Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–1953)
반혁명 진압 운동 (1950~1953)
The large-scale campaign of repression of the early People’s Republic launched with China’s entry into the Korean War by Mao Zedong’s “Directive on Suppressing Counter-revolutionary Activities” of 10 October 1950 (the Double Ten Directive). It targeted Kuomintang remnants and agents, secret societies, “bandits” and religious sects; Mao handed down execution quotas proportional to population, and public executions at mass rallies peaked in spring 1951. A 1954 Ministry of Public Security report counted 712,000 executed, 1.29 million imprisoned and 1.2 million placed under control.
In depth
The policies of the first year were relatively moderate, and Liu Shaoqi criticised indiscriminate purges in the provinces. When the Korean War broke out Mao told the public security minister Luo Ruiqing that “we must not miss this opportunity”, and the Double Ten Directive launched nationwide suppression. Mao argued that roughly 0.1 per cent of the population would have to be executed to eliminate the worst counter-revolutionaries, later lowering this to 0.05 per cent with a ceiling of 0.1 per cent. In January 1951 he wired Shanghai that one to two thousand executions might be needed that year, and told Guangdong it was “very good” that it had already killed more than 3,700. Many provinces did not have enough “counter-revolutionaries” to fill the quota, nor the facilities for mass arrests.
In Beijing alone some 30,000 rallies were attended by over three million people. A 1954 report by Deputy Public Security Minister Xu Zirong counted 2.62 million arrested and 712,000 executed, and in 1957 Mao said 700,000 had been killed in 1950–1952. The historian Yang Kuisong holds that the real number was much larger because local officials concealed executions after Mao mildly criticised excessive killing in 1951; researchers’ estimates run from 500,000 to two million. The campaign overlapped with the killing of landlords in land reform, and the two are hard to separate. The quota system it left behind was used in later campaigns as a measure of local cadres’ results.