From the Hundred Flowers to the Anti-Rightist Campaign

The two shocks of 1956

When Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult and purges in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet party in February 1956, the Chinese leadership was put in an awkward position. At the end of March Mao Zedong spoke at length to the Soviet ambassador about Stalin’s wrongs towards China while stressing that he had been “a great Marxist”, and in April the People’s Daily article “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” called the idea that Stalin had been wrong in everything a “grave misconception”. In “On the Ten Major Relationships” that month Mao said the Central Committee judged Stalin’s mistakes at 30 per cent and his achievements at 70 per cent, an assessment that was “just about right”. China distanced itself from the Soviet “total negation” while signalling that it would no longer simply follow the Soviet model. 1 2

The Eighth Party Congress in September turned this mood into policy. Stressing collective leadership and opposition to the personality cult, it removed “Mao Zedong Thought” from the party constitution and concluded that in a society whose socialist transformation was complete, class struggle was no longer the “key link” and the party should concentrate on economic construction. Practical leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping gained weight. The 1981 Resolution on party history judged this line correct, and what overturned it within a year was the Anti-Rightist Campaign of summer 1957. 3 4

The Poznań rising in June and, in October, Gomułka’s return in Poland and the Hungarian revolution taught a different lesson. Part of the Chinese leadership read the events in Eastern Europe as the result of putting heavy industry first and neglecting people’s livelihoods. Liu Shaoqi pressed Khrushchev to crush Hungary by force, and Mao too swung from initial opposition to support for the second intervention. Yet the judgement that the Hungarian party had cut itself off from the masses and collapsed as a bureaucratic despotism struck Mao as a warning that the Chinese party could go the same way. 5 6

At the Second Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in November Mao raised the warning openly. Citing a hundred-odd students from Chengdu, Sichuan, who had been stopped at railway stations on their way to petition in Beijing, he said that students taking to the streets and workers striking should be regarded as “a good thing”, and that the masses had good reason to remove whoever practised bureaucracy; the party had to guard against growing into an “aristocratic stratum” divorced from the people. He announced a rectification movement for the following year against the “three bad styles” of subjectivism, sectarianism and bureaucracy, saying that from then on problems among the people and inside the party would be solved by rectification, criticism and self-criticism, not by force. The “great democracy” Mao spoke of meant the masses checking officials from outside the state machinery, through demonstrations and strikes. 7 5

“Let a hundred flowers bloom”

The slogan came from the arts before politics. In 1951, amid the debate over reforming Peking opera, Mao wrote the dedication “let a hundred flowers bloom, weed through the old to bring forth the new” for the Chinese Opera Research Institute, and in 1953, when Chen Boda asked him about guidelines for historical research, he answered with four characters: “let a hundred schools contend”. In January 1956 a central conference on the question of intellectuals set the course of winning over China’s five million intellectuals. At an enlarged Politburo meeting on 27 April the propaganda chief Lu Dingyi proposed that scholarship and the arts develop through free debate rather than administrative fiat, and in his summing-up the next day Mao said “a hundred flowers, a hundred schools” should be the policy for developing science and the arts. At the Supreme State Conference on 2 May he announced it formally, citing Lysenko’s suppression of Morganian genetics in the Soviet Union as a cautionary example. 4 8 9

On 26 May Lu Dingyi gave his report “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” to scientists, physicians, writers and artists at Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai. He called for academic and technical questions to be kept strictly apart from political ones and for scholars not to be labelled politically for their views, upholding freedom of independent thought, of debate, of creation and criticism, and of expressing, maintaining and reserving one’s own opinions. The science budget rose sharply, and a genetics symposium at Qingdao in August restored to Morganian scholars the right to teach, research and publish. Debates opened on the periodisation of history and on the law of value in economics, and literary journals were founded, among them Stars, the first state-supported poetry journal. 9 8 4

Intellectuals did not open up easily, however. Mao had once denounced Liang Shuming as a “reactionary” at a Central Government meeting for criticising the tax burden on the peasants, and in 1955 the Marxist literary theorist Hu Feng, who had submitted a 300,000-word report to the Politburo opposing the party’s control of literature, was arrested as head of a “counter-revolutionary clique”. Mao himself wrote the preface to a compilation of Hu’s letters, and by the authorities’ count some 2,100 people were implicated and 92 arrested. The Sufan campaign against hidden counter-revolutionaries that followed left fear in the universities and institutions. Early criticism was mostly indirect and couched in praise of the campaign itself; most of the letters Zhou Enlai received were cautious suggestions, and he advised Mao that the intellectuals needed more encouragement. 4 10 11

In literature the taboos began to give way first. The young writer Wang Meng’s story “A Newcomer at the Organisation Department” portrayed a bureaucratised party office, and Liu Binyan’s reportage, such as “On the Bridge Worksite” and “The Inside Story of Our Newspaper”, exposed cadres’ complacency and press censorship. The poet Ai Qing wrote the fable “Dream of the Flower Grower”, in which a gardener who raised only one kind of rose is chided in a dream by the other flowers for shutting his gates on them. Mao referred to these works repeatedly in his speeches of February and March 1957; of the Sichuan poet Liu Shahe’s “Pieces on Plants” he said it was a “poisonous weed” to be criticised, but that even a hundred such pieces would cause no chaos. 4 12 13

The “contradictions” speech and the rectification directive

At a conference of provincial, municipal and autonomous-region party secretaries in January 1957 Mao said that writings hostile to Marxism should also be openly published so that ways could be found to refute them, and that it was better to “vaccinate” the masses by exposing them to harmful ideas. In internal speeches of the same period, though, he also said that just as grain and weeds grow together in a field, “poisonous weeds” had to be hoed every year, and that uprooted weeds made fertiliser. He complained that nine out of ten senior cadres did not agree, or only half agreed, with the policy, including “long-term coexistence and mutual supervision” with the democratic parties. The call to let flowers bloom and the call to weed were there together from the start. 4 8

On 27 February Mao delivered “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” to the Eleventh (Enlarged) Session of the Supreme State Conference. Distinguishing two types of contradiction differing in nature, those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people, he said that contradictions remained in socialist society and that the non-antagonistic contradictions among the people were to be resolved by democratic methods, persuasion and education, and “unity, criticism, unity”. His remark that right and wrong often take time to become clear, and that Copernicus’ solar system and Darwin’s theory of evolution were both once held to be erroneous, reassured the intellectuals. The admission that socialism too had contradictions was received as an original Chinese theory, different from the Soviet doctrine of a “society without contradictions”. The speech was relayed across the country by recording, and at the National Conference on Propaganda Work in March Mao repeated that the trouble was “not too much blooming but too little”. 14 15 8

Resistance inside the party was strong. Why, it was asked, should the party submit to supervision after winning the revolution? The country would fall into disorder and work would become harder. Most of the leadership, including Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen, were reluctant to rectify the party by bringing in people from outside it. From 17 March to early April Mao toured Tianjin, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Zhejiang to persuade local cadres. On 27 April the Central Committee issued its “Directive on the Rectification Movement”, deciding on a rectification against bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism, and the directive, printed in the People’s Daily on 1 May, promised the principle: “say all you know and say it without reserve; the speaker is not to blame, the listener should take heed.” 4 16 8 17

On 30 April Mao gathered the leaders of the democratic parties on the Tiananmen rostrum, repeated the same promise and asked them to help the party rectify itself. The democratic parties descended from the “third force” of the 1940s, such as the China Democratic League founded in 1941 and the Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party; they had joined the new government in 1949 through the Political Consultative Conference that adopted the Common Programme, but had been losing real power since the 1954 constitution. In the first Central People’s Government three of the six vice-chairmen and eleven of the twenty-four ministers had come from the democratic parties. The Eighth Congress in 1956 had confirmed “long-term coexistence and mutual supervision” between the Communists and the democratic parties as official policy. Zhang Bojun, vice-chairman of the Democratic League, minister of communications and head of the Guangming Daily, was greatly encouraged, calling Mao’s talk of contradictions among the people a theoretical breakthrough. 17 18 8 19

The great blooming: the “political design institute” and the “party’s empire”

From early May the Central United Front Work Department held thirteen forums for leaders of the democratic parties and non-party figures and twenty-five for business people, and institutions, universities, research institutes and arts bodies held forums of their own. The newspapers printed the criticism as it came. Between 1 May and 7 June millions of letters poured into the Premier’s Office and other authorities. This phase is called the “great blooming and contending”, or the “spring of 1957”. Most of the criticism said that the party had lost its revolutionary edge and become bureaucratic, monopolising power and privilege and drifting away from the masses; complaints followed about the mistreatment of intellectuals and the self-censorship it had produced. Most of it, however, took socialism and the legitimacy of the Communist Party for granted and proposed ways to make the existing system work better. 8 4

In forum remarks printed in the People’s Daily on 22 May, Zhang Bojun said that industry had many design institutes but politics had none, and that the CPPCC, the National People’s Congress, the democratic parties and the people’s organisations should be politics’ “four design institutes”, discussing basic state policies in advance. He proposed open discussion of the discontent with party-committee rule in the universities and said the party and government should resolve to review the problems left over from the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, the Three-anti campaign and the Sufan purge. On 22 May Luo Longji, vice-chairman of the League and minister of the forest industry, proposed a committee within the NPC and the CPPCC, made up of the ruling party, the democratic parties and non-party figures, to review the errors of the Three-anti, Five-anti and Sufan campaigns. Zhang Naiqi of the business community had already called for a review of Three-anti and Five-anti cases the year before. 19 20 8 21

Chu Anping, who had run the liberal magazine The Observer in the 1940s, became editor-in-chief of the Guangming Daily in April on Hu Qiaomu’s recommendation, and when the paper’s Communist party group withdrew on 19 April it became for the first time a true democratic-party paper. On 1 June he spoke at the United Front Work Department forum on “Some Opinions for Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou”, criticising the mentality of the “party’s empire”, in which the party treated the whole country as its own. The full text was printed prominently the next day in the People’s Daily and the Guangming Daily, and on the 6th Lu Yuwen, an assistant secretary-general of the State Council, rebutted it as a grave error at a forum chaired by Xi Zhongxun. Mao later named Zhang Bojun’s “political design institute”, Luo Longji’s “redress committee” and Chu Anping’s “party’s empire” the three great political theories of the rightists. The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, who had cautiously suggested reviving sociology, was later branded a “poisonous weed” and a “big rightist” as well. 22 23 20 24

The criticism spread beyond the intellectuals. Peasants attacked the inefficiency of the cooperatives and demanded their land back; workers complained that the wage system was irrational and that they were forced to work overtime without pay. Some said life had been better under the Kuomintang, and some minority activists called for independent states. Huang Xinping, a high-school teacher in Tianjin, asked “why can we not have a system that allows each party to take turns being in power?”, and there was talk that the democratic parties should have armed forces of their own and that a “Hyde Park” of open speech should be opened. In June a student disturbance broke out at a secondary school in Hanyang, Hubei (the Hanyang No. 1 Middle School incident). Mao is reported to have fumed that fewer than eight years into Communist rule there were more than 300,000 complaints: “must I go back to Jinggangshan?” 4 25 17 8

The “democracy wall” at Peking University

On the morning of 19 May second-year history students at Peking University pasted the first big-character poster on the south wall of the main canteen, asking who the university’s delegate to the coming Third National Congress of the Youth League was and how he had been chosen. When another poster, “A bold proposal”, called for a “democracy wall”, the walls and notice boards around the large and small canteens were covered with posters by nightfall, 162 of them by the afternoon of the 20th. The party secretary Jiang Longji announced on behalf of the party committee that it supported the posters. From the 22nd debating forums and platforms sprang up everywhere; on the 26th students went to a sports meeting at Tsinghua to appeal for solidarity, and the movement spread to other Beijing universities and to Nankai University in Tianjin. It is known as the May 19th Movement. 26 4

In “The First Poisonous Weed” the physics student Tan Tianrong wrote that newspaper editors’ ignorance of Marxism was a Great Wall shutting out the truth, and in “Hu Feng Is Not a Counter-revolutionary” Liu Qidi demanded Hu Feng’s release. “It Is Time”, a poem by the Chinese-department students Zhang Yuanxun and Shen Zeyi, sang that its spark came from “May Fourth”. Students demanded disclosure of the cases wrongly struggled against in the purge of counter-revolutionaries, access to their own personnel files, an end to banned books and to compulsory political courses, and an end to blind imitation of the Soviet Union. One poster, citing the gap between cadres’ and workers’ pay, argued that a “new class” was forming. On the 29th students founded the Hundred Flowers Society, declaring that while upholding socialism they would debate any question freely, and published the magazine The Square. 26 4

The greatest stir was caused by Lin Xiling, a fourth-year law student at Renmin University. A former army clerk sent to the university as a cadre-student, she came to a Peking University student-union debate on the Hu Feng case on 23 May, took the platform and argued that legally the evidence against the “Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique” was insufficient: how could submitting a memorandum to the Central Committee be counter-revolutionary? Public ownership was better than private, she said, but the present socialism was an “atypical” socialism grown on a feudal foundation; genuine socialism meant public ownership together with socialist democracy and a sound socialist legal system. She spoke six times at the two universities in May and June, and disclosed the contents of Khrushchev’s secret speech, obtained through her fiancé, a secretary to Hu Yaobang. When the People’s Daily reported her speech in an internal bulletin, Liu Shaoqi issued instructions on it himself. 27 26 25

The students’ criticism largely attacked party privilege and the lack of democracy in the name of socialism. Where the democratic parties had asked for a share of power and organs of supervision, the students asked about the roots of the Soviet-type system itself: the extreme concentration of state power and the absence of a legal order. One poster wrote that the democracy “that began on 19 May and is taking shape on Democracy Square is neither a copy of the Soviet form nor an import of the West European form, but a democracy grown from the socialist soil of today’s China”. At the same time the young nuclear physicist Fang Lizhi, a former physics student, was drafting a letter of suggestions on education with colleagues that was never finished; when the Anti-Rightist Campaign began, out of loyalty to the party, he confessed it himself. University speech was later punished most harshly: 716 people were labelled rightists at Peking University alone, and Jiang Longji was demoted because that was fewer than at Tsinghua. 26 28 4

8 June: “What is this for?”

The direction was already changing in mid-May. On 14 May the Central Committee directed that the remarks of right-leaning and anti-Communist elements be reported “as they are, without embellishment” so that the masses could see them for what they were, and on the 15th Mao wrote “Things Are Beginning to Change” and circulated it among senior cadres. It called revisionism inside the party a bigger danger than dogmatism and put the rightists among intellectuals outside the party at between one and ten per cent. “To date, the Rightists have yet to reach the climax of their attack, and they are going at it in high spirits… We shall let the Rightists run amuck for a time and let them reach their climax.” There was no need to bait the hook, he wrote, for large numbers of fish had surfaced of themselves, and they were “man-eating sharks”. The article went down to the whole party only on 12 June. Meanwhile the newspapers went on printing criticism, and the critics knew nothing of the change. 29 30 8 4

The pretext was an anonymous letter. On 6 June Lu Yuwen, who had rebutted Chu Anping at a State Council forum, read out a threatening letter he had received, and the next day Mao told Hu Qiaomu and Wu Lengxi that this was the perfect chance to counter-attack the rightists. On 8 June the Central Committee issued Mao’s inner-party directive “Muster Our Forces to Repulse the Rightists’ Wild Attacks”, which called this “a great battle” fought both inside and outside the party: unless it was won, socialism could not be built and there was some danger of a “Hungarian incident”. The same day the People’s Daily editorial “What Is This For?” declared that a small number of rightists, in the name of “helping the Communist Party rectify itself”, were trying to overthrow the Communist Party and the working class. The editorial ended by saying the party would still listen to well-meant criticism, but that day the Hundred Flowers ended. 17 31 25 4

The counter-attack continued through editorials. When Yao Wenyuan, a young Shanghai critic, wrote an article attacking Wen Hui Pao on 10 June, the People’s Daily reprinted it on the 14th with “The Bourgeois Orientation of Wen Hui Pao over a Period of Time”. On 1 July Mao’s own editorial “Wen Hui Pao’s Bourgeois Orientation Should Be Criticized” wrote: “Some people say this was a covert scheme. We say it was an overt one. For we made it plain to the enemy beforehand: only when ghosts and monsters are allowed to come into the open can they be wiped out; only when poisonous weeds are allowed to sprout from the soil can they be uprooted.” It charged the Democratic League and the Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party with acting with organisation, plan and programme, and traced the black clouds that had roiled China’s sky all spring to the “Zhang–Luo alliance” of Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji; the promise that “the speaker is not to blame” did not apply to them. 32 33 8 17

On 19 June the People’s Daily published Mao’s February speech for the first time. In this version, which Mao had gone over and added to, appeared six criteria for telling “fragrant flowers” from “poisonous weeds” that had not been in the February speech: whether words and actions helped to unite the people of all nationalities, benefited socialist transformation and construction, consolidated the people’s democratic dictatorship, consolidated democratic centralism, strengthened the leadership of the Communist Party, and benefited international socialist unity, the most important being the socialist path and party leadership. A speech that had invited criticism became the yardstick for judging it. At the Qingdao conference in July Mao said that Beijing had struck at 1,500 rightists and the whole country should strike at ten Beijings’ worth; apart from a few well-known figures, rightists should be sent to re-education through labour, and regulations for it should be drawn up. 14 15 4 17

Criteria and quotas for “rightists”

The campaign was run in practice by the party’s general secretary, Deng Xiaoping. A Secretariat meeting he chaired on 23 July decided that the organisational handling of rightists need not be rushed, but that the United Front, Propaganda and Organisation departments should produce plans by December. On 2 September the Centre directed that rightists inside the party be treated exactly like those outside it, warning that “the longer their party standing and the higher their posts, the greater the harm”, and that no one was to be spared for being a party member. The “Criteria for Identifying Rightists” of 15 October defined as rightists those who opposed the socialist system and the party’s basic economic policies, opposed the proletarian dictatorship and democratic centralism, opposed the Communist Party’s leading role in national life, split the people’s unity, organised or joined anti-party cliques, or helped such people; their leaders were classed separately as “ultra-rightists”. 34 17 25

The criteria were broad and the quotas mechanical. Each unit received a target of roughly five per cent to be identified as rightists, and units with only a handful of intellectuals, or where no one had spoken out, still had to fill the number. Many became rightists through anonymous denunciations, factional quarrels or personal grudges, and officials and intellectuals used the campaign to strike at rivals. Critics of the government from the left, young Communists and Trotskyists among them, were also swept up as “rightists”. In the summer and early autumn of 1957 some 400,000 urban residents were branded rightists and sent to camps or to labour in the countryside, and another count puts the total at over 300,000 by the end of the year. The campaign continued into the “anti-rightist make-up lessons” of 1958. 25 4 17 35

The first targets were prominent figures of the democratic parties and the press. In January 1958 Zhang Bojun lost nine posts, among them minister of communications, vice-chairman of the CPPCC, chairman of the Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party, first vice-chairman of the Democratic League and head of the Guangming Daily, becoming “China’s number one rightist”; Luo Longji, “number two”, lost his ministry of the forest industry and his seat in the NPC, and his salary was cut from grade four to grade nine. Among those who attacked him was Wu Han, a historian of the same League, and the journalist Pu Xixiu, who had lived with him for ten years, wrote at the party’s request a denunciation calling him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Chu Anping was dismissed from the Guangming Daily in November 1957 and in January 1958 labelled an “anti-party, anti-people, anti-socialist bourgeois rightist”. In law, jurists who had argued for an independent judiciary were moved to other jobs, and law journals ceased publication or reverted to propaganda. 19 36 20 22 23 25

In literature and the arts Zhou Yang attacked Ding Ling again, who had been accused in the Sufan campaign of 1955 of forming an “anti-party clique” with Chen Qixia, and in September Mao named her a bourgeois intellectual who should be expelled from the party. The poet Ai Qing, who had defended her, the critic Feng Xuefeng and the playwright Wu Zuguang were labelled rightists, Liu Binyan was expelled from the party and Wang Meng was attacked with him. Fei Xiaotong of the Democratic League was driven out of academia and had to confess his “crimes”. The young Zhu Rongji of the State Planning Commission, the mechanics scientist Qian Weichang, the economist Gu Zhun and the former Yunnan warlord Long Yun were also labelled. Fang Lizhi did hard labour at Zanhuang, Hebei, from December 1957 to August 1958 and was expelled from the party in early 1959. The economist Ma Yinchu presented his “New Population Theory” to the NPC in June 1957, was attacked in two rounds in 1958–1960 and was removed as president of Peking University in 1960; his call for population control was branded Malthusian. 37 13 12 24 25 28 38 39

Punishment: re-education through labour and Jiabiangou

On 26 July the plenary State Council passed the “Decision on the Question of Re-education through Labour”, submitting it to the NPC Standing Committee for approval, and on 4 August the People’s Daily published it, explaining that for “bad elements” on whom persuasion and simple punishment were both useless and who could not be kept in their workplaces, taking them in and remoulding them through labour was the best solution. Re-education through labour confined people by administrative decision of the police, without trial; a practice used against counter-revolutionaries since 1955, it was given legal form in the Anti-Rightist Campaign. At first there was not even an upper limit on terms, which was set at four years only in 1979. The system lasted until the NPC Standing Committee abolished it in December 2013. 17 40 41

In 1958 the Centre had rightists dealt with in six ways according to the gravity of their “crimes”: from the heaviest, re-education through labour, supervised labour, retention on probation, dismissal, demotion with pay cuts, and exemption from administrative penalty. Those given the first two left their workplaces for heavy labour on the frontiers, in the countryside and in camps. The Xingkaihu camp, run directly by the Beijing Public Security Bureau, was set up in haste because the prisons were full, and mixed political prisoners with criminals who were used to watch them. On the reclamation farms of the Great Northern Wilderness officials’ zeal produced food shortages and crushing work, and many died or took their own lives. By contrast the “great rightists” named by the Centre, such as Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji, kept some of their ministerial privileges, while the nameless rightists of the grassroots met far harsher fates. 17 25

The worst place was Jiabiangou farm on the edge of the Badain Jaran desert north-east of Jiuquan, Gansu. Built as a labour-reform farm for forty to fifty prisoners, it became a re-education-through-labour farm in 1957, began receiving rightists from across Gansu that November and held up to 3,074 in 1958. The land, ringed by salt marsh and desert, could not feed them, and during the famine food was withheld on the logic that “rightists are reactionaries”. In September 1960 some 1,900 were moved to a new farm at Mingshuitan in Gaotai county that had no facilities at all; people ate leaves, rats and finally the flesh of dead inmates. In November the minister of the interior Qian Ying discovered the situation and a rescue began, but only about two hundred came back alive from Mingshuitan. The farm was closed in October 1961, and the authorities forged medical records attributing the deaths to natural causes rather than starvation. 42 43

The label did not stop with the individual. Rightists were grouped with landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries and bad elements among the “five black categories”; every party member among them was expelled and more than half lost their public posts. Their families could not find work, and their children were discriminated against in schooling and jobs, most never going beyond junior middle school. Lin Xiling was kept at her university under supervised labour, arrested for counter-revolution in July 1958 and sentenced in 1959 to fifteen years. When the defence minister Peng Dehuai criticised the Great Leap Forward at the Lushan Conference in 1959 and was branded head of an “anti-party clique”, the same logic was turned inward in the “anti-right-deviation” campaign, in which more than three million cadres and party members were criticised as “right opportunists”. In the silence the Anti-Rightist Campaign produced, the false reports and errors of the Great Leap Forward went unchecked. 17 27 44 25

From “removing the cap” to “correction”

In September 1959 the Centre decided to mark the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic by “removing the caps” of rightists who had truly repented, while keeping their number to about twenty per cent of all rightists. The same year Zhou Enlai obtained Mao’s permission to rehabilitate 40,000 “rightist” intellectuals. Between 1959 and 1964 more than 300,000 had their caps removed, but they carried a new tag as “capless rightists”, and most were attacked again in the Cultural Revolution. Chu Anping, dragged through struggle sessions in August 1966, attempted suicide and disappeared in September; his fate is still unknown. Zhang Bojun died of stomach cancer in 1969 and Luo Longji of heart disease in 1965. 17 45 22

Rehabilitation came only after Mao’s death. In 1977 Hu Yaobang, in charge of the Central Party School, opened the review of unjust cases with People’s Daily articles, and that December he became head of the Organisation Department. At a conference held at Yantai, Shandong, in spring 1978 by the United Front, Public Security, Organisation, Propaganda and Civil Affairs departments, conservatives who thought removing the caps was enough faced Hu’s side, which demanded full rehabilitation. Central Document No. 11 of April said that “the 1957 anti-rightist struggle itself was not wrong; the problem was its enlargement”, removing all caps but saying nothing of rehabilitation. After the debate on the criterion of truth changed the climate, Document No. 55 of 17 September laid down that “those who should not have been labelled rightists but were wrongly labelled shall be corrected in accordance with the facts”, restoring their political reputation, jobs and party membership. Those corrected received no economic compensation, however. 17 25

By 1981 more than 540,000 rightists had been “corrected”, and the 315,000 handled as “middle-rightists” or “anti-socialist elements” were rehabilitated as well. But Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Peng Wenying, Chu Anping and Chen Renbing were kept by central decision, together with 91 named by local authorities, as 96 rightists whose “caps were removed but whose original verdicts stand, uncorrected”. Lin Xiling, although Hu Yaobang ordered her rehabilitation three times, received a verdict of “no correction” in 1980 because of opposition from the Beijing party committee and the former public-security establishment, and became the only Beijing student rightist never corrected; she left for France in 1983. While admitting “mistakes”, the party kept specimens to show that the campaign itself had been right. 17 46 27

The official verdict was fixed in Deng Xiaoping’s words. In February 1980 he said: “In the anti-rightist struggle of 1957 we were activists, and I bear responsibility for its enlargement; I was the general secretary.” In March he said the struggle “must still be affirmed” and that “the mistake lay in its enlargement”. The June 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic” held that the rectification had been a normal step in developing socialist democracy and that the counter-attack against the offensive of a very small number of bourgeois rightists was “entirely correct and necessary”, but that the struggle had been seriously enlarged, wrongly labelling intellectuals, patriots and party cadres as rightists with unfortunate consequences. The third history resolution, of 2021, repeated that the anti-rightist struggle had been “seriously enlarged”. 17 4

Assessment: “open scheme” or miscalculation?

The oldest question is Mao’s intent. Mao himself spoke of an “overt scheme” in the editorial of 1 July, and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao and Harry Wu, a victim as a teenager, hold that it was a trap to draw out opponents from the start. The phrase “luring the snakes out of their holes” spread widely soon after the campaign began, yet Li Shenzhi said he could never find its source. The present academic consensus, on the other hand, and scholars such as Lin Chun, Christine Vidal and Dayton Lekner, argue that Mao sought to avert a Hungarian-style crisis and to draw the intellectuals into socialist construction, and changed course when caught off guard by the scale and sharpness of the criticism; in this view the “open scheme” and the “snakes” were retrospective attempts to appear more in control than he had been. His physician Li Zhisui called the campaign a gamble on the calculation that real counter-revolutionaries were few and that intellectuals would criticise only what Mao himself wanted reformed. MacFarquhar’s Origins of the Cultural Revolution, volume one, which analysed the leadership conflicts of 1956–1957 as the starting point of the Cultural Revolution, became a classic of this debate. 4 47 8 32

The scale of the damage is also disputed. The official count from the rehabilitation after 1978 gives 552,973 people labelled rightists in 1957 and in the “make-up lessons” of 1958, of whom 552,877 were corrected (the often-quoted 552,877 is the number corrected). The figure leaves out “middle-rightists”, “anti-socialist elements”, families and those punished without a label. Researchers estimate the real number of victims at one to two million, three million on a broad count and five million if the Socialist Education Movement is included, and one claim based on declassified central archives gives 3.17 million rightists plus 1.43 million middle-rightists. Incomplete statistics put abnormal deaths at over 4,000, far short when set against an estimate of about 2,500 deaths at Jiabiangou alone (a 1964 Gansu document counts 2,369 people sent there; the writer Zhao Xu estimates about 3,500). 17 25 42 43

On the consequences opinion is more united. The Anti-Rightist Campaign effectively ended “long-term coexistence and mutual supervision”, reducing the democratic parties to political decoration, and moved political struggle from the party versus forces outside it to line struggles inside the party. The Eighth Congress’s declaration that “large-scale class struggle” was over was reversed within a year and class struggle again overrode economic construction, and the Great Leap Forward began where the objections of agronomists and intellectuals had been silenced. A 2018 study by Zhaojin Zeng and Joshua Eisenman of 144 counties in Anhui, Henan and Jiangsu found that the higher the share of the population declared rightists, the worse the economic and educational outcomes even into 2000. The professionalisation of the judiciary was halted too. Deng Xiaoping later said that “before 1957 Comrade Mao Zedong’s leadership was correct, and after the anti-rightist struggle there were more and more mistakes.” 17 25 3

The question the episode left for the socialist movement is a heavy one. Watching Hungary, Mao spoke more sharply than anyone of the danger of a bureaucratised party cut off from the masses, and the theory of “contradictions among the people” was an important admission that socialist society has conflicts and that they should be resolved by discussion, not repression. When students demanded democracy and a legal order in the name of “genuine socialism”, the party turned their criticism into a contradiction with the enemy. Maurice Meisner wrote that the Hundred Flowers was the time when China broke with the Soviet model of development, and that it was “a cruel and tragic irony” that this break was not accompanied by a break with Stalinist methods in political and intellectual life. Lu Dingyi, who had delivered the 1956 Hundred Flowers report, criticised in his last years Mao’s reduction of the “hundred schools” to two, proletarian and bourgeois, which had turned scholarly dispute into class struggle, and reflected that from the Anti-Rightist Campaign to the Cultural Revolution the roots of one-man rule had never been examined, so the error recurred. In late 1986 Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan and Xu Liangying wrote to well-known rightists of 1957 suggesting a meeting in memory of the event, a sign that the memory had passed into the next generation’s demands for democracy. 48 14 9 28 26