"Four Clean-ups" Movement

The socialist education movement carried out across China between 1963 and the first half of 1966. In September 1962, after the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the CPC, the Rectification and socialist education campaigns were carried out in Hunan and Hebei provinces and some other regions. At the Central Work Conference in February 1963, the experience of the "Four Small Clean-ups" Movement (clean-up accounts, clean-up storage facilities, clean-up finances private, clean-up the work point system in the communes) carried out in Baoding District of the Hebei Province was reviewed and affirmed, which can be seen as a prelude to the later "Four Clean-ups" Movement.

The Central Work Conference decided to focus on the class struggle and carry out a socialist education movement in the countryside with the "Four Clean-ups" as the main content, and the "Five Antis" movement in the urban areas targeted (embezzlement and theft, speculation, extravagance and waste, decentralization, and bureaucratism). After this Conference, the rural socialist education movement was launched with pilot practices.

In May and September 1963, under the chairmanship of Mao Zedong, CPC formulated the “Decision on Certain Issues in the Present Rural Work (Draft)” (i.e., the “First Ten Articles”) and the “Policies Concerning the Socialist Education Movement in the Rural Areas (Draft)” (i.e., the “Latter Ten Articles”). These two documents held that there was a serious and acute class struggles in the Chinese society and that the restoration of counter-revolutionary forces was already a real urgent threat. The documents analyzed that the socialist education movement required "waging a sharp and tit-for-tat struggle against the capitalist and feudal forces that are attacking us rampantly" and put forward the policy of "taking class struggle as the key link" in this movement. Then, these two documents were circulated nationwide.

In March 1964, the CPC Central Committee issued a directive which addressed the whole Party and the whole people, which required to carry out the socialist education movement the end. Thereafter, the socialist education movement was launched on a large scale throughout the country. Within the specific aspects of the whole movement, a series of problems and “Left” mistakes had emerged, such as implementing "battle of large corps" against the bad elements, the practice of "gathering a few trustworthy collaborators by secret contacts" and to practice "vicious attacks” against others in order to seize power. At the Central Work Conference held in Beijing December 1964, Mao Zedong chaired the formulation of document titled as "A Number of Problems Raised in the Current Rural Socialist Education Movement" (i.e., "Twenty-three Articles") which marked a turning point in the socialist education movement and made a new step stipulating that the target of the movement should be to cleanse politics, economy, organization and ideology. Although "Twenty-three Articles" corrected some specific “Left” practices and eased the tension in the countryside to a certain extent, the “Left” thinking could not be rectified but it further developed. Consequently, it began to emphasize that the nature of the socialist education movement should be to resolve the contradiction between socialism and capitalism, and that the focus of the movement was “to rectify those power-holders within the Party who take the capitalist road”, which paved the way for beginning of the “Cultural Revolution” targeting to criticize the capitalist roaders within the Party.

Later, in the first half of 1966, the deviations of the previous period began to be corrected, and the "Four Clean-ups" Movement tended to be balanced. Although the "Four Clean-ups" Movement played a crucial role in correcting certain problems in cadres' style of work and improved economic management, its guiding ideology of "taking class struggle as the key link" wrongly estimated the situation of class struggle, confused between the two kinds of contradictions with different natures, caused a large number of cadres to be wrongly attacked, consequently the “Left” errors within the Party began to develop viciously until the “Cultural Revolution” was launched.