Was the Hundred Flowers campaign an opening or a trap?

The short answer

• 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.

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.