Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee

A Turning Point in CCP History

The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, held December 18–22, 1978 in Beijing, is widely regarded as the most consequential Party meeting since 1949. It marked the definitive consolidation of Deng Xiaoping's leadership, the formal abandonment of "class struggle" as the Party's central task, and the launch of the reform and opening-up era that would transform China over the following four decades.

Key Decisions

The session endorsed a shift in the Party's central task from political campaigns to economic modernization, adopting the "Four Modernizations" of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology as the nation's governing objectives. It also initiated a partial reassessment of the Cultural Revolution and the reversal of many wrongful verdicts. The session approved the Household Responsibility System — effectively de-collectivizing agriculture — and endorsed the establishment of special economic zones as experiments in market mechanisms.

Legacy

The Third Plenary Session effectively ended the ideological era of Maoist politics and began China's transition toward what it called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" — a system that retained political one-party rule while progressively liberalizing economic activity. Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic formulation "it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice" captured the new empirical approach to policy. The session's decisions set in motion a process of economic growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty over the following decades.