Peking Orders Rehabilitation of Intellectuals
The reputations of intellectuals unjustly persecuted in Mao Tse-tung’s political movements must be restored by 1987, the Communist Party has decided.
Millions of teachers, scholars, scientists and other intellectuals were jailed, reviled, ostracized and exiled to the countryside during Mao’s leftist campaigns, such as the 1958 “anti-rightist” movement and the 1966 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
Attacked as bourgeois reactionaries, many were killed or committed suicide, and some remain under a cloud, unable to return to their homes and jobs.
The official New China News Agency last week quoted Wang Zhaohua, deputy director of the party’s organization department, as telling provincial party cadres that such cases must be righted before the next national party congress in 1987.
He said the “new historical period” under leader Deng Xiaoping’s modernization policy respects knowledge and talented people.
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