The Third Plenary Session of the Twelfth Central Committee of the CPC

It convened in Beijing on October 20, 1984. The Plenary Session summarized the experience of economic system reform since the founding of New China, especially since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party, and adopted the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Economic System Reform. The Plenary Session was attended by 321 members and alternate members of the Central Committee. The Plenary Session was attended by 297 members of the Central Advisory Committee, members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, as well as the main responsible comrades from local and central departments concerned. The Plenary Session was presided over by Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Li Xiannian and Chen Yun, members of the CPC Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau. Ye Jianying did not attend the Plenary Session due to illness.

The Plenary Session analyzed the current economic and political situation in China and summarized the positive and negative experiences of China's socialist construction. The Plenary Session pointed out that it is necessary to combine the basic principles of Marxism with Chinese reality and formulated the general requirements of building socialism with Chinese characteristics, to further implement the policy of revitalizing the domestic economy and opening it up external world, and speed up the pace of reform of the entire economic system with emphasis on urban areas, so as to better achieve a new situation in socialist modernization.

The “Decision” initially proposed and articulated a series of major theoretical and practical issues of the economic system reform, and it was a programmatic document which aimed to guide the reform of China's economic system. The Plenary Session also decided to convene a special national conference of Party representatives in September 1985, the topics of which were: (1) Discussion and adoption of proposals on the outline of the Seventh Five-Year Plan for national economic and social development; (2) Organizational matters such as the co-option of new members to the Central Committee.

The major theoretical contribution of the “Decision” was that it proposed that China's socialist economy is a "planned commodity economy on the basis of public ownership" and that "ownership rights and management rights should be appropriately separated". This was a brand-new understanding of the Party on the relationship between planning and market.

The “Decision” presented a blueprint of an overall reform for the whole Party and the whole nation, and put forward systematic views and measures for all aspects and stages of reform in the urban areas. The implementation of this decision not only aimed to make the rural reform compatible with the urban reform, but also put various urban reform processes under a unified direction, which was an important guarantee for a successful overall reform. The “Decision” adopted by the Plenary Session demonstrated that the CPC had reached a new level of understanding of national conditions of China and the laws of socialist economic construction and clarified the confusion and ambiguities that existed in the minds of many people.