Democracy Wall movement in 1978, in which people
posted complaints about the country on a wall in Beijing. In
July of 1978, one of Deng’s supporters, Hu Qiaomu,
presented some basic principles of economic reform.
These included the notions that firms should be given
greater initiative and authority to make their own production
decisions. Prices should be allowed to bring supply and
demand together, rather than just being set by the
government, and the state regulation of the economy more
generally ought to be reduced. These were radical
suggestions, but Deng was gaining influence. In November
and December 1978, the Third Plenum of the Eleventh
Central Party Committee produced a breakthrough. Over
Hua’s objections, it was decided that, from then on, the
focus of the party would be not class struggle but economic
modernization. The plenum announced some tentative
experiments with a “household responsibility system” in
some provinces, which was an attempt to roll back
collective agriculture and introduce economic incentives
into farming. By the next year, the Central Committee was
acknowledging the centrality of the notion of “truth from
facts” and declaring the Cultural Revolution to have been a
great calamity for the Chinese people. Throughout this
period, Deng was securing the appointment of his own
supporters to important positions in the party, army, and
government. Though he had to move slowly against Hua’s
supporters in the Central Committee, he created parallel
bases of power. By 1980 Hua was forced to step down
from the premiership, to be replaced by Zhao Ziyang. By
1982 Hua had been removed from the Central Committee.
But Deng did not stop there. At the Twelfth Party Congress
in 1982, and then in the National Party Conference in
September 1985, he achieved an almost complete
reshuffling of the party leadership and senior cadres. In
came much younger, reform-minded people. If one
compares 1980 to 1985, then by the latter date, twenty-one
of the twenty-six members of the Politburo, eight of the
eleven members of the Communist Party secretariat, and
ten of the eighteen vice-premiers had been changed.
Now that Deng and the reformers had consummated
their political revolution and were in control of the state, they
launched a series of further changes in economic