Who Has the Final Word on Truth? China and the 1978 Philosophical Debate

The Trigger: A Philosophical Debate on the Front Page 

On May 11, 1978, the newspaper 光明日报 Guāngmíng Rìbào published on its front page an extensive essay signed by 本报特约评论员 Běnbào tèyuē pínglùnyuán, "Special Commentator of this Newspaper." It bore a categorical title:

《实践是检验真理的唯一标准》

Shíjiàn shì jiǎnyàn zhēnlǐ de wéiyī biāozhǔn

Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth.

The original text had been drafted months earlier by 胡福明 Hú Fúmíng, a professor in the Philosophy Department at 南京 Nánjīng University, and subsequently revised by theorists and editors associated with the Central Party School. Prior to its publication in 光明日报 Guāngmíng Rìbào, the text had circulated on May 10 in《理论动态》Lǐlùn dòngtài, an internal publication of the Central Party School. That publication immediately unleashed a nationwide discussion: the 真理标准问题大讨论 zhēnlǐ biāozhǔn wèntí dà tǎolùn, the Great Debate on the Question of the Criterion of Truth.

There is, however, a seemingly minor detail that illuminates the philosophical significance of the text. In its earliest drafts, the title was《实践是检验真理的标准》Shíjiàn shì jiǎnyàn zhēnlǐ de biāozhǔn, "Practice is the Criterion for Testing Truth." During the revision process, the term 唯一 wéiyī, "sole" or "only," was incorporated, transforming the assertion to hold that practice was not merely a criterion of truth, but the sole criterion.

The distinction is not trivial. It is not the same to assert that practice constitutes one of the means through which we can test a theory as it is to assert that no other authority or instance can perform that function definitively. Authority, tradition, or fidelity to a text may retain importance, but they can no longer constitute, in themselves, a guarantee of truth.

It is necessary, however, to clarify from the outset another fundamental nuance: the thesis was not a theoretical invention of 1978. It stemmed from the very core of Marxist materialism, from Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach to Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and had been articulated by 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng himself in his 1937 treatise《实践论》Shíjiàn lùn, "On Practice."

What was truly disruptive, therefore, lay not in the philological novelty of the formulation, but in its political and hermeneutic function after the end of the Cultural Revolution: using the Marxist philosophical canon to challenge the prevailing dogmatism. The debate did not need to reject Marxism to challenge a specific interpretation of Marxism. It could mobilize the very principles of the tradition to ask whether theoretical formulations ought to remain subject to the test of reality.

The Epistemological Knot 

At a strictly conceptual level, the debate raises an elementary epistemological question: how do we verify that a theoretical proposition corresponds to the real?

The classical Marxist formulation maintains that the criterion cannot reside exclusively in consciousness, nor in the purely formal coherence of discourse, but must be found in practice (实践 shíjiàn). It is useful here, however, to distinguish three questions that are often conflated: what truth is, how we acquire knowledge, and how we can distinguish a true statement from a false one. The 1978 formulation pertains fundamentally to this last question: to the criterion of truth.

This distinction is crucial because stating that practice is the criterion of truth does not necessarily mean that practice "produces" truth, nor that whatever simply works is true. The thesis maintains, more precisely, that our assertions about reality must be capable of being confronted with reality itself. Practice thus constitutes the realm in which a theory can be confirmed, amended, or rejected.

Now, an assertion of this nature immediately shifts the problem toward the definition of the term itself. Is practice mere immediate sensory experience? Is it productive and material activity? Is it verification by means of scientific experimentation? Is it political action and mobilization? Or is it historical outcome and the effective capacity to transform the material conditions of a society?

The Marxist conception does not reduce practice to a simple accumulation of experiences. In it, practice is the material and social activity through which human beings relate to reality and transform it. For this reason, the relationship between theory and practice cannot be understood as a process in which a theory receives a verdict from reality once and for all. Practice can corroborate a theory, but it can also generate new problems that compel its modification. Theory and practice thus stand in a dynamic relationship: theory guides action, action yields results, and those results allow for the subsequent revision of theory.

Resolving this question inevitably gives rise to a second, qualitatively more delicate problem: if historical practice is the criterion through which we must test our claims, who determines what practice has taught us?

Reality does not speak for itself through philosophical propositions. Events must be observed, compared, and interpreted. A policy may produce certain results, and yet one must decide which results are relevant, over what duration they must be observed, and what theoretical consequences may be drawn from them.

Here the epistemological question converges once more with politics. The issue is no longer solely deciding whether an authority can declare what is true, but also determining who is entitled to interpret reality and who can correct that interpretation.

The Underlying Issue: The Orthodoxy of the Two 凡是 fánshì 

To understand the magnitude of the shock caused by the article, it is necessary to consider the balance of forces immediately following the death of Chairman 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng (1976). The leadership headed by 华国锋 Huá Guófēng rested theoretically on the slogan known as the 两个凡是 liǎng gè fánshì, "Two Whatevers," formally articulated in a joint editorial in February 1977:

凡是毛主席作出的决策，我们都坚决维护； 

Fánshì Máo zhǔxí zuòchū de juécè, wǒmen dōu jiānjué wéihù; 

We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Máo made;

凡是毛主席的指示，我们都始终不渝地遵循。 

fánshì Máo zhǔxí de zhǐshì, wǒmen dōu shǐzhōng bùyú de zūnxún. 

We will unswervingly adhere to whatever instructions Chairman Máo gave.

The 两个凡是 liǎng gè fánshì, "Two Whatevers," did not constitute in themselves a philosophical theory of truth, but rather a rule of political fidelity. Their epistemological consequence, however, was immense: if every decision by Chairman Máo had to be upheld and every directive followed, what authority or instance could ever determine that one of them had been mistaken?

Under this premise, an authoritative assertion risked being shielded in advance against the possibility of error. The issue was not simply how much power a leader possessed, but whether a human authority could become an instance immune to revision. If the word of an authority had to retain its validity regardless of subsequent outcomes, the very possibility of testing it was nullified.

The 1978 conflict was not, therefore, a mere bureaucratic power struggle, although the struggle for power was inseparable from it. It was also a clash between two ways of understanding the relationship between authority and truth: on one hand, a conception in which the correctness of a decision was inextricably tied to the authority of the one who formulated it; on the other, a practical-materialist conception according to which theoretical assertions and political lines had to be subject to examination in light of their results in historical reality.

The word 唯一 wéiyī, "sole," carried all its weight here. If practice was the sole criterion, no authority could constitute itself in advance as an infallible guarantor of truth.

胡耀邦 Hú Yàobāng and the Rebirth of Philosophy as Critique 

In this landscape, the role of figures like 胡耀邦 Hú Yàobāng, then head of the Central Party School and also connected to the Organization Department, proved decisive. Through the internal publication《理论动态》Lǐlùn dòngtài and his backing of intellectuals marginalized during the previous decade, he advanced the rehabilitation of persecuted cadres and fostered a climate of intellectual reopening. The discussion on the criterion of truth was not confined to university philosophy departments; it also unfolded within the Central Party School itself, where future leading cadres debated the experience of the Cultural Revolution and the relationship between theory and practice.

Reducing this period to a factional dispute between 邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng and 华国锋 Huá Guófēng obscures the density of the phenomenon. What was taking place in universities, theoretical committees, specialized journals, and political training organs was also the reclamation of philosophy as a critical activity. After a decade of petrified slogans and decontextualized quotations from the Little Red Book, philosophical thought was once again reclaiming the possibility of examining concrete reality, and with it, theoretical formulations themselves.

This explains the singular importance of the debate. It was not simply a matter of replacing one doctrine with another, but of recovering the possibility of asking whether a doctrine could be wrong. The philosophical question thus assumed an immediate political dimension: can a society correct its own ideas when historical experience demonstrates that they are insufficient?

邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng and the Re-signification of 实事求是 shíshì qiúshì 

The culmination of this theoretical turn was consecrated in the famous address delivered by 邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng on December 13, 1978, at the closing of the Central Work Conference preceding the historic Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee:

《解放思想，实事求是，团结一致向前看》 

Jiěfàng sīxiǎng, shíshì qiúshì, tuánjié yízhì xiàng qián kàn 

Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts, unite and look forward.

At the core of this formulation reappears a fundamental concept synthesized in the 成语 chéngyǔ 实事求是 shíshì qiúshì: seek truth from facts.

Far from being a neologism of the Communist Party, the expression is deeply rooted in classical Chinese historiography. It appears originally in the《汉书》Hànshū, Book of Hàn, compiled by 班固 Bān Gù in the first century CE, in the chapter《河间献王传》Héjiān Xiàn wáng zhuàn, "Biography of King Xiàn of Héjiān." There, the philological and scholarly work of Prince 刘德 Liú Dé is described with the phrase: 修学好古，实事求是 xiūxué hào gǔ, shíshì qiúshì, "he cultivated learning, loved antiquity, and sought truth from facts," referring to the rigorous pursuit of authentic sources over arbitrary interpretations.

Centuries later, in his 1941 essay《改造我们的学习》Gǎizào wǒmen de xuéxí, "Reform Our Study," the revolutionary leader 毛泽东 Máo Zédōng took up the classical phrase, imbuing it with a dialectical reading: 实事 shíshì are the objective facts; 是 shì is the internal order and objective laws of reality; 求 qiú is methodical investigation.

In 1978, 邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng reclaimed this notion to make it one of the ideological pillars of the reform process. If past policies had failed to resolve specific social and economic problems, clinging to them out of mere fidelity to previous formulations contradicted the principle of investigating concrete reality. The question was no longer simply what an authority had said, but what could be learned from historical experience.

Truth versus Authority 

History textbooks often state that the discussion on the criterion of truth cleared the path for the policy of 改革开放 gǎigé kāifàng, "reform and opening-up." While this is historically indisputable, the conclusion remains insufficient from a philosophical perspective.

The controversy over the 真理标准问题 zhēnlǐ biāozhǔn wèntí, the problem of the criterion of truth, was not a scholastic debate over categories divorced from the social world. It was a process in which notions such as 真理 zhēnlǐ, truth; 实践 shíjiàn, practice; 事实 shìshí and 实事 shíshì, facts and objective reality; 权威 quánwēi, authority; and 思想 sīxiǎng, thought, were dynamically articulated.

It compelled a generation of intellectuals and leaders to confront a dilemma that runs through the entire history of political philosophy: what happens when a theory of truth ceases to function as an instrument of legitimation for an authority and becomes a tool to subject that very authority’s assertions to examination?

The answer of 1978 was that no theoretical formulation should remain immune to the possibility of confrontation with reality. Yet this response contained a difficulty that remains philosophically salient: practice does not eliminate the need for interpretation. Facts may show that a policy produced certain outcomes, but someone must decide which outcomes are meaningful, how they are to be explained, and what consequences they hold for theory.

For this reason, the 1978 discussion did not merely resolve the problem of authority; it displaced it. The question ceased to be solely who can declare what is true and became also who possesses the right to interpret what practice demonstrates.

By proclaiming that practice alone could serve as the ultimate criterion of truth, post-Cultural Revolution Chinese thought opened a space for the revision of doctrines and the correction of policies based on historical experience. Theory could no longer close in on itself or be protected in advance by the authority of the one who formulated it.

The great discussion of 1978 was, in this sense, far more than the intellectual prelude to reform. It was a discussion on the very possibility of error and, consequently, on the possibility of its correction. If no authority can decide on its own what is true, philosophy reassumes an essential function: to investigate reality, examine the interpretations we make of it, and keep open the possibility that our own certainties may need to be revised.

This article was originally published in Spanish: ¿Quién tiene la última palabra sobre la verdad? China y el debate filosófico de 1978