Abstract
The criticism of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 brought about an anti-government and anti-communist wave among the people of Poland and Hungary. Mao Zedong believed that this was the result of bureaucratism in the ruling parties and government. To counteract it he promoted a movement, namely, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, to liberalize the thought of people, particularly the intellectuals, encouraging them to speak relatively freely. However, Mao became concerned that the movement was moving in an unexpectedly anti-socialist direction, and in June 1957 he suddenly reversed his previous policy and began exposing critics, mainly intellectuals, as “rightists.” From this time on, it was no longer possible to criticize Mao at all, and China was to be plunged into the reckless and radical policy of the Great Leap Forward.
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Notes
- 1.
Democratic parties in China include the following political organizations: China Democratic League, Chinese Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee, China Democratic Construction Association, China Association for Promoting Democracy, Chinese Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, China Zhi Gong Party, Jiu San Society, Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League. Although these are nominally independent organizations, in reality they are all under the control of the Communist Party.
- 2.
Mao Zedong deliberately summoned Deng Tuo and other cadres of the People’s Daily to his home and gave them a pep talk to speak out boldly.
- 3.
He spoke about the term limits for Chairman of the Party and President of the State at the Beidaihe Conference in the summer of 1956 and divulged that he would step down as President of the State at an appropriate time just before the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September of that year (Hu 2008, p. 774). Xinhuanet has an article titled “Jiemi 1954nian weihe Mao Zedong yao qingyuan ci guojia zhuxi (Uncover why Mao Zedong requested to resign as President of the State in 1954).” https://news.sina.com.tw/books/history/barticle/16245.html.
- 4.
The Three Antis-Corruption Movement was a movement to purge bureaucracy, corruption, and waste by public officials and Party members that developed from the end of 1951. The Five Antis-Corruption Movement refers to the movement to expose five types of criminal activities, including bribery and tax evasion by capitalists, which was developed in 1952.
- 5.
Ma was an economist with a Ph.D. in the United States and Chu Anping had studied political science under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE), and they both could speak English very well.
- 6.
The “Six-Six” incident is so called because six professors gathered on June 6. The six professors included Fei Xiaotong, whom I will refer to later.
- 7.
This editorial has been said to have been written by Mao himself, but in fact it was written by a person named Lin Wei Lin on the order of Mao’s secretary, Hu Qiaomu, and then completely rewritten by Hu (Zhu 2013, Vol. 1, p. 288). Undoubtedly, it was then published after Mao’s perusal.
- 8.
The “internal contradictions” in the Mao Selected Works Vol. 5 was originally published in the People’s Daily on June 19, and contains only the sentence “The class struggle is not over yet.” The sentence “the class struggle on the ideological front is still protracted, tortuous, and sometimes violent” is omitted.
- 9.
According to Bo Yibo, the revision was made 14 times from the February 27 talk to the official announcement on June 19 (Bo 1993, p. 589).
- 10.
Luo Longji died of a disease in 1965, i.e. before the Cultural Revolution.
- 11.
According to “a private research” cited by Qian Liqun, there were about 3.17 million “rightists” and 1.43 million “middle-rightists,” for a total of 4.6 million (Qian 2012a, Vol. 1, p. 197; Qian 2012b, Vol. 1, p. 143). According to Beihai Xianren, as many as 530,000 intellectuals were considered enemies, and millions were hanged in critical struggles (Beihai Xianren 2005, p. 241).
- 12.
See note 9 to Chap. 2 for more information on labor camps (laogai).
- 13.
The May Seventh Cadres School is a “school” established to commemorate Mao Zedong’s May 7, 1966, letter to Lin Biao, in which he said, “Let’s make the whole country into a big revolutionized school,” and to train the cadres of the Party and government agencies to do physical labor and train their brains.
- 14.
For more details on the life of Zhang’s family after this struggle, see his daughter’s book Zhang (2007). However, they also suffered tremendous persecutions from the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
- 15.
Dai Qing sees Luo Longji’s one comment as having stimulated Mao’s complex toward intellectuals. When he was a humble clerk at the Peking University Library, he was despised by Lu Xun’s younger brother, Zhou Zuoren (Dai 1990, p. 276). However, Shen Zhihua is dismissive of this view of Mao’s “intellectual complex” and rather says that Mao felt uncomfortable with them because many intellectuals came from landowners and the bourgeoisie (Shen 2008, pp. 37–38).
- 16.
Chen Yun played a key role in the economic planning during the Mao era, e.g. the head of the State Commission for Capital Construction.
- 17.
In the future, when brain science, IC, and AI technologies are further developed and it becomes possible to determine what people are thinking by analyzing brain waves, etc., under an authoritarian regime like China, people may be accused and arrested simply for having “anti-establishment thoughts” in their minds. If George Orwell were alive, he would surely write a satirical novel entitled “2084” to depict such an electro-authoritarian society.
- 18.
A reeducation through labor (RTL) camp is originally a type of prison designed to correct relatively minor offenders through labor, but this system was abolished in 2014.
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Nakagane, K. (2024). The Development of the Anti-Rightist Struggle and Its Aftermath: Turning Point of the Chinese Politics during the Mao Era. In: Mao Zedong and Contemporary China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1761-3_4
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