The Central Work Conference was held in Beijing from November 10 to December 15, 1978. 212 persons respectively in charge of all provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the Central Government, major military regions and central departments attended the conference. Hua Guofeng presided over the opening ceremony and announced the three issues of the conference: Firstly, to discuss “The Decision on Accelerating the Speed of Agricultural Development”and “The Working Regulations of Rural People’s Communes (Trial Draft)”; secondly, to agree on the arrangements for the national economic plan in 1979 and 1980; thirdly, to discuss Li Xiannian’s speech at the State Council meeting on theoretical matters. Before these issues, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee decided to discuss first the shift of the focus of the whole Party’s work to socialist modernization from the following year. The shift of work focus received everyone’s warm support and unanimous approval. The criterion of testing truth, the change of ideological line, or the rehabilitation of a series of unjust, false and wrong cases that were of general concern both inside and outside the Party at that time were not mentioned. In the group discussion, Chen Yun first proposed that in order to achieve stability and unity within the Party, the central government should decide to solve problems left over from the “Cultural Revolution” and historical legacy by rehabilitating a number of major unjust, false and wrong cases. He suggested redressing six issues left over from the history, such as the case of the 61 traitors group including Bo Yibo, Tian’anmen Incident and the conclusion about Tao Zhu and Peng Dehuai. His suggestion received enthusiastic response from the participants…
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