Contradictions among the people
인민 내부 모순
The concept systematised by Mao Zedong in his speech to the Supreme State Conference on 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”. Contradictions persist in socialist society, he argued, and unlike the antagonistic contradictions between ourselves and the enemy, the non-antagonistic contradictions among the people must be resolved not by coercion but by democratic methods, persuasion and education, and “unity, criticism, unity”. It was the theoretical basis of the Hundred Flowers, but the six criteria of the revised text published in June 1957 became the yardstick by which the Anti-Rightist Campaign turned critics into contradictions with the enemy.
In depth
The speech distinguished the two contradictions thus:
We are confronted with two types of social contradictions -- those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people. The two are totally different in nature.
Mao said the scope of “the people” varied with the period, and that all classes and groups supporting socialist construction belonged to it; even the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie could, if properly handled, be one among the people. The method he advanced, “unity, criticism, unity”, generalised the way dogmatists had been handled in the Yan’an rectification of 1942. The admission that socialism retained contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production, and between the superstructure and the base, was received as an original Chinese theory against the Soviet doctrine of a “society without contradictions”, and is seen as extending “On Contradiction” of 1937 to the socialist period.
Relayed by recording, the speech invited the “great blooming” of the intellectuals and the democratic parties. But the revised text printed in the People’s Daily on 19 June added six criteria absent in February: whether words and deeds benefited national unity, socialist transformation and construction, the people’s democratic dictatorship, democratic centralism, the leadership of the Communist Party and international socialist unity, the socialist path and party leadership being the most important. The Anti-Rightist Campaign classed the contradiction between the rightists and the people as one with the enemy, and the party later admitted that this judgement had made the punishments far too severe.
In the readjustment of 1961–1962 literary and scientific policy again used the six criteria as its boundary.