Hundred Flowers Campaign
백화제방·백가쟁명
The campaign in which Mao Zedong, under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, invited intellectuals in 1956 to criticise the party. Intended after Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Hungarian revolution to check party bureaucratism, it produced in May–June 1957 an outpouring of criticism of one-party monopoly and Soviet imitation from intellectuals, the minor democratic parties and students. On 8 June Mao reversed course and the Anti-Rightist Campaign began.
In depth
The slogan was first raised in May 1956 and theorised in Mao’s February 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”. Mao said that socialist society too had antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and that the latter must be resolved by discussion and persuasion. Most of the leadership was reluctant to open the door to intellectuals, and the real “blooming” began only in early May 1957.
For several weeks criticism poured out in newspapers and forums. Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji of the democratic parties proposed a “political design institute” and the separation of party and state; students pasted big-character posters on a “democracy wall” at Peking University, and some criticised the Soviet intervention in Hungary. When the criticism reached the party’s leading role itself, Mao declared on 8 June, in the editorial “What is this for?”, that the rightists were attacking.
Whether the campaign was from the start an “open plot” to draw out opponents, or a reversal after criticism grew beyond expectation, remains disputed; Mao himself later said he had “lured the snakes out of their holes”. Either way the result was the same: those who spoke carried the rightist label for the next twenty years.