Early Urban Reform Attempts and Their Implications

Abstract

Apart from declaring that the Party would shift its priority of work and the attention of the whole nation to economic development, the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee held at the end of 1978 reached unanimity in two aspects concerning the economy. The first was, through adjustment and rectification, to get rid of the legacy of Mao’s leftist radicalism, namely, the disequilibrium of the planned economy, disorder within the economy and the ‘debt’ they owed to the people in that people’s living standards would have risen had it not been for Mao’s mistakes. The second was to gradually reform the over-centralised management system, transfer power to lower levels under orderly leadership, and change the situation in which the party, administration and enterprises were all mixed up together.¹ The Third Plenum also emphasised that the key issue then was adjustment, and that reform should give way to adjustment. At a working conference of the CCP Central Committee held in April 1979, Li Xiannian, who soon took office as president, summarised the ideology which was to guide the economic reform in three principles.