Discuss the reasons and motivations for the Hundred Flower Movement and the Subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement.

Discus the reasons and motivations for launching the Hundred Flower Movement and subsequent Anti-Rightist movement.

The main thrust of the Hundred Flower Movement, is summed up in Mao’s maxim, "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend” (bai hua qifang, bai jia zhengming). In this essay, I will investigate the reasons why the People’s Republic of China thought it was necessary to start a policy self-criticism and how this, in a matter of months, descended into a crack down of freedom and purge of intellectuals in the subsequent Anti-Rightist movement. I will focus less on the events themselves, but more on the reasons for these two movements.

In 1956 Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, celebrated the “high tide of socialist transformation” but acknowledged that there was still the problem of “contradictions in a socialist society.” One of the biggest problems facing China was the fact that intellectuals out of fear from reprimand, were afraid to develop their creativity and provide co-operation with the government. According to Meisner, they were becoming an “economic liability.” An article around that time from the Kuang-ming Daily stated, “a new situation has arisen in which intellectuals… must make greater contributions to society.”

The intellectuals were also unhappy that the newly formed 1954 People’s Republic of China constitution specifically protecting freedom of speech, assembly and press did not seem to be being followed. As one biochemist put it at the time, “there is too much blind obedience to the party.” The intellectuals witnessed the imprisonment of Hu Feng, a literary critic that placed special emphasis on “the subjective nature of creative writing” and was labelled a counterrevolutionary by the government. This, compounded with the thought reforms of 1954- 1955 and the Sufan campaign in which intellectuals argued that fictional counter-revolutionaries had been invented, made “a mockery of the legal right of ‘freedom of speech.’” In my opinion, it is clear that this constitution was not being followed by the People’s Republic of China and the intellectuals felt that the constitution was not being followed by the government.

The problems for the People’s Republic of China were exacerbated as there were clusters of strikes and demonstrations throughout China by both intellectuals and workers. The strikers were demonstrating on both economic and political grounds. These strikes were scattered and were quickly controlled but raised questions about the roles of intellectuals and also resulted in less freedom for the intellectuals. Major demonstrations also took place in Tibet, where the protesters resented the Chinese takeover and army in Tibet. I think that these strikes gave a clear warning to the communist government that a clear policy towards the intellectuals was necessary.

The “problem of Chinese intellectuals” as it is dubbed in Schwarcz’s Memory and Commemoration’s essay, was increased by the fact that in the communist party it was difficult to see how the intellectuals fitted into the social strata of society. This is because, intellectuals could not by defined, as workers or peasants could, by their link to the “means of production … in the Marxist way.” Zhou attempted to solve this problem by stating, during a special conference at the Party’s Central Committee in January 1956, that most intellectuals had now “become government workers… and are already part of the working class.” He suggested that they should “develop their specialized skills” to help the nation. He then proposed that the intellectual elite should be provided with better housing, salaries, greater potential to develop their career and that their point of views should be considered more . Mao agreed with these propositions of Zhou’s and developed it. Mao believed that the loyalty of the intellectuals could be gained and wanted to “draw the pre-1949 [i.e. pre- communist] intellectuals into active participation … and remoulding them in the process.” . Zhou also proclaimed that there should be less of an emphasis on administrative tasks.

This pre-occupation with administration was another motivation for starting the Hundred Flower Movement. The campaign was in some ways to be an “anti-bureaucratic” push. Furthermore, it was an attempt to try and address growing gulf between the state and the people. According to Meisner, this great bureaucratic state was becoming increasingly “alienated from society.” I think that by trying to make the people more involved with society and asking for their viewpoints, this was an attempt to make the government seem a less remote, distant and foreign body. This meant that it would be permissible to criticize officials in an attempt to “improve the bureaucracy and increase its efficiency”

As Zhou’s rhetoric to the Party’s Central Committee were never published, Lu Dingyi’s comments that followed were to “set the tone for the campaign” He called for “another golden age of intellectual development like that of the Hundred Schools of thought of the late Chou era. (722-221 B.C). He feared that if academic thinking was not encouraged, it would stagnate. On the other hand, he said that if it were encouraged, it would blossom and so offered intellectuals the chance to “criticize, express, maintain their own opinions” on areas of art, literature and science. It is important to note that political discussion was not advocated as an area to discuss, there would be a focus on purely intellectual discussion. In my opinion, by alluding to the history of China, and using highly appealing political language that make it seem China was to enter a great period of history that would even rival the hundred schools of thought, where culture and intellectual development blossomed, the intellectuals would become inspired to help the government.

International events also played a part as a motivation for the hundred flowers campaign. Mao was worried by the recent Hungarian uprising in October 1956 against the Soviet Union. He felt this showed how the Hungarian government had failed to deal successfully with counter-revolutionaries and was determined China must not make this error. Mao decided that the Hungarian uprising had failed to deal efficiently with the “contradictions between to rulers and the ruled.” He vividly stated, “if there is a postulate, it must emit pus.” Mao was adamant that China should learn a lesson from Hungary’s misfortunes.

However, the major international event that influenced the Hundred Flower Movement was Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech in February 1956. Here Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and accused him of many crimes against the Russian people. Although this speech was not reported by the Chinese press, news of the speech eventually reached the Chinese people. How could Mao, who had often referred to “comrade Stalin, the friend of mankind and the Chinese people” and praised him, reconcile to the Chinese people this view of Stalin? Mao decided that the main lesson to be learnt from this episode is the importance of not “alienating the people” . Mao also subtly changed his references to Stalin in latter speeches accusing him of “substituting internal differences for external antagonism.”

The idea of the people criticising the government was, unsurprisingly, not overly well received by the main governmental officials. However, Mao reassured them that he was not “encouraging people to make disturbances” or and was not “holding riot-promoting conferences.” I believe that Mao also thought that the people by being encouraged to criticise the government, would eventually feel that the people would decide that Socialism would emerge as the best and most acceptable ideal.

At first, the self-criticism that had been encouraged in the Hundred Flowers Campaign was minor. Mao said “low- keyed criticism like a gentle wind and fine rain” was needed . With great encouragement from Mao and Zhou, scientists and engineers began to raise the issue of whether such state interference was needed in science and engineering and that there should be more access to Western scientific literature and less political administration . There then ensued debates on philosophy, role of Marxism-Leninism, history and economics. I feel that these debates were welcomed by Mao as were very much theoretical and in the spirit of “blooming and contending” that Mao wished.

Perhaps the reason that these debates were not overly controversial and accepted by the government, was that the most previously outspoken May Fourth writers, were at first much more hesitant of speaking out lest they are reprimanded, as they had been in the past. However, in mid-1956, the writers began to speak out and “hit much more directly at the Party’s political policies than the discussions of any other intellectual group.” In my opinion, this would always be a road to confrontation as Mao had stressed that the political question was to focus on the “relationship between leaders and led” and not the political party itself.

Mao continued to reassure the intellectuals that this was “ a campaign for unity that would bind all in common progress” so the intellectuals became convinced that this was now an official invitation to air their dissatisfaction with the government in public. During May and June 1957, there was an increase of rallies in the street and the public beginning to speak out, they criticised the low standard of living in China, banning of much foreign works, corruption and the fact that Party officials enjoyed many benefits than the normal public did not.

In Beijing university, in May 1957, students put up character posters, criticising party members and the intervention of the government in academics work. These posters eventually formed a wall called the Democracy wall. Some students even suggested that new laws should be formed to “protect their freedom to speak and criticize.” Several magazines even proposed that many Communists should be executed for the “good of the people” .Most worryingly to Mao, however, was the fact that the students were rioting on similar grounds to the May 4th demonstrations, showing that the years of indoctrination had not worked. Protests as far as Chengdu and Qingdao had spread, with students “rioting, beating up cadres, ransacking files” and encouraging other universities and middle schools to do the same. According to Spence, “scholars published articles of astonishing frankness”, for example the sociologist Fei Xiaotong published in June 1957, accounts exposing the lack of basic education for children and “irrational planning practices” in a remote part of Jiangsu.

In my opinion, the hundred flowers campaign had clearly gone far beyond Mao’s control and it was necessary to now control it. Mao, though in public had talked about “poisonous weeds being allowed to grow,” now in private acknowledged that they must be stalled by fertilizer. On May 15th 1957 Mao first applied to some revolutionaries the term “revisionists… that rejected the party leadership” and on June 8th 1957, Mao launched the “party’s counter-offensive.”

The party’s reaction to the Hundred Flower Campaign and mass riots began in June 1957, led by Deng Xiaopeng, called the Anti-rightist campaign. Mao revised his previous February 1957 speech and warned of the “danger of anarchism” and need to flush out “poisonous weeds” from the flowers. He also published six criteria to show when distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad criticism.’ These criteria included the need to unite rather than to divide and should not contain anything that could weaken the central leadership. This was when the government made a complete change of policy and Mao started to encourage people, by the lure of promotion and new jobs, to denounce intellectuals that showed “rightist qualities” and were likely to “wage war against party rule” According to White, “urban units were expected to dub 5% of their members ‘rightists’ … universities 7% of their faculty this way… and if possible an equal portion of students.”

This denouncement continued on a vast scale and “reversed the intelligence and creativity of the masses” and the value that had been placed on intellectuals was virtually destroyed as they were “imbued with bourgeois values of individualism, liberalism and anarchism.” Writers were most criticised as it was seen by Zhou that they “weakened confidence in the party” and should henceforth “praise, not criticize.” For the most part, students were treated “relatively leniently” as the official party policy is that they had been “misled by older bourgeois individuals” and most were allowed to return to their studies.

In total, nearly 3 million people were labelled rightist which meant even if allowed to keep their job, they had no real influence. Later studies were to reveal that between 400,000 and 700,000 intellectuals lost their jobs and were sent for labour reform into the remote countryside. This also caused psychologically damaging effects, with many suicides reported. When the cases were examined again in 1979, it was shown that 99% of rightists had been incorrectly labelled. I originally thought that this petitioning document could be biased as based on the experience of those labelled ‘rightists’ but Twitchett and Fairbank also argue that “perhaps 98 percent” of rightists were labelled wrongly. Many of the so-called “rightists” were denounced over minor disagreements or very trivial matters.

In conclusion, I feel that although the Hundred Flowers campaign was an attempt to try and address the intellectual problem facing China, and seemed at first a genuine attempt by Mao to engage with the people, the criticism quickly escalated out of hand. Tragically, the subsequent anti-rightist movement meant that afterwards, China had become a more politically repressive regime and had alienated the intellectuals further than before the Hundred Flower Campaign had started. This also resulted in more party control. Although some critics argue that from the onset Mao intended to use the Hundred Flower Campaign to flush out the intellectuals, I do not agree with this and more agree with Short’s argument that after too many people began to question the very roots of Socialism itself, Mao had to change his policy and argue that counter-revolutionaries had to be “resolutely suppressed.”

Bibliography:
Lynn T.White III, Policies of Chaos (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989)
June Grasso, Jay Corrin and Michael Kort, Modernization and Revolution in China (Armonk, East Gate, 2004)
P. Bailey, China in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, Blackwells 1988)
S.Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall and James B. Palais, Modern East Asia from 1600: A Cultural, Social and Political History (Boston, Mass: Houghton and Mifflin, 2006)
Jeffrey N.Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J.Perry, Popular Protest & Political Culture in Modern China (Boulder, Westview Press, 1994)
William A Joseph, Christine PW Wong and David Zweig, New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1991)
Phillip Short, Mao: A Life (John Murray, 1999)
Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and after: a History of the People’s Republic of China (New York, The Free Press, 1999)
Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York, W.W Norton 1991)
Roderick MacFarquhar and John K.Fairbank, The Cambridge History of China Volume 14 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Websites used:

Petitioning for Redress over the Anti-Rightist campaign, http://hrichina.org/public/PDFs/CRF.2.2007/CRF-2007-2_Petitioning.pdf, addressed to CCP 13th November 2005, date accessed 30th October 2008

Mao Zedong Internet Archive of works: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch04.html , date accessed: 6th November 2008

Bibliography: Lynn T.White III, Policies of Chaos (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989) June Grasso, Jay Corrin and Michael Kort, Modernization and Revolution in China (Armonk, East Gate, 2004) P. Bailey, China in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, Blackwells 1988) S.Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) William A Joseph, Christine PW Wong and David Zweig, New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1991) Phillip Short, Mao: A Life (John Murray, 1999) Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and after: a History of the People’s Republic of China (New York, The Free Press, 1999) Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York, W.W Norton 1991) Roderick MacFarquhar and John K.Fairbank, The Cambridge History of China Volume 14 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987) Websites used: