Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns
삼반·오반 운동
Two mass campaigns of the early People’s Republic. The Three-anti (from late 1951) targeted corruption, waste and bureaucratism among party and state cadres; the Five-anti (1952) targeted bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing state economic information by private businessmen. Denunciations and “tiger-hunting” meetings put hundreds of thousands under investigation and produced waves of suicides in Shanghai and elsewhere. The Five-anti subordinated the national bourgeoisie to the state and prepared the socialist transformation after 1953.
In depth
The Three-anti began under the fiscal strain of the Korean War. Mao extended nationwide an anti-corruption drive that Gao Gang had first run in the Northeast, and the execution of the Tianjin prefectural secretaries Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan signalled that the party would apply the death penalty to its own cadres. Quotas of “tigers” to be caught produced over-denunciation.
The Five-anti began by identifying capitalists as the “backers” of the cadre corruption exposed in the Three-anti. Workers and shop assistants were organised to denounce their employers, and fines and back-taxes transferred business assets to the state. The protection of national capital promised by New Democracy effectively ended with the campaign, leading to the 1953 general line for the transition and the joint state-private enterprises of 1956.
Together with the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries (1950–1951) the two movements formed the repressive framework of the early People’s Republic. Contemporary reports convey the atmosphere of the mass accusation meetings, and historians such as Dikötter now reread the period as “the tragedy of liberation”.