From the Hundred Flowers to the Anti-Rightist Campaign

The two shocks of 1956

When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Soviet Twentieth Congress in February 1956 the Chinese leadership reacted in two ways. In April the People’s Daily article “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” rated Stalin seventy per cent good and thirty per cent bad, distancing itself from Moscow’s “total negation”; at the same time the Eighth Congress stressed collective leadership and opposition to the personality cult and dropped Mao Zedong Thought from the constitution. Mao outwardly accepted this. Source 1 · Source 2

The Polish October and the Hungarian revolution of October–November taught a different lesson. Mao read the Hungarian rising as the result of a party cut off from the masses and of accumulated bureaucratism, and judged that to prevent the same in China the party must accept criticism from outside to wash away its bureaucratism. His concept of “contradictions among the people” admitted that socialist society too had contradictions, presented as an original theory against the Soviet doctrine of a “society without contradictions”. Source 3 · Source 4

“Let a hundred flowers bloom”

The slogan was first raised in May 1956, but intellectuals kept silent, remembering the Hu Feng affair of 1955 — the arrest of the literary theorist Hu Feng and thousands of his “counter-revolutionary clique”. On 27 February 1957 Mao addressed 1,800 cadres and intellectuals at the Supreme State Conference with “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, reassuring them that criticism could be a “fragrant flower” rather than a “poisonous weed”. The speech circulated in its original form but was published, heavily revised, only in June. Source 5 · Source 4

Most of the leadership — Liu Shaoqi, Peng Zhen and others — were reluctant to open a rectification to outside criticism, and in March and April Mao toured the provinces to persuade the cadres. After the central directive of 27 April, from early May the United Front Department convened forums for the democratic parties and intellectuals and the newspapers printed the criticism. This phase, called the “great blooming and contending”, lasted about five weeks. Source 2 · Source 6

How far the criticism went

The criticism went beyond the “bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism” Mao had expected. Zhang Bojun of the Democratic League proposed a “political design institute” to deliberate on policy; Luo Longji proposed a committee to review unjust cases from the suppression and Three-anti campaigns. Intellectuals attacked the “party’s empire” — the party’s monopoly of everything — and complained of Soviet imitation and of “laymen leading experts”. There were workers’ strikes and student disturbances in Wuhan, Chengdu and elsewhere. Source 7 · Source 2

At Peking University students began pasting big-character posters on a “democracy wall” from 19 May. The physics student Tan Tianrong and others demanded publication of the execution figures of the suppression campaign, a reassessment of Soviet intervention in Hungary and an end to “class struggle” education, and spontaneous groups such as the Hundred Flowers Society appeared. The universities’ speech was later punished most harshly; Lin Xiling of People’s University attacked party privilege in the name of “genuine socialism”. Source 2 · Source 8

8 June: the reversal

On 15 May Mao circulated to cadres a note, “Things are beginning to change”, saying the rightists’ attack had begun and should be allowed to “run wild” for the moment. On 8 June the People’s Daily editorial “What is this for?” and an internal directive of the same day declared a counter-attack on the “rightists’ offensive”. The six criteria for telling “fragrant flowers” from “poisonous weeds”, absent from the February speech, were inserted into the revised version published in June and served as retroactive justification. Source 8 · Source 9

Deng Xiaoping, as general secretary, ran the campaign in practice. The first targets were prominent figures of the democratic parties and the press — Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Chu Anping — and it then spread through every institution, university and secondary school, filling quotas of about five per cent. By the end of 1957 300,000 people had been labelled, and the final official count was 552,877, thought to understate the real number considerably. The writers Ding Ling and Ai Qing, the scholar Ma Yinchu and the young Fang Lizhi were among them. Source 8 · Source 10

Punishment: labour re-education and rural exile

Rightists were sorted into six grades and dismissed, demoted, docked in pay, put under “supervised labour” or sent to re-education through labour. Introduced by the State Council in August 1957, re-education through labour confined people by administrative decision without trial; hastily created to deal with the rightists, it survived until 2013. About three thousand rightists were sent to Jiabiangou farm in Gansu, and most starved to death in the famine of 1960. Source 11 · Source 12

The label did not stop with the individual. Rightists’ children were discriminated against in schooling and employment, and “rightist families” were targets again and again in the political campaigns of the next twenty years. After the Lushan Conference of 1959 the “anti-right-deviation” drive turned the same logic inward on the party, investigating millions of cadres. In the silence the campaign produced, the inflated reports and failures of the Great Leap of 1958 met no check. Source 8 · Source 13

Open plot or change of mind?

In July 1957 Mao said he had “lured the snakes out of their holes”, and official history explains the campaign as an “open plot” from the start to expose opponents. Historians such as MacFarquhar hold that Mao genuinely wanted criticism to check party bureaucratism, took fright when it reached the party’s leading role, and reversed course — the “open plot” being an explanation constructed afterwards. Either way the outcome was the same. Source 14 · Source 2

After 1978 the party ruled that the campaign had been “necessary but seriously enlarged” and cancelled the labels of all but ninety-six of the 550,000. The legitimacy of the campaign itself was maintained, and the “great rightists” such as Zhang Bojun have never been rehabilitated. The relationship between intellectuals and the party — invitation and betrayal, silence and conformity — found one of its archetypes in this episode, remembered by the students of 1989 as well. Source 8 · Source 15