---
title: The 1981 Resolution:how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/
description: Between March 1980 and June 1981, under Deng Xiaoping's direction, the Chinese Communist Party spent fifteen months and consulted about 4,000 senior…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence-dossier collage dominated by a distressed world map with connecting routes, coordinates and highlighted regions.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-map-heavy.jpg)

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

# The 1981 Resolution:how the Chinese Communist Party engineered a single verdict on Mao

At a glance

Between March 1980 and June 1981, under Deng Xiaoping's direction, the Chinese Communist Party spent fifteen months and consulted about 4,000 senior cadres to produce a single…

- **When:** June 27, 1981
- **Actor:** Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, directing the drafting on the Central Committee's behalf…
- **Target:** The CCP's own membership and the Chinese public, as the audience for one binding account of…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/)
- **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, directing the drafting on the Central Committee's behalf; Hu Qiaomu's drafting group; the October 1980 conference of about 4,000 senior cadres; the Sixth Plenary Session of the 11th CCP Central Committee, which adopted the final text on 27 June 1981
- **Target:** The CCP's own membership and the Chinese public, as the audience for one binding account of 1949-1981; Mao Zedong's historical standing and 'Mao Zedong Thought' as continuing party doctrine; the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing ('Gang of Four') factions, on whom the resolution concentrates blame for the worst abuses

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page discusses the Cultural Revolution's death toll and persecution figures only as they appear (or fail to appear) in the resolution's own text; it does not re-describe the violence itself, which [The Red Guards: how Mao turned millions of students into a political weapon, 1966-68](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-guards-youth-mobilization/) and [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/) already cover.

**In one line:** Between March 1980 and June 1981, under Deng Xiaoping's direction, the Chinese Communist Party spent fifteen months and consulted about 4,000 senior cadres to produce a single, Politburo-approved account of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution — the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party" — that called the Cultural Revolution the party's "most severe setback" while ruling that Mao's "merits are primary and his errors secondary," concentrated blame for the worst abuses on the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing factions, and has stood, unrevised, as the party's only sanctioned verdict for over four decades.

![Diagram: a Politburo decision in March 1980 launches the drafting; Deng Xiaoping's August 1980 interview sets the ratio of Mao's merits to errors before the text is public; an October 1980 conference of 4,000 cadres presses for a harsher verdict and is overruled; the Sixth Plenum adopts the final text unanimously on 27 June 1981, judging Mao's "merits primary, errors secondary" and assigning the worst abuses to the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing cliques; the verdict is still binding as of Xi Jinping's 2021 resolution](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **9 September 1976 - October 1976.** Mao Zedong dies; within a month the Politburo arrests the "Gang of Four" (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen). Hua Guofeng, Mao's chosen successor, continues to defend the Cultural Revolution in general terms even as he moves against its most visible figures. (These events are covered in full 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/) and [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/); this page does not repeat them.)

![Children dancing in a Shanghai kindergarten in 1978 beneath portraits of Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng and a study poster](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao-shanghai-kindergarten-1978.jpg)

*Children dancing in a neighbourhood kindergarten in Minhang District, Shanghai, March 1978, under portraits of Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng and a poster reading "study well and improve every day". Photograph by LBM1948, CC BY-SA 4.0, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai,_guarder%C3%ADa_1978_03.jpg).*

- **May 1978 - December 1978.** The "practice is the sole criterion of truth" debate, encouraged by Deng Xiaoping's allies, challenges Hua Guofeng's "two whatevers" line (that the party must uphold whatever Mao decided and instructed). The Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee (18-22 December 1978) endorses "reform and opening" and, with it, a broader reassessment of the Mao era — the start of the boluan fanzheng ("setting things right") process covered in full on [Boluan Fanzheng: how Deng Xiaoping's faction used a debate about truth to break Hua Guofeng's hold on power, 1977-1981](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/boluan-fanzheng-repudiation-of-cultural-revolution/).

![Deng Xiaoping speaking at a lectern on the White House lawn in January 1979 with President Jimmy Carter standing behind him](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao-deng-carter-1979.jpg)

*Deng Xiaoping, with President Jimmy Carter behind him and a man holding notes at left, at the arrival ceremony on the White House lawn, 29 January 1979, during his official visit to the United States. The photograph is from after the Third Plenum and about fourteen months before the resolution's drafting began, and does not show the drafting. Photograph by a White House staff photographer, National Archives (U.S. government work, public domain), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deng_Xiaoping_and_Jimmy_Carter_at_the_arrival_ceremony_for_the_Vice_Premier_of_China._-_NARA_-_183157-restored.jpg).*

- **From around March 1980.** The Political Bureau and its Secretariat commission a formal resolution on party history, to settle — in one document, for the whole party — how the years since 1949 are to be judged. Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang direct the effort; Hu Qiaomu, the party's senior ideologist and a former secretary to Mao himself, leads the drafting group. This is only the second time the party has produced a document in this genre: the first, the April 1945 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party," had ruled the pre-Mao party leadership wrong and Mao's own line correct, helping install him as unchallenged leader (see [The Mao cult before the state: 'Mao Zedong Thought' and 'The East Is Red', 1943-1949](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/mao-cult-origins-1943-1949/)). The 1981 drafters worked, deliberately, inside the precedent that document had set.
- **21 and 23 August 1980.** In two interviews with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Deng Xiaoping states that in weighing Mao's record, "his mistakes were only secondary" — publicly fixing, before a single line of the resolution had been released, the ratio the document would eventually have to justify. Drafters rewrite a complete draft to match.
- **October 1980.** An expanded party conference — commonly described as gathering about 4,000 senior cadres — discusses the revised draft. Many participants, drawing on their own experience of persecution during the Cultural Revolution, press for a sharper judgment of Mao personally, including proposals to weigh his later errors more heavily against his earlier achievements. Deng declines to reopen the question: the cadres' views, he says, have already been "fully incorporated," and there will be no second round of consultation at that scale. After the conference, Hu Qiaomu's group produces a further revised draft, and the Political Bureau and Central Committee continue reviewing successive drafts through the spring of 1981.
- **27 June 1981.** The Sixth Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee unanimously adopts the final text, the "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China." The same plenum removes Hua Guofeng as party Chairman (he is kept on, for a time, as a vice-chairman) and elects Hu Yaobang to the post — the last person to hold the title of CCP Chairman before the office was abolished in 1982 — while Deng Xiaoping becomes Chairman of the Central Military Commission. The resolution's adoption and the leadership change are the same vote.
- **1 July 1981.** The text is published in party media to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the CCP's founding, converting an internal party judgment into the public record.
- **1981-2026.** No later party document revises the verdict on Mao. Xi Jinping's own "Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century," adopted 11 November 2021 at the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee and sometimes called the party's "third historical resolution," explicitly builds on the 1980-81 judgment rather than reopening it — the closing function the 1981 drafters designed the document to perform is, on the record, still working forty-five years later.

![Outdoor wall inscribed in Chinese with a sentence from the 1981 party resolution on the Cultural Revolution, at the Shantou Cultural Revolution Museum](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/party-resolution-1981-verdict-on-mao-shantou-museum-wall.jpg)

*An outdoor wall at the Cultural Revolution Museum in Shantou, Guangdong, photographed on 12 June 2014, inscribed with a sentence from the 1981 resolution describing the Cultural Revolution as an internal disorder launched in error by a leader, exploited by counter-revolutionary cliques, and a serious disaster for the party, the state and the peoples of all nationalities, with the resolution's citation and its 27 June 1981 adoption date beneath. Photograph by Yangziyuan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bwg2.jpg).*

## How it works

- [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/): the resolution's real content is not window dressing. It states in the party's own voice that the Cultural Revolution "was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic," and that it "did not in fact constitute a revolution or social progress in any sense" (both already quoted, from the same source, 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/)). That is a genuine confession of catastrophic failure. What it releases is bounded precisely to survive: no independent tribunal, no reopened investigation into the dead, no reconsideration of one-party rule, and a ruling that Mao's "merits are primary and his errors secondary" that keeps his founding legitimacy — and the party's own claim to have been right to found the state he led — intact.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): the balance the resolution reaches was fixed in advance and the text was then built to support it. Deng's August 1980 remark that Mao's mistakes were "only secondary" precedes, rather than follows, the drafting; the popular shorthand that resulted, "Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong," does not in fact appear anywhere in the resolution's text — a distinction historians including Timothy Cheek have made explicit, since the ratio-language is a later paraphrase of the document's conclusion rather than a quotation from it. The resolution itself states no comparable figure for the number of people killed, persecuted or displaced during the Cultural Revolution; those counts exist only in the later work of scholars such as Andrew Walder, working from local records the resolution does not cite.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): the resolution's chief formula on Mao — "chief responsibility for the grave 'Left' error of the 'Cultural Revolution', an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration, does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong" — is paired with a second move that channels the worst concrete abuses onto the "counter-revolutionary cliques" of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, already tried and sentenced by the state's own special court in 1980-81 (see [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/)). Splitting a single, continuous campaign into "Mao's Left error" (an error of theory and judgment) and "the cliques' crimes" (a matter of individual wrongdoing) lets the party keep Mao's stature as founder while disposing of specific culpability onto people who, by 1981, were no longer in a position to answer back.
- [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/): the resolution's own vocabulary — "Left error," "severe setback," "comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration" — describes a decade of denunciations, purges, forced labour and killing without naming a death toll, a mechanism of killing, or an individual victim by name in its central verdict. The operational content (who did what to whom) is supplied elsewhere, by the trials and by later scholarship; the resolution supplies only the judgment.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): the fifteen-month drafting process — a Central Committee commission, multiple full rewrites, an October 1980 conference of about 4,000 cadres, further Political Bureau review, and a unanimous vote at the Sixth Plenum — was built to manufacture not just a text but the appearance, and the institutional fact, of party-wide agreement on it. Once adopted unanimously, dissenting readings on either side — the cadres in 1980 who wanted a harsher verdict on Mao, or party elders who wanted a softer one — had nowhere further to go inside the party's own process.

## Then and now

The nearest working parallel is the Soviet Union's handling of Stalin twenty-five years earlier. At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev delivered "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" to a closed session, documenting mass arrests, executions and the fabrication of charges under Stalin while preserving Lenin's standing and the party's own legitimacy as the vehicle of the revolution. Mao Zedong's own reaction, at the time, pointed to the same device the CCP would use on him: he argued for a balanced accounting of Stalin's record rather than Khrushchev's wholesale condemnation, an argument China scholarship reads as an early version of the "merits primary, errors secondary" formula the CCP applied to Mao himself a generation later.

The differences matter. Khrushchev's speech was never published inside the Soviet Union at the time; it was read aloud at closed party meetings and only reached the outside world after it was leaked to the West and printed by the *New York Times* in June 1956, and it was not officially published in the USSR itself until 1989. The CCP's 1981 resolution, by contrast, was built through a deliberately public-facing internal consultation (the 4,000-cadre conference) and then printed openly in party media for the whole country. And where the Soviet verdict on Stalin proved unstable — Brezhnev-era leaders partially rehabilitated Stalin's reputation within two decades, and the USSR itself dissolved before any single verdict could outlast it — the CCP's 1981 judgment on Mao has now outlasted the man who wrote it: Xi Jinping's 2021 "third historical resolution" reaffirms rather than revises it.

## Positions on the record

- **The resolution's own position.** The text states that Cultural Revolution "was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic," that it "did not in fact constitute a revolution or social progress in any sense," and that "chief responsibility for the grave 'Left' error... does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong" — while ruling that "his merits are primary and his errors secondary" and that Mao Zedong Thought, defined as the party's collective achievement rather than Mao's alone, remains valid.
- **Dissent inside the process.** Some of the roughly 4,000 cadres consulted in October 1980, many of them purged or persecuted during 1966-76, argued in the discussion itself for a harsher judgment of Mao than the resolution ultimately reached; Deng Xiaoping declined to reopen the question for a further round.
- **Scholarship.** Roderick MacFarquhar's chapter on the succession to Mao (in MacFarquhar, ed., *The Politics of China*) and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, *Mao's Last Revolution* (2006), trace the resolution's drafting to Deng's deliberate balancing act: enough condemnation of the Cultural Revolution to legitimate the reform program, not so much that it delegitimized the party's own thirty-two years in power or Deng's own record as a participant in earlier campaigns. Timothy Cheek's work on the party's use of its own history notes that the "70/30" figure popularly attached to the resolution is a paraphrase that gained currency after publication, not a quotation from the text.
- **What is documented.** The dates of the Third Plenum, the March 1980 commissioning of the drafting group, Deng's August 1980 Fallaci interviews, the October 1980 cadre conference, and the 27 June 1981 unanimous adoption; the resolution's quoted formulas on the Cultural Revolution and on Mao's "merits" and "errors"; the leadership change (Hu Yaobang for Hua Guofeng) voted at the same plenum.
- **What is contested.** The precise number of full drafts the resolution went through before June 1981 is not settled to an exact count in the sources this page draws on, beyond "at least two complete rewrites, plus further rounds of Political Bureau revision" being clearly documented; how much of the October 1980 cadres' harsher sentiment actually reached the final text, versus how much Deng's own preferences overrode it, is a matter for the historians cited above rather than something the resolution states about itself.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether the resolution's own historical judgments — on the Great Leap Forward, on the balance of Mao's pre-1966 record, or on the party's post-1981 direction — are correct. This page scores how the verdict was produced and how it functions, not the merits of the verdict's content.

## Same-method test

The same scoring applies, evenhandedly, outside the communist world. The U.S. Senate's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the "Church Committee," 1975-76) produced the closest thing the United States has to a single official verdict on COINTELPRO and related FBI and CIA abuses documented on [COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert media and information operations against U.S. groups, 1956-1971](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cointelpro-media-operations/): a genuine, detailed public accounting — [Limited hangout](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/limited-hangout/) scores here too, in real disclosure bounded well short of a full one — that named specific programs and quoted internal memos, followed by institutional reforms (the 1976 Attorney General's Guidelines, the permanent congressional intelligence committees, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) rather than prosecutions. [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) scores as well: no senior official was criminally charged over the disclosed abuses, much of the underlying material stayed classified for decades after the Committee's reports, and the reports themselves became the fixed, citable reference point — "the Church Committee found..." — that closed off further congressional reckoning with the same period for a generation.

The scale and the stakes are not comparable. The Church Committee's subject was a democratic government's intelligence agencies operating under continuing judicial and press oversight, its report was produced by an adversarial, multi-member, opposition-inclusive committee rather than by the institution's own leadership, and its findings could be and were revisited by later journalism and FOIA litigation. The CCP's 1981 resolution was drafted entirely inside the ruling party that it judged, about a paramount leader who had also founded the state, and it covers a decade in which national death estimates run into the hundreds of thousands to low millions (Walder and Su 2003; Walder 2014, cited 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/)). Same techniques; very different order of what was at stake in getting the verdict right.

## How to spot it

- Ask whether the balance the document reaches was announced by a leader before the drafting process that supposedly produced it. If the ratio comes first and the evidence is assembled to fit, the "verdict" is closer to a specification than a finding.
- Check what the document does not put a number on. A resolution that states a broad judgment ("severe setback," "heaviest losses") but supplies no casualty count, no roster of the dead, and no mechanism for anyone outside the drafting body to check the count later has left the hardest facts to someone else, or to no one.
- Watch for blame split cleanly between "error" (attributed to the top leader, in terms that soften into theory and judgment) and "crime" (attributed to subordinates or a faction already out of power). The split is doing political work, not necessarily factual work.
- Ask what happens to a dissenting view raised inside the drafting process itself. A conference convened to "consult" a few thousand people, whose harsher conclusions are noted and then set aside without a further round, has performed consultation rather than conducted it.
- Look at how long the verdict is expected to last, and check later. A resolution that later leaders continue to cite, rather than revise, forty years on has succeeded at exactly the propaganda function such documents are built for: making one institution's assessment the only sanctioned one.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams_fall_party_resolution_1981.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Kindergarten, Shanghai, March 1978 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanghai,_guarder%C3%ADa_1978_03.jpg), LBM1948 | CC BY-SA 4.0 (photographer's own work) |
| Deng Xiaoping and Jimmy Carter, White House, 29 January 1979 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deng_Xiaoping_and_Jimmy_Carter_at_the_arrival_ceremony_for_the_Vice_Premier_of_China._-_NARA_-_183157-restored.jpg), White House staff photographer (U.S. federal government) | Public domain (U.S. government work, White House staff photographer; NARA ID 183157) |
| Wall inscribed with a sentence of the 1981 resolution, Shantou, 2014 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bwg2.jpg), Yangziyuan | CC BY-SA 3.0 (photographer's own work) |

### Image gaps

- **The Sixth Plenum itself (27 June 1981), or any photograph of the drafting sessions.** The plenum was a closed party meeting; no openly licensed photograph of the session, the drafting group, or the vote was found. Xinhua and *People's Daily* almost certainly hold contemporaneous photographs, but as with the Chinese-origin press photographs already documented as excluded on [The Red Guards: how Mao turned millions of students into a political weapon, 1966-68](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/red-guards-youth-mobilization/) and [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/), Chinese-origin photographs from this period can have had their U.S. copyright restored under the URAA even where tagged public domain in China; none was identified with a clear U.S. rights clearance.
- **A scan of the resolution's original printed text (1 July 1981 party press).** No openly licensed scan of the original publication was found; the marxists.org and USC US-China Institute transcriptions cited below are text, not page images, and neither states a licence permitting reuse of a facsimile.
- **A portrait of Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang or Hu Qiaomu from 1980-81.** None was found with a clear licence. Genuinely public-domain U.S. government (NARA/White House) photographs of Deng Xiaoping exist from his January 1979 Washington visit; one is used above and is captioned with its own date, since it predates the drafting by more than a year and does not depict him directing it.
- **The October 1980 conference of about 4,000 cadres.** No openly licensed photograph of this internal party gathering was found.

## Sources

- 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: [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm); [USC US-China Institute](https://china.usc.edu/node/20941).
- Deng Xiaoping, "Remarks on Successive Drafts of the 'Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China'" (1980-81), in *Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping*: [marxists.org](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1981/15.htm).
- Roderick MacFarquhar, "The Succession to Mao and the End of Maoism", in Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), *The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People's Republic of China*, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, *Mao's Last Revolution* (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006): [publisher page](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027480).
- Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, *The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976* (M.E. Sharpe, 2007), for the political context of the succession struggle the resolution later had to settle.
- Andrew G. Walder and Yang Su, "The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact", *The China Quarterly* 173 (2003): 74-99: [PDF, Stanford](https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/sociology/files/walder-sucq.pdf); Andrew G. Walder, "Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971", *Social Science History* 38, nos. 3-4 (2014), both already cited in full 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 not repeated here beyond the death-toll comparison above.
- Timothy Cheek, discussed in "Xi, Mao, and China's Search for a Usable Past", *ChinaFile*: [chinafile.com](https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/xi-mao-and-chinas-search-usable-past), on the "70/30" formula as a post-publication paraphrase rather than the resolution's own wording.
- Jude Blanchette, "Where's the 'official' verdict that Mao was 70% correct, 30% wrong?" (blog, 13 May 2016): [judeblanchette.com](http://www.judeblanchette.com/blog/2016/5/13/there-is-no-offical-verdict-that-mao-was-70-correct-30-wrong), for the same point, independently argued.
- Communist Party of China Central Committee, "Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century", adopted 11 November 2021, for the 2021 reaffirmation discussed above.
- Nikita Khrushchev, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", delivered to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, 25 February 1956, for the same-method comparison; on its non-publication inside the USSR until 1989 and its 1956 leak to Western media, see standard Cold War historiography of the speech (e.g. William Taubman, *Khrushchev: The Man and His Era*, W.W. Norton, 2003).
- U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee"), Final Report, Books II and III (S. Rep. 94-755, 1976), for the same-method test; already cited in full on [COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert media and information operations against U.S. groups, 1956-1971](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cointelpro-media-operations/) and not repeated here beyond the comparison above.