Peking University May 19th Movement (1957)
베이징대 5·19 운동 (1957)
The student democracy movement that began on 19 May 1957 when Peking University students put up big-character posters on a “democracy wall”. Answering the rectification’s call for “great blooming”, students criticised party privilege, the excesses of the purge of counter-revolutionaries, imitation of the Soviet Union and the absence of a legal order, and founded the Hundred Flowers Society; the movement spread to other universities in Beijing and Tianjin. It stopped when the Anti-Rightist Campaign began in June, and many participants were labelled rightists, 716 at Peking University alone.
In depth
The first poster was put up on the morning of 19 May by second-year history students on the south wall of the main canteen, asking who the university’s delegate to the Youth League’s Third Congress was and how he had been chosen. When a proposal for a “democracy wall” followed, the area around the canteens was covered with posters that night, 162 of them by the afternoon of the 20th. The party secretary Jiang Longji announced his support for the posters. From the 22nd debating forums and platforms sprang up everywhere, on the 26th students went to Tsinghua to appeal for solidarity, and Nankai University in Tianjin joined in. The Hundred Flowers Society, founded on the 29th, declared that while upholding socialism it would debate any question freely, and published the magazine The Square.
Characteristic texts included the physics student Tan Tianrong’s “The First Poisonous Weed”, Liu Qidi’s “Hu Feng Is Not a Counter-revolutionary” demanding Hu Feng’s release, the poem “It Is Time” by the Chinese-department students Zhang Yuanxun and Shen Zeyi, Wang Shuyao’s essay tracing Stalin’s errors to the extreme concentration of state power, and Zhou Dajue’s essay seeing a “new class” in cadre privilege. At the 23 May debate on Hu Feng, Lin Xiling of Renmin University declared present-day socialism an “atypical” socialism. Students demanded an end to banned books and compulsory political courses, access to personnel files and disclosure of the cases wrongly struggled against in the Sufan purge, and the view that the roots of the “three evils” lay not in individual character but in the political system, to be remedied by expanding socialist democracy and the legal order, became the mainstream of the movement.
When the Anti-Rightist Campaign began in June the movement stopped. At Peking University 716 people were labelled rightists, and Jiang Longji was demoted for having labelled fewer than Tsinghua and left the university in 1959. Most participants were rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, but Lin Xiling never was. The big-character poster and the “democracy wall” reappeared in the Xidan Democracy Wall of 1978.