Anti-Rightist Campaign
반우파 투쟁
The political campaign of 1957–1959 that punished intellectuals, cadres and students who had criticised the party during the Hundred Flowers as “rightists”. Run in practice by Deng Xiaoping, with quotas handed down to each unit, it labelled about 550,000 people by the official count and subjected them to demotion, dismissal, re-education through labour and rural exile. With the channels for criticism closed, nothing remained to check the errors of the Great Leap; most labels were reversed as mistaken in 1978–1980.
In depth
The campaign opened with the People’s Daily editorial of 8 June 1957 and Mao’s internal directive. The first targets were prominent figures in the democratic parties, the press and academia; it then spread through every institution and university, where quotas of around five per cent were filled. Writers such as Ding Ling and Ai Qing, scholars such as Ma Yinchu, and countless students and schoolteachers were included, and the real number labelled is thought to exceed the official count considerably.
Punishment was tied to the establishment of re-education through labour. Introduced in August 1957, it allowed confinement by administrative decision without trial, and in rightist camps such as Jiabiangou farm in Gansu mass starvation followed during the Great Famine. After the Lushan Conference of 1959 the criticism of Peng Dehuai extended an “anti-right-deviation” drive into the party itself.
After 1978 the party ruled that the campaign had been “necessary but seriously enlarged” and cancelled the labels of all but a handful of the roughly 550,000. The legitimacy of the campaign itself was officially maintained, and the silence of these years is generally judged to have been the political condition for the disaster of the Great Leap.