Renovation in Transition?

In 1989, the year that will end soon, we have seen many positive changes in our country's socio-economic life after three years of striving to implement the sixth party congress resolution and the subsequent r?solutions of the Party Central Committee and Political Bureau, as well as other important progress. Noteworthy is that we have attained a grain output of more than 20 m t; further controlled and pushed back serious inflation, which has dragged on for many years; mobilised much latent potential of various economic components to expand production and business; and continued to foster socialist democracy in socio-economic life. We have also withdrawn all Vietnamese volunteer troops from Cambodia and expanded international relations, thereby contributing actively to the preservation of the peace in the region and in the world. However, the country situation is still rife with difficulties and complexities in all aspects.1

Mongolia in 1989: Year of Adjustment

The December 1988 plenum of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) Central Committee was a milestone in the country's economic and political reform movement. The restructuring (oorchlon shinechlel) of government had been under way since the end of 1987, but the economic progress that it should have promoted was still being hindered by bureaucratic attitudes and lack of initiative among middle-level managers. Jambyn Batmonh, general secretary of the MPRP and chairman of the Presidium of the People's Great Hural (national assembly), said that the necessary popular drive could be encouraged by greater il tod (glasnost) in political and social affairs and the prospect of such moves toward democratic government as multicandidate election of officials for fixed terms. 1 Many letters on the themes of renewal and openness were published in the party and government newspaper, Unen, but except for general environmental issues, they remained largely confined to a fairly narrow spectrum of low-level problems arising in the daily life and work of individuals. However, for the first time the former Mongolian leader, Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal, deposed in August 1984, was held responsible by name for the country's years of stagnation.2

The People's Daily: Politics and Popular Will-Journalistic Defiance in China During the Spring of 1989

C HINA'S DRAMATIC POLITICAL UPHEAVAL in the spring of 1989, when student demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing to demand greater democratic rights, and hundreds of thousands of citizens in urban centers throughout the country poured into the streets in solidarity with the protesters, received saturation coverage by the western media. Less visible abroad, but crucially important to the Chinese audience, was the role that China's domestic news media played in both reflecting and supporting the protest movement. Journalists from official news organizations became active participants in the protest movement, not only taking to the streets themselves but also bolstering the movement through the content and conduct of their work. 1 This study is a detailed examination of one aspect of that journalistic activism, namely how editors and reporters at the very pinnacle of the official news apparatus defied, fought and circumvented government suppression in their efforts to promote the cause of the demonstrators and express their own aspirations for greater democracy. The inquiry focuses on two months of news coverage and other editorial content in the People's Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, from the inception of the protests in mid-April to the weeks following their suppression by armed force on June 4. It examines how that newspaper managed not only to cover news of the uprising, but also to convey discontent and protest against the country's political authorities through all sorts of editorial techniques including story selection and placement, headline creation, page design, writing style, and other aspects of news content and presentation.'

Party Official Says Policy on Women Unchanged

A drop in the number of women officials in some areas of China last year is due to a reduction in the number of official posts and introduction of a system allowing more candidates to stand for office, a leading official at the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee says. It does not, however, reflect any change in the party's policies to train and promote women officials, said the official in an interview with Women in China, republished in today's People's Daily.

The Hungarian Parliament in Transition

Most socialist states have shown some transformation of their political institutions in the eighties, but the Hungarian experimentation with reforms is significantly different from that of other socialist states. The 1985 national and local elections were held on the basis of a hitherto unique electoral law; citizens were able to nominate candidates of their own choosing. The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP) Central Committee clearly approved of the expanded responsibilities forthe new National Assembly (also called in Hungarian the Parliament or Orszag gyules) and held that it should play a more active role in the legislative and political systems. This, of course, would be impossible without major organizational and/or functional changes on the plenary, committee and procedural levels.

Implementing the Resolution of the Second Plenum of the Seventh Party Central Committee

Implementing the Resolution of the Second Plenum of the Seventh Party Central Committee

Editor's Introduction

Since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to define his policies of perestroika, or restructuring, for the comprehensive reform of Soviet society, much has been written in the USSR about the national educational system that could not have been written before. The earliest of these writings, dating to 1986 and '87, may be compared to what was published during the years of the Khrushchev thaw; factual information and critical analyses of educational practices were forthcoming in greater quantities and to greater extents than previously. The political events of 1988 that have taken place prior to the date of this writing—chiefly the Communist Party Central Committee Plenum of February 1988 and the Nineteenth Communist Party Conference of July—have made possible far greater openness, or glasnost', in discussions of educational issues. This new chapter in the history of the Soviet educational reform of the 1980s, which was initiated in 1983 and 1984 by the short-lived pre-Gorbachev governments of Iurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko and which has been extensively chronicled in this journal, has found its first written reflections in newspaper articles. The Soviet press is openly publishing the debates that are taking place about how to reformulate the educational reform.

On Model Security Workers

… The party's Central Committee and the State Council have always been most concerned with the building up of our public security force. Leaders of the Central Committee had issued a number of important directives in this area. Recently, Comrade Hu Yaobang pointed out that, generally speaking, our public security force is a good one. In the Cultural Revolution, it went through some bad times. It does have some weaknesses in not being able to adapt quickly to the needs of changing times. Since the establishment of our People's Republic, the prestige of our party has depended to a large extent upon the public security force and the people's supervision. Many of the police officers and rank and file are exemplary people, but in general the force has not built up the fine image it should.

Discipline Inspection: Doing It Well

Comrades: Today we are holding the Second Plenary Session of the Central Discipline Inspection Commission. The main topics for discussion at this session are: further implementing the guidelines of the Thirteenth Party Congress, doing a good job of discipline inspection under the conditions of reform and opening to the outside world, and making the necessary arrangements for these purposes. This session was convened immediately after the Second Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Party Central Committee. The Second Plenary Session was a great success. It examined, discussed, and approved the name lists of leading personnel of state organs to be recommended to the First Session of the Seventh National People's Congress and leading personnel of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference to be recommended to the Presidium of the First Session of the CPPCC National Committee. Moreover, it set forth important opinions on further implementing the guidelines set at the Thirteenth CPC National Congress. It stressed the need to further emancipate the mind, stabilize the economy, deepen the reform, liberate to a still greater extent the productive forces in our country, and, at the same time, strengthen the building of the party itself. We should study earnestly the documents of that session to improve our implementation of the guidelines of the Thirteenth Party Congress in the process of our discipline inspection work. …

Rudolf Hilferding and the Theoretical Foundations of German Social Democracy, 1902–33

Rudolf Hilferding's appointment as finance minister in the newly formed coalition government headed by Social Democrat Hermann Müller in June 1928 marked the peak of an outstanding political career in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A prominent member of the Party Central Committee and its “chief ideologue,” Hilferding was an ardent supporter of the coalition tactic. He opposed those in the party's left wing, who demanded that the SPD remain in permanent opposition to the bourgeois state. Instead, he advocated a more flexible political strategy that did not rule out the formation of an SPD alliance with the moderate bourgeois parties. When the SPD leadership announced its willingness to form a coalition government in the wake of the successful Social Democratic electoral performance in May 1928, it reflected the strength of Hilferding and his supporters within the party.

Hong Kong's Influence on China: The Tail That Wags the Dog?

In 1982, when talks began between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK) over the future status of Hong Kong, speculation centered on their eventual outcome. Informed observers knew that only one result was acceptable to the PRC: the eventual return of the territory to Chinese sovereignty. Since the UK was in no position to dispute this, the only negotiating points were when and how such a changeover would occur. While much discussion has focused on the impact that a new PRC-Hong Kong relationship would have on Hong Kong, little attention has been directed at what influence Hong Kong might exert on China. Will it exert any significant influence, and if so, what form might this take? In August 1984 William McCord postulated that Hong Kong might be the tail to wag the Chinese dog.I Today, some four years later, Hong Kong seems already to exert a considerable degree of influence on the PRC. Hong Kong and China have long been closely linked, but the relationship has blossomed dramatically, particularly during the past nine years. The two have been drawn inexorably closer politically, economically, and culturally since the Third Plenum of the 11th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee in November 1978. The most significant event was the signing, in December 1984, of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that formalizes the handing over of the territory to China in 1997, while permitting Hong Kong to maintain its existing social and economic systems for fifty years as a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. In

The Need for New Approaches

The new approach we have adopted toward the relationship between the economic and social spheres, and the broad humanization and democratization of society underway have raised anew the problem of human needs in their individual and social aspects. The June 1987 Plenum of the party's Central Committee emphasized once again that the results of restructuring and the potentialities of socialism will be judged by what society has in fact to offer man and how socially effective it is. Who or what is man and his needs in society's system of government? Do our research and decisions sufficiently take into account the complexity of the dialectics of social and individual needs? What should be the mechanism of their conscious formulation on a democratic basis at a time when the focus of social policy is not the abstract individual but the real, concrete person with his characteristic orientations and preferences. These are the questions that are knocking at the door, and this door must not be tightly shut.