Mao’s China · CHAPTER 5 ·
Hundred Flowers Campaign
Chapter 5 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “A Hundred Flowers”
In 1956–57 Mao invited China’s educated people to criticise the Communist Party under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom”. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the Hungarian rising, criticism in May and June 1957 went to the Party’s foundations, and within weeks the critics were punished.
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The map above is the world of China, June 1957 — From a Hundred Flowers to the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Hundred Flowers campaign, one of the regime’s organised nationwide drives, shows how little room Mao’s regime would allow for opposition, because Mao invited China’s educated people to criticise the Communist Party in 1956–57 and punished them within weeks of their answer. The Party ruled alone at every level of government, much like a company whose owner appoints every manager, and it had never before asked outsiders to judge it. The invitation came under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, a promise of open debate like a newspaper suddenly allowed a free letters page. Mao had reasons to make the offer. In February 1956 Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader, had denounced Stalin’s crimes, and in October Hungarians rose against their Communist government, so Mao argued that letting grievances out in the open would prevent a Chinese Hungary. In spring 1957 the Party asked non-members to help it correct its faults, and for about five weeks professors, students, writers and leaders of the small “democratic parties”, the non-Communist parties allowed to survive as junior partners, spoke out, many of them attacking the Party’s monopoly of power itself. The criticism went far beyond the mild complaints Mao seems to have expected, and that gap decided what came next.
The Party’s answer came in June 1957, when the People’s Daily, its main newspaper, signalled a counter-attack, and the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed labelled about 550,000 people “rightists”, enemies of socialism, a label that worked like a criminal record imposed without a trial. Units were expected to find their share, often around five percent of their staff, and those labelled lost jobs, homes and marriages; many were sent to labour camps on the frontier, along the routes the dark arrows trace from Beijing, Lanzhou and Shanghai. The hatching on the map is small because this campaign struck the cities, universities and offices, and the three great municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin carry it. Its effects reached much further than its size suggests. The engineers, economists and journalists who might have warned against the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s reckless industrial drive of 1958, had learned that honest criticism could end a career or a life.
The full story
The Hundred Flowers grew out of a crisis in world communism and Mao’s confidence that China was different. Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956 had shown that a Communist leader could be judged and condemned by his own party, and the risings in Poland and Hungary that autumn showed what could happen when grievances were suppressed for too long. Mao’s speech of 27 February 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, drew a line between disagreements among the people, which should be settled by discussion, and conflicts with enemies, which called for force. In April the Communist Party, which ruled alone at every level of government, launched a rectification campaign, a drive to correct its own faults much like an organisation inviting complaints about its managers. It asked outsiders to criticise its “bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism”. Mao seems to have expected mild complaints from grateful intellectuals, and his confidence that the Party had won their loyalty was the premise of the whole experiment.
The criticism that came in May and early June 1957 went to the foundations, because people with seven years of grievances took the invitation literally. Chu Anping, editor of the Guangming Daily, a newspaper for intellectuals, accused the Party of treating the country as its private property, the “Party’s empire”. Leaders of the democratic parties, the small non-Communist parties kept as junior partners since 1949, proposed real power-sharing and a commission to review the injustices of earlier campaigns. At Peking University students covered a wall with posters, and the student Lin Xiling told crowds that the faults lay in the system itself. In Shanghai, which carries the second marker, workers joined a wave of strikes over pay and conditions, and the city’s newspaper Wenhui Bao printed the critics at length. As early as 15 May, Mao had told senior officials in an internal article that “things are beginning to change”, and he waited while the critics revealed themselves. The invitation had become a register of names.
The counter-attack was swift and organised, and Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, who ran its daily business, managed it. The People’s Daily editorial of 8 June asked “What is this for?”, and on 1 July an editorial written by Mao condemned the Wenhui Bao and described the whole episode as an “open plot” to lure enemies into the light. About 550,000 people were labelled “rightists”, enemies of socialism, a label that worked like a criminal record imposed without a trial. Among them were the sociologist Fei Xiaotong, the novelist Ding Ling and Chu Anping himself. A new punishment, “re-education through labour”, created in August 1957, sent people to camps without trial. At Hanyang, schoolchildren’s protests were treated as a “little Hungary” and three adults were executed, and at Jiabiangou in Gansu most of some 3,000 rightists died of hunger by 1961. China’s educated class learned the lesson that silence was the price of survival.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
A trap, or a gamble that went wrong?
Historians have argued since 1957 about whether Mao planned the Hundred Flowers as a trap. Mao himself encouraged that reading after the fact, when his 1 July editorial called it an “open plot” and he spoke of luring snakes out of their holes. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday take him at his word and treat the whole campaign as a deliberate snare. Roderick MacFarquhar, in the first volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, argued that Mao genuinely expected moderate criticism that would help him discipline a bureaucratic Party, and that he changed course in mid-May only when the attacks reached the Party’s right to rule. The internal article of 15 May, “Things are beginning to change”, supports a turning point in the middle of the campaign. Most scholars now hold a mixed view: Mao took a real gamble, and once it went wrong he presented the result as cunning to avoid admitting a mistake. Either way, the outcome for the critics was the same.
Who were the rightists?
The official total of about 550,000 rightists, later revealed by the Party itself when it began reversing the verdicts in 1978, understates the reach of the campaign. Many more people were punished under other labels, such as “anti-socialist elements” or “middle rightists”, and in 1958 the campaign spread into the countryside and the Party’s own ranks. Because units were expected to identify a share of their staff, often cited as around five percent, people were labelled to meet a target, and personal rivalries settled many cases. Those labelled ranged from leaders of the democratic parties, such as Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji, to schoolteachers, engineers and students who had spoken once at a meeting. Families shared the stigma: children of rightists were barred from university and the army. Almost all the labels were removed in 1978–80, but by then many of the accused had died in camps or in the Cultural Revolution. The scale of the campaign was set as much by quotas as by anything the victims said.
Workers and students in 1957
The Hundred Flowers is usually remembered as an episode among intellectuals, and the evidence shows that it reached further. Elizabeth Perry’s research in the Shanghai archives found a wave of strikes, slowdowns and protests in the spring of 1957, counted in the hundreds, by workers angry about pay, housing and the loss of benefits after private firms were turned into joint enterprises. Students in Beijing, Wuhan and other cities organised debates and posters, and some school pupils, as at Hanyang, marched over their own grievances. The Party treated these protests as more dangerous than professors’ speeches, because workers and students could act together, as they had in Hungary. Mao’s distinction between contradictions among the people and conflicts with enemies gave officials a simple tool: any protest could be moved from the first category to the second by declaring its leaders rightists. The campaign therefore shows both the breadth of discontent in 1957 and the method by which it was contained.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Khrushchev’s secret speech. On 25 February 1956 Khrushchev told the Soviet party congress that Stalin had been a criminal and a self-glorifying tyrant. The speech shook every Communist party, because it showed that a leader’s record could be condemned by his successors. Mao was uneasy about the attack on a personality cult that resembled his own, and he concluded that China needed its own way to air grievances before they built up. He also wanted to show that the Chinese party, unlike the Soviet one, could face criticism without collapsing.
Hungary and Poland as warnings. Two risings in Eastern Europe convinced Mao that repression alone bred explosions. In October 1956 workers in Poland forced a change of leadership, and in Hungary a rising against the Communist government was crushed by Soviet tanks, with some 2,500 Hungarians killed. Letting people criticise officials, he argued, would allow the Party to correct its faults and prevent a Chinese Hungary. The lesson he drew was the opposite of the one Moscow drew, because Soviet leaders concluded that any opening invited revolt.
Mao’s confidence after collectivisation. By the end of 1956 collectivisation was complete, private business had been absorbed, and the First Five-Year Plan was succeeding. Mao believed the Party had won the loyalty of the educated class and could afford to hear its complaints. That confidence, and his wish to use outside criticism to shake up a bureaucratic Party he distrusted, made the invitation seem safe. He misjudged how much the campaigns of the early 1950s had cost him in the trust of the people he was now inviting to speak.
Real grievances after seven years. There was a great deal to criticise by 1957. Intellectuals had been through thought reform and the purges of 1951–55, the democratic parties had titles without power, workers had lost benefits when firms were nationalised, and students resented assignments and admissions quotas. Once permission was given, these grievances poured out faster and more sharply than anyone in the leadership had expected. The speed of the outpouring was itself evidence of how much had been suppressed since 1949.
THE TURNING POINT
8 June and 1 July 1957. The People’s Daily editorials of 8 June and 1 July 1957 are the hinge because they turned an invitation into a hunt and defined criticism of the Party as enmity to the state. Before them, the Party had presented itself as willing to be corrected; after them, the critics’ own words became the evidence against them, and the phrase “open plot” told everyone that frankness had been a test. The editorial attacking Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao, written by Mao, made clear that the leader himself had decided. No later invitation to criticise would be trusted, and the silence that followed shaped every decision of 1958.
What it changed
No one left to warn. The economists, engineers, statisticians and journalists who might have exposed the impossible targets of 1958 had been labelled, sent away or frightened into silence. When the Great Leap Forward began, the experts who remained in office competed to praise it, and doubts were kept private. The famine that followed was made possible in part by a silence that the Anti-Rightist Campaign had created a year earlier.
Re-education through labour. The punishment created in August 1957 allowed police to send people to camps for years without trial. It was used against rightists, petty offenders and later political suspects, and it lasted until 2013, one of the longest-lived institutions of the Mao era. Even in its final years it held well over a hundred thousand people, and it gave the police a way to punish without courts that every later campaign used.
From rightists to “right opportunists”. The language of 1957 was turned against the Party itself two years later. At Lushan in 1959 Mao called the defence minister’s criticism of the Leap “right opportunism”, and a campaign against it purged officials across the country, so the Anti-Rightist method moved from intellectuals to the Party’s own ranks. Officials who had watched the critics of 1957 punished now learned that even senior comrades could be labelled for honest doubts.
A generation of intellectuals broken. Rightists spent up to twenty years in camps, villages or menial jobs, and their children carried the label too. When the Cultural Revolution came, many of the 1957 victims were attacked again, and the rehabilitations of 1978–80 came too late for those who had died. Those who survived became a generation of cautious professionals who remembered that candour had been punished.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Hundred Flowers campaign a genuine opening that failed, or a deliberate trap?
The evidence points to a gamble that Mao later disguised as a trap. Supporting a genuine opening are his speech of February 1957, which argued for settling disagreements by discussion, the international crisis of 1956 that made reform seem urgent, and the fact that the rectification campaign began with real criticism of officials. Supporting the trap thesis are Mao’s own later claims of an “open plot” and his internal article of 15 May, which shows him watching the critics and preparing a response before the counter-attack. MacFarquhar reads that article as a change of course, while Chang and Halliday read it as the plan unfolding; Teiwes stresses that other leaders were divided too. The documents cannot reveal Mao’s private intentions in March 1957, so any answer carries uncertainty. What can be said is that the outcome made the question almost irrelevant for those punished, and that a regime which can turn an invitation into evidence teaches its citizens never to answer the next invitation honestly.
An interesting fact
The best-known social scientist labelled a rightist, Fei Xiaotong, had trained in London under the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, and his study of a Yangtze delta village, Peasant Life in China (1939), is still read as a classic of fieldwork. After 1957 he was barred from research for more than twenty years and spent part of the Cultural Revolution doing manual labour. Rehabilitated in 1980, he returned to the study of small towns and rural industry, and from 1988 to 1998 he served as a vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress, the state he had once been accused of trying to overthrow.
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