20 October 1984
7 December 1984
December 1984- January 1985
Reformists sought to limit the campaign both style (avoiding it developing into a mass movement) and scope (confining it to the ideological realm and social practices such as pornography), not allowing it to spread to the economy, rural areas or new freedoms such as dress and hairstyles. The campaign generated a lot of heat but the reformists were successful in controlling it and it peaked in November. Hu Yaobang was probably a target of the campaign, with Deng Liqun and Hu Qiaomu the principal pursuers. The main victims were reformist theoreticians Wang Ruoshui who was dismissed from his post of Deputy editor-in- chief of the People's Daily and Zhou Yang, who made a public self-criticism.
Third Plenum of the 12th Central Committee. Economic reform regained its momentum around May 1984 after the shock of the anti-spiritual pollution campaign. The third plenum adopted a major Central Committee policy document on economic reform, which called for a shift in focus from agriculture to urban reform and outlined a comprehensive range of measures for national implementation.
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People's Daily commentary "Theory and Practice". This argued that while the universal laws and methodology of Marxism-Leninism were important, specific statements made by Marx and Lenin were of little practical use in resolving problems confronting China. It contained the sentence "We cannot expect the writings of Marx and Lenin of that time to provide solutions to our current problems". On the following day, People's Daily issued a correction to this sentence, to the effect that the word 'all' had been mistakenly omitted before "our current problems".
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Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers Association. This marked a highpoint in the relaxation of Party controls over writers. keynote speech by Hu Qili and People's Daily commentaries called for writers to have more freedom in choice of subject matter and less fear of retribution should they commit errors. Wang Meng and Liu Binyan were among those newly elected as vice-chairmen of the Association and Bai Hua was elected to its council. Wu Zuguang
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