Volta
PoliticsMay 1957 – 1958

Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign

Also called: Hundred Flowers Campaign, Anti-Rightist Movement, Anti-Rightist Campaign

In spring 1957 the Communist Party invited intellectuals to criticise it under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”. When criticism grew fierce it turned in June to an Anti-Rightist Campaign in which, by official count, over 550,000 people were labelled “rightists” and lost their jobs or were sent to labour camps.

Rehabilitation document later issued to a man who had been labelled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign
Rehabilitation document later issued to a man who had been labelled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign

陈少举 · CC0 · Source

In May 1956 Mao Zedong proclaimed the policy of “letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”. After his February 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, the party announced at the end of April a rectification campaign against its own bureaucratism, sectarianism and subjectivism and welcomed criticism from outside. From May leaders of the minor democratic parties, professors and students poured out criticism, and a “Democracy Wall” of big-character posters appeared at Peking University. Some critics went as far as questioning one-party rule itself.

A People’s Daily editorial on 8 June, “What Is This For?”, signalled the start of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. In this campaign, run day to day by the party’s General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, 552,877 people were officially classed as “rightists” (some studies argue the real number was higher), and many lost official and teaching posts and were sent to re-education-through-labour camps and frontier farms.

Afterwards intellectuals fell silent, which is often cited as one reason why few dared to question the unrealistic targets of the Great Leap Forward the following year. Most rightist verdicts were reversed in 1978–1980, though a handful, such as Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji, were never rehabilitated.

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States and rulers at the time
People's Republic of China — Paramount leader Mao Zedong
Places
Beijing

People

  • Mao Zedong1893 – 1976

    key figure · Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

  • Deng Xiaoping1904 – 1997

    participant · General Secretary of the Communist Party (1956–1966), twice purged during the Cultural Revolution, and from 1978 China’s paramount leader who launched “reform and opening up”

Before and after

Earlier
1950 Land Reform in China
Later
1958 The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine

Themes that include this event

  • From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976

    From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan