---
title: Boluan Fanzheng:how Deng Xiaoping's faction used a debate about truth to break Hua Guofeng's hold on power, 1977-1981
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/
description: Between February 1977 and June 1981, Deng Xiaoping's faction inside the Chinese Communist Party used an ostensibly abstract philosophical debate —…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a dense, generic Cold War intelligence analyst's evidence wall of press photography, redacted reports and aerial reconnaissance imagery.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-evidence-wall.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Boluan Fanzheng:how Deng Xiaoping's faction used a debate about truth to break Hua Guofeng's hold on power, 1977-1981

At a glance

Between February 1977 and June 1981, Deng Xiaoping's faction inside the Chinese Communist Party used an ostensibly abstract philosophical debate — "practice is the sole criterion for testing truth…

- **When:** May 11, 1978
- **Actor:** Deng Xiaoping and allies inside the Chinese Communist Party, chiefly Hu Yaobang…
- **Target:** Hua Guofeng and the 'two whatevers' position he, Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui and Chen Xilian…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Semantic hijacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/semantic-hijack/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/) [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/)
- **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Deng Xiaoping and allies inside the Chinese Communist Party, chiefly Hu Yaobang (executive vice-president of the Central Party School from March 1977, head of the Organization Department from December 1977) and the Party School's internal journal Theoretical Trends; Guangming Daily, People's Daily and People's Liberation Army Daily as the carrying press; provincial and military-region party leaderships that published endorsements through 1978
- **Target:** Hua Guofeng and the 'two whatevers' position he, Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui and Chen Xilian used to claim continuity with Mao; more broadly, the Cultural Revolution's standing as unquestionable orthodoxy and the official verdicts against millions of purged officials

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page covers an intra-party power struggle and a mass administrative review of Cultural Revolution-era political cases; it does not describe violence in detail. Where it references the persecution and deaths of officials purged in 1966-76, those events and their casualty estimates are documented on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) and [The Red Guards: how Mao turned millions of students into a political weapon, 1966-68](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-guards-youth-mobilization/), which this page does not repeat.

**In one line:** Between February 1977 and June 1981, Deng Xiaoping's faction inside the Chinese Communist Party used an ostensibly abstract philosophical debate — "practice is the sole criterion for testing truth," launched from the Central Party School and printed in *Guangming Daily* on 11 May 1978 — to dismantle Hua Guofeng's "two whatevers" claim to Mao's mantle, drove a mass rehabilitation of purged officials framed as *Boluan Fanzheng* ("bringing order out of chaos, returning to normalcy"), made Deng paramount leader in substance at the December 1978 Third Plenum, and then, once that position was secure, drew a hard line — the March 1979 "Four Cardinal Principles" — around how far the reassessment of the party's own past, and of Mao himself, would be allowed to go.

![Diagram: Hua Guofeng's February 1977 "two whatevers" editorial makes Mao's own past words the test of policy; Hu Yaobang's Central Party School places a rebuttal in Guangming Daily on 11 May 1978; provincial and military leaderships endorse it through the summer while Red Flag stays silent; the November-December 1978 Central Work Conference reverses the Tiananmen Incident verdict and rebukes the "whatevers" faction; the Third Plenum, 18-22 December 1978, makes Deng paramount leader; six weeks later the Four Cardinal Principles set the limit on how far the reassessment would go](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **9 September 1976.** Mao Zedong dies. Hua Guofeng, whom Mao had named acting premier and first vice-chairman earlier that year, becomes party chairman. The succession and the propaganda built around it are covered on [Grief on schedule: Mao's death, Hua Guofeng's succession and the 'two whatevers', 1976-1978](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-death-succession-propaganda-1976/).
- **6 October 1976.** Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying have the "Gang of Four" arrested, ending the Cultural Revolution's most radical faction. That arrest and its own propaganda campaign are covered on [The Gang of Four: arrest, denunciation and a trial that closed the Cultural Revolution's books (1976-1981)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/gang-of-four-arrest-and-trial-propaganda/).
- **7 February 1977.** *People's Daily*, *Red Flag* and *People's Liberation Army Daily* jointly publish the editorial "Study the Documents Well and Grasp the Key Link," drafted by the party's Central Theoretical Study Group. It states that the party will "resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave" — the formulation critics soon call the "two whatevers" (两个凡是). It gives Hua Guofeng, who had no independent power base of his own, a legitimacy claim resting entirely on continuity with Mao, and by the same logic makes any of Mao's Cultural Revolution-era decisions, including the purge of Deng Xiaoping himself, unchallengeable.
- **3 March 1977.** Hu Yaobang becomes executive vice-president of the Central Party School (Hua Guofeng holds the nominal presidency) and begins removing Cultural Revolution-era radicals from its staff while bringing in rehabilitated officials and reform-minded scholars.
- **16-21 July 1977.** The Third Plenary Session of the 10th Central Committee formally restores Deng Xiaoping to the Politburo Standing Committee, the vice-chairmanship of the Central Committee, the vice-premiership and the post of PLA chief of general staff — his third return to power after being purged twice during the Cultural Revolution.
- **12-18 August 1977.** The 11th Party Congress formally declares the Cultural Revolution concluded, but reaffirms Hua Guofeng as party chairman, and the "two whatevers" framing remains unofficial orthodoxy.
- **December 1977.** Hu Yaobang becomes head of the CCP's Organization Department and begins the systematic, case-by-case review and reversal of verdicts against officials purged in the Cultural Revolution and earlier campaigns.
- **10 May 1978.** Issue 60 of *Theoretical Trends* (理论动态), the Central Party School's internal reference journal, reviewed and approved by Hu Yaobang, carries the essay "Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth."
- **11 May 1978.** *Guangming Daily* publishes the essay on its front page under the collective byline "Special Commentator" (特约评论员). It is credited primarily to Hu Fuming, a philosophy lecturer at Nanjing University who had submitted a draft the previous autumn; Party School and *Guangming Daily* editors substantially reworked it, and Hu Yaobang reviewed the final text before publication. The essay argues that practice, not any text or any person's past authority, is the sole standard by which political truth can be tested — an epistemological claim with an unmistakable target: the "two whatevers'" premise that Mao's own past words settle every question.
- **12 May 1978.** *People's Daily* and *People's Liberation Army Daily* reprint the essay, widening its reach beyond the party-school and academic-press readership its "special commentator" framing implied.
- **May-November 1978.** Wang Dongxing and *Red Flag* (Hongqi), the organs most closely tied to the "two whatevers" position, decline to reprint or endorse the essay, and parts of the propaganda apparatus attempt to limit its circulation; in November 1978 the Politburo Standing Committee rebukes Wang Dongxing over an attempt to block a related essay by veteran cadre Tan Zhenlin. Through the summer, one province and one military region after another publishes its own statement endorsing the "practice" criterion, a rollout that scholarship on the episode (see Sources) describes as substantially organized rather than spontaneous.
- **September 1978.** On a tour of northeast China, Deng Xiaoping publicly and explicitly backs the "practice" line himself, ending any pretense that the debate was a purely internal or academic matter.
- **10 November - 15 December 1978.** The CCP Central Committee holds a 36-day Central Work Conference in Beijing. Veteran leader Chen Yun raises a set of previously undiscussed cases — including the April 1976 Tiananmen Incident and the treatment of purged officials such as Bo Yibo, Tao Zhu and Peng Dehuai — forcing them onto the agenda. The conference declares the Tiananmen Incident a "completely revolutionary" mass movement, reversing its 1976 condemnation, and figures associated with the "two whatevers" position come under direct criticism inside the conference.
- **13 December 1978.** At the conference's closing session, Deng Xiaoping delivers "Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future," which becomes the de facto keynote of the plenum that follows three days later.
- **18-22 December 1978.** The Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee convenes at Beijing's Jingxi Hotel. It repudiates the "two whatevers" formulation, endorses "seek truth from facts" as the party's guiding standard, shifts the party's central task from "class struggle" to "socialist modernization," and commits to the mass rehabilitation of purged officials as settled policy. Hua Guofeng remains party chairman in name, but historians, including Ezra Vogel, treat this plenum as the point at which Deng Xiaoping became China's paramount leader in substance.
- **1979, throughout.** Hu Yaobang's Organization Department drives the review and reversal of Cultural Revolution-era and earlier verdicts nationwide; provincial and county "case review groups" reassess millions of individual files, a process Chinese official accounts and later scholarship put at several million cases nationwide by the early 1980s.
- **28 January - 5 February 1979.** Deng Xiaoping makes a state visit to the United States, the highest-level visit by a Chinese leader since 1943, including a White House state dinner and a gala cultural performance at the Kennedy Center, and stops in Atlanta, Houston (a tour of NASA's Johnson Space Center on 2 February) and Seattle — presented at home and abroad as confirmation of Deng's now-consolidated standing.

![Deng Xiaoping departs the White House in Washington, D.C., 29 January 1979](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/boluan-fanzheng-deng-white-house-1979.jpg)

*Deng Xiaoping leaves the White House, 29 January 1979, five weeks after the Third Plenum. Photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress; no known restrictions on publication. Shown for what it documents directly — a foreign head-of-state-level reception — not for the internal party debate this page is mainly about.*

![Deng Xiaoping touring NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, 2 February 1979](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/boluan-fanzheng-deng-jsc-1979.jpg)

*Deng Xiaoping during a tour of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, 2 February 1979, the day the visit reached Texas. NASA photograph GPN-2002-000077, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain (U.S. federal government work). Shown, like the White House photograph above, for the foreign reception that followed the Third Plenum, not for the internal party debate.*

- **December 1978 - March 1979.** The Democracy Wall movement, initially tolerated (Deng told a foreign visitor in November 1978 that big-character-poster criticism was "a good thing"), grows more direct. Wei Jingsheng's essay "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy" appears on the wall in December 1978; a further essay the following March names Deng himself as a potential new autocrat.
- **30 March 1979.** At the close of a follow-on Theory Conference, Deng proclaims the "Four Cardinal Principles" — the socialist road, the people's democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought — as non-negotiable limits on how far the party's self-criticism would be allowed to go.
- **March-October 1979.** Wei Jingsheng is arrested; he is tried and, on 16 October 1979, sentenced to fifteen years in prison for counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation. The Democracy Wall is subsequently closed.
- **February 1980.** The Fifth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee rehabilitates Liu Shaoqi posthumously, the highest-profile individual case of the whole campaign; that rehabilitation and Liu's earlier persecution are covered on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/).
- **September 1980.** Hua Guofeng resigns as premier; Zhao Ziyang succeeds him.
- **27 June 1981.** The Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee adopts the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party" and replaces Hua Guofeng with Hu Yaobang as party chairman, formalizing both the verdict on the Cultural Revolution and Deng's ascendancy. The resolution's text, its "70 percent achievements, 30 percent mistakes" formula for Mao, and the limits it set are covered on [The 1981 Resolution: how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/) and are not repeated here.

## How it works

- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): the "two whatevers" is the purest form of the technique — invoking "whatever Chairman Mao decided" and "whatever Chairman Mao instructed" as an automatic seal on any policy question, ending debate before it starts. Deng's countervailing resource, once his own position had firmed up, was the collective testimonial weight of veteran revolutionaries: Chen Yun's standing inside the party let him force the Tiananmen Incident and other cases onto the November 1978 conference's agenda in a way no ordinary delegate could have.
- [Semantic hijacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/semantic-hijack/): "practice is the sole criterion for testing truth" reads as a claim about how anyone tests any claim. Inside the CCP's own vocabulary, "truth" (真理) meant, specifically, which political line was correct — and the essay's operative content was to dethrone Mao's own past words as the automatic answer to that question and substitute a standard (does it work, in practice) against which any of Mao's own past decisions, including the Cultural Revolution itself, could in principle now be measured and found wanting.
- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): the essay reached the public not as a directive from Deng or a Politburo resolution but as a philosophy commentary, vetted inside the Central Party School's internal journal and carried on *Guangming Daily*'s front page under the anonymous collective byline "Special Commentator." A Nanjing University philosophy lecturer's name sat over prose substantially reworked by Party School and newspaper editors and reviewed by Hu Yaobang — a scholarly surface over a directed political operation.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): through the summer of 1978, one province and one military region after another published its own statement endorsing the "practice" criterion, building the appearance that the country had independently converged on Deng's position. *Red Flag*, the journal closest to Wang Dongxing and the "two whatevers" position, conspicuously declined to join in — a silence that, inside this system, was itself read as a signal of who still held out.
- [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/): "*Boluan Fanzheng*" — bringing order out of chaos, returning to normalcy — describes what was, mechanically, the political defeat of a rival faction's leadership claim and a selective, centrally directed reopening of millions of individual case files. "Correction" and "normalcy" are calmer words than "purge" or "faction fight," and they present a contested, partisan political outcome as the simple restoration of an obvious pre-existing order.
- [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/): Deng tolerated, and at times welcomed, open criticism of Cultural Revolution excess while his own position was still contested — in November 1978 he called Democracy Wall's posters "a good thing." Roughly five months later, six weeks after the Third Plenum had secured his authority, he proclaimed the Four Cardinal Principles, made party leadership and Mao Zedong Thought non-negotiable, and Wei Jingsheng — who had used the same opening to name Deng himself as a possible new autocrat — was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years. The truth-criterion campaign released just enough of the Cultural Revolution's record to do Deng's work and no more; the 1981 Resolution's own limits, formalized two years later, are covered on [The 1981 Resolution: how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/).

## Then and now

The same mechanism — a successor faction using an ostensibly abstract ideological or historical debate to dismantle a rival's legitimacy claim, while stopping well short of repudiating the system itself — is documented in the Soviet Union's own post-dictator succession. Nikita Khrushchev's "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," delivered to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956, denounced Stalin's purges, show trials and cult of personality in explicitly historical and moral terms. It also served a concrete power purpose: it undercut the standing of Stalin-era figures still on the Presidium — Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov and Lazar Kaganovich — who, having built their careers under Stalin, could not credibly join the denunciation without damaging themselves, and who were defeated as the "Anti-Party Group" in June 1957 after attempting to remove Khrushchev. The speech never questioned the legitimacy of the October Revolution, one-party rule, or Leninism itself; like Deng's campaign two decades later, the reckoning was real but bounded by design.

The differences are substantial. Khrushchev's speech was delivered once, in secret, to party delegates, and only later leaked and published abroad; Deng's campaign ran for nearly two years in the country's largest newspapers, under bylines, with a visible, public rollout of provincial and military endorsements. Stalin had been dead three years when Khrushchev spoke; Mao had been dead barely a year and a half when the "two whatevers" was first challenged, and Mao himself, unlike Stalin in 1956, was never denounced by name — the 1981 Resolution kept his "merits as primary." The comparison holds at the level of mechanism, not at the level of how far either reckoning was allowed to go.

## Positions on the record

- **The "two whatevers" position at the time.** The 7 February 1977 editorial and Hua Guofeng's own statements through 1977-78 framed unconditional adherence to Mao's decisions and instructions as the party's basic discipline and the guarantee against a return to chaos.
- **Deng's own framing.** Deng's 13 December 1978 speech, "Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future," presented the truth-criterion line not as a challenge to Mao's authority but as a return to Mao's own stated method — invoking Mao Zedong Thought's own emphasis on "seeking truth from facts" against the "two whatevers'" narrower, literalist reading of Mao's specific past instructions.
- **Scholarship.** Ezra F. Vogel's *Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China* (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2011) is the standard biographical account of this period and traces the truth-criterion campaign, the November-December 1978 conference and the Third Plenum as a deliberate, organized campaign for power run alongside a genuine policy argument about reform. Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun's studies of the 1977-81 leadership transition (see Sources) work from conference records and participant accounts to reconstruct how the "two whatevers" faction was isolated procedurally rather than voted out. Roderick MacFarquhar's and other general histories of the reform era treat 11 May 1978 as the campaign's symbolic opening date while noting that its result — Deng's paramountcy — was not formally registered in any single vote or document.
- **What is documented.** The dates and texts of the 7 February 1977 editorial, the 11-12 May 1978 publication and reprinting of "Practice Is the Sole Criterion," Hu Yaobang's institutional roles, the 10 November - 22 December 1978 conference and plenum, Deng's 13 December speech, the 30 March 1979 Four Cardinal Principles, and Wei Jingsheng's arrest and sentence.
- **What is contested.** The precise scale of the provincial and military endorsement campaign — how far it was centrally coordinated versus locally initiated once the political wind had shifted — is a matter of degree rather than dispute among historians. The total number of individual cases reviewed and reversed nationwide, commonly cited in Chinese official retrospectives and repeated in later scholarship as upward of three million, is an official count rather than an independently audited figure, and this archive treats it as such.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether Deng's economic reform program itself, launched alongside this campaign, was the right policy for China — this page scores the method by which the ideological ground for it was cleared, not the economics. The 1981 Resolution's own verdict on Mao is covered on [The 1981 Resolution: how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/).

## Same-method test

The same organizational test — did a successor faction use a debate framed as doctrinal or ideological to defeat a specific rival's power claim, while leaving the deeper legitimacy of the system untouched — applies to ['Trotskyism or Leninism': the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/), covered elsewhere on this archive. There, the "Triumvirate" of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev kept Lenin's letter criticising Stalin's conduct out of the party's published record while flooding the press with their own material, tagged there as [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/); a January 1924 party-conference resolution branded Trotsky's position "a petty-bourgeois deviation" and "Trotskyism" before any specific act was at issue, tagged [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/); and lopsided pre-Congress vote counts, run by an apparatus answering to the Triumvirate, plus a mass recruitment drive ("Lenin enrollment") that brought in new members with a stake in the sitting leadership, are tagged [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/) there just as this page tags the summer 1978 wave of provincial and military endorsements. Both campaigns dressed a specific rival's removal in the vocabulary of correct doctrine — "Leninism" against "Trotskyism" there, "practice" against "whatever Mao said" here — while never once proposing to dissolve the party or renounce the founder each invoked.

The scale and the outcome differed sharply. Deng's opponents — Hua Guofeng, Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui and Chen Xilian — were demoted through ordinary intra-party procedure: loss of posts, public criticism, retirement. None was imprisoned, tried or killed for the "two whatevers" position. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927, deported in 1929 and assassinated in 1940; Zinoviev and Kamenev, later readmitted, were shot after show trials in 1936, a fate covered on [The Moscow show trials: confession, spectacle and consent (1936-1938)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/moscow-show-trials-1936-1938/). Same organizational test, overlapping technique ids; a difference in outcome of the widest possible order.

## How to spot it

- Ask whether an "abstract" or "philosophical" debate has one clear, practical payoff for one specific person's power, and whether it was resourced — placed in flagship outlets, timed, followed by an organized wave of endorsements — rather than conducted as an open, undirected argument.
- Watch which outlets stay conspicuously silent or hostile while the rest of the press falls in line. In a one-party system, that silence maps who has not yet lost, as clearly as the endorsements map who already has.
- Check how far the resulting reassessment goes and, just as carefully, where it stops. A campaign that reopens the record on the tier just below the top while carefully protecting the founder or the system itself at the very top is running a selective correction, not an open reckoning.
- Note the sequence of tolerance and its withdrawal. Openness to criticism offered while a leader's own position is still contested, and then closed off once that position is secure, is a strong sign that the earlier openness was tactical rather than principled.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_fall_boluan_fanzheng.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Deng Xiaoping departs the White House, Washington, D.C., 29 January 1979 | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2005696436/), U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran | "No known restrictions on publication," per the Library of Congress catalog record |
| Deng Xiaoping tours NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, 2 February 1979 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visit_of_Chinese_Vice_Premier_Deng_Xiaoping_to_Johnson_Space_Center_-_GPN-2002-000077.jpg), credited NASA (GPN-2002-000077) | Public domain (U.S. federal government work; NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted) |

*Both photographs postdate the Third Plenum by five to six weeks; the NASA photograph is embedded above and is included here for the same reason as the White House departure photograph: to show Deng received abroad at head-of-state level within weeks of the plenum, not the internal party debate itself, no openly licensed photograph of which was found (see Image gaps).*

### Image gaps

- **The 11 May 1978 *Guangming Daily* front page, or the *Theoretical Trends* issue 60 that preceded it.** No openly licensed scan or photograph was found. As documented on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) and [The Red Guards: how Mao turned millions of students into a political weapon, 1966-68](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-guards-youth-mobilization/), Chinese-origin printed matter still under copyright as of 1 January 1996 had its U.S. copyright restored under the URAA even where a source treats it as freely reproducible domestically; a period Chinese newspaper page falls squarely in that category.
- **Photographs of Hu Yaobang at the Central Party School, or of Hu Fuming, 1977-78.** No openly licensed photograph was found for either.
- **The November-December 1978 Central Work Conference or the 18-22 December 1978 Third Plenum session itself.** No openly licensed photograph was found; conference and plenum sessions were not open to photographers with a documented open-licence chain.
- **Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui or Chen Xilian, individually, from this period.** No openly licensed photograph was found for any of the four.
- **Beijing's Democracy Wall, 1978-79, including Wei Jingsheng's posted essays.** Commons and other archives hold period photographs, but none carries a clear U.S. rights clearance; the same unresolved-status concern applies as to other Chinese-origin 1970s photographic material on this archive's sibling pages.

## Sources

- "Study the Documents Well and Grasp the Key Link," editorial, *People's Daily*, *Red Flag* and *People's Liberation Army Daily*, 7 February 1977 (the "two whatevers" formulation), discussed in Ezra F. Vogel, *Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China* (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
- "Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth" ("实践是检验真理的唯一标准"), *Guangming Daily*, 11 May 1978, and *Theoretical Trends* (理论动态) issue 60, 10 May 1978; publication history and Hu Fuming's and Hu Yaobang's roles discussed in David Cowhig, "1978: Hu Fuming's 'Practice is the Sole Criterion of Truth' and his Retrospective," *David Cowhig's Translation Blog*, 3 January 2022: [gaodawei.wordpress.com](https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/hu-fuming-author-of-mind-opening-guangming-daily-commentary-practice-is-the-only-criterion-of-truth/) (the environment used to build this page could not re-fetch the page to re-verify it; cited from its search-indexed content).
- Deng Xiaoping, "Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite as One in Looking to the Future," speech at the closing session of the CCP Central Work Conference, 13 December 1978.
- Deng Xiaoping, "Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles," speech at the Forum on Theory Work, 30 March 1979.
- Ezra F. Vogel, *Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China* (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, on the 1977-81 leadership transition and the Central Work Conference: working paper, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney (July 2023 revision): [sydney.edu.au (PDF)](https://www.sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/china-studies-centre/working-paper/fred_teiwes_warren_sun_july_2023_v2.pdf) (the environment used to build this page could not re-fetch the PDF to re-verify it; cited from its search-indexed title).
- Communist Party of China, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," 27 June 1981, for the campaign's formal endpoint (text and limits covered on [The 1981 Resolution: how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/)): [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm).
- Reporting and scholarship on Wei Jingsheng's essays, arrest and 16 October 1979 trial and sentence, and on the closure of the Democracy Wall movement, 1978-79.
- Nikita Khrushchev, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, 25 February 1956, and the June 1957 defeat of the "Anti-Party Group" (Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich), for the same-method comparison in "Then and now."
- For the "Same-method test," see ['Trotskyism or Leninism': the press campaign that removed Trotsky from Soviet leadership (1924-1929)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/stalin-trotsky-power-struggle-1924-1929/) and its own sources (chiefly Isaac Deutscher, *The Prophet Unarmed*, 1959; Robert Service, *Stalin: A Biography*, 2004 and *Trotsky: A Biography*, 2009; E. H. Carr, *The Interregnum 1923-1924*, 1954).
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection: ["Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping leaves the White House, Washington, D.C."](https://www.loc.gov/item/2005696436/), 29 January 1979, photograph by Thomas J. O'Halloran.
- NASA, "Visit of Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping to Johnson Space Center," GPN-2002-000077, 2 February 1979, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visit_of_Chinese_Vice_Premier_Deng_Xiaoping_to_Johnson_Space_Center_-_GPN-2002-000077.jpg).