A Historical Analysis

“Let a hundred flowers blossom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Under this slogan, Mao Zedong promoted the Hundred Flowers Campaign, a movement that would signal a significant shift in his career as well as in the history of China’s intellectual and cultural sphere. Mao had instigated the campaign in response to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech that had levied charges against Joseph Stalin that Mao himself was also vulnerable to. Though Mao had aimed to restore relations with China’s intellectual community, the movement was roundly criticized, forcing him to respond swiftly and severely with his Anti-Rightist campaign that followed roughly one year after. Considering the outcome of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, many have wondered as to why Mao engaged in it at all; some asserted the movement to be an earnest manifestation of his desire for party correction, while others theorized that the campaign was a brilliant but brutal maneuver to identify and remove dissidents. I argue that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was wrought out of Mao’s genuine desire for criticism, a genuine desire for having “a hundred schools of thought contend,” especially in light of the implications of Khrushchev’s speech. However, not anticipating the flood of criticism that had actually befallen the Party, Mao sought to minimize the damage, adapting what turned out to be a dangerous undercutting of the Party’s power into an opportunity to simultaneously eradicate opposition and inspire fear. It was not until Mao’s death and the subsequent rise of Deng Xiaoping—the man who had headed the Anti-Rightist Campaign—that the intellectual community was able to recover and regain their foothold in Chinese society, a recovery that was ironically signaled with Deng’s pursuit of their support in his consolidation of power.

Nikita Khrushchev’s speech roundly condemned Stalin; in no uncertain terms, he states that it “is clear that…Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power.”1 It would be all too easy to replace Stalin’s name with that of Mao Zedong’s and still have the statement ring true. When Khrushchev gave his 1956 speech condemning Joseph Stalin—a man whom Mao had touted as the “greatest genius of the present age”—he rocked the Communist world, and especially the Chinese Communist world, where at the center Mao stood guilty in particular of “building his own ‘cult of personality.'”2 Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin damaged relations between China and the Soviet Union; Mao deplored Khrushchev’s criticisms as being revisionist, and a rivalry developed between Khrushchev and Mao over who was the true leader of the Communist world. Regardless, Mao, astonished by Khrushchev’s revelations, and perhaps trying to learning from Stalin’s apparent mistakes, “resolved to keep an open line between himself and the masses,” even as it became clear that the Chinese Communist Party had made a “move to nudge Mao gently to the sidelines.”3 Certainly, one such product of Mao’s resolution to reach out to the masses was the Hundred Flowers Campaign, an effort that was resisted by both the Party and by China’s intellectuals. Whereas the Party feared that the campaign would lead to revolts like those that had taken place in Hungary, the intellectual community’s hesitance stemmed from their previous suffering. In past years, the Party had destroyed lives in smear campaigns that designed to “impose intellectual conformity” or, at the very least, silence independent thought.4 Nevertheless, after sufficient assurances that they were indeed free to speak without fear of punishment, China’s intellectuals did in fact unleash a volley of criticism on a scale so unprecedented that it exceeded Mao’s expectations.

In spite of criticism that claimed that Party members had “bungled their jobs,” I believe Mao’s aims for the movement had initially been sincere.5 Indeed, in his book Maurice Meisner discusses how Mao had intended “the non-Party intelligentsia [to be used as] the instrument” to rectify the Party.6 However, the actual volume of critiques received during the campaign posed a threat to the position of the Chinese Communist Party and perhaps, to Mao’s own vision of revolution as well. After all, Mao had pictured the peasantry as the revolutionary class, but participation in the Hundred Flowers Campaign was limited to the intellectual community. Their extensive criticism of the Party could thus be interpreted as a burgeoning attempt at revolution.

In order to root out such a possibility before it could truly be planted, Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign with Deng Xiaoping at the helm. Commenced roughly one year after the announcement of the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Anti-Rightist Campaign targeted and purged alleged rightists, “‘poisonous weeds’ that [had] sprung up among the blooming flowers.”7 In reality, the word “rightist” was applied liberally and generally included anyone who dared to voice an opposing opinion, which unfortunately, included a majority of Chinese intellectuals, and in particular, writers and artists. Where science had been considered a “politically neutral matter,” literature and art “retained a class character and therefore was still to be under political supervision.”8 Aside from eliminating enemies of the Party, the Anti-Rightist Campaign also foreshadowed what was to come in the Cultural Revolution: a mass branding of people as rightists whose lives thereafter were subsequently marked for ruination. Even during the Hundred Flowers Movement, China’s students had proven to be a considerable force; it would not have been at all difficult for Mao to realize the power of a people who were young, passionate, and most importantly, easily influenced. At the time however, the student population had been absorbed into the whole of the intellectual community, a community which was older and more experienced at Party manipulation. By isolating and appealing to these students, Mao was able to forge a potent weapon that could be wielded and aimed at anyone—and he did just that during the Cultural Revolution, targeting not just intellectuals and “rightists,” but the very Party members who had worked to sideline him.

For years, the intellectual community was stifled under Mao’s rule. Ironically, it was not until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, the previous head of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, that their position in Chinese society began to shift once more. In retrospect, the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist campaign became inextricably linked, having “reshaped Chinese political space by silencing the party’s most outspoken intellectuals.”9 But their real legacy, according to historian Richard Kraus is the practice of “cautious cynicism.”10 In any event, conditions for the intellectual community began to improve following Mao’s death in 1976, and especially after Deng Xiaoping’s revival of the Hundred Flowers slogan, seeking support from intellectuals to secure his power. It seemed that Deng had the same hopes that Mao had had for the Hundred Flowers Campaign: Deng wanted “intellectuals to strengthen the party through patriotic criticism.”11 To reinforce this message, he even went so far as to publish previously unreleased speeches that Mao had given during the Hundred Flowers movement. China’s intellectual community did not endure oppression for naught, as witness the inclusion of a “typical (male) intellectual, bespectacled face…alongside the conventional images of worker and peasant” on a new issue of the fifty-yuan banknote. The intellectual community had struggled so much that their suffering now aligned them with the working class. This shift in social position was only further emphasized by the 1979 National Arts Congress, which “heralded a new era of openness, tolerance, and innovation.”12 However, one of the most significant signals that things had indeed changed for China’s intelligentsia came in 1998 when Zhu Rongji, who himself had been branded a rightist in 1957, headed the government as premier.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Movement that followed conveyed Mao’s desire for party correction as well as his intolerance for intellectual freedom. While Mao “shared the egalitarian and anti-bureaucratic aims of the socialist critics, he did not share their commitment to freedom and democracy,” and it was for the latter that China’s intellectuals were so severely persecuted.13 However, it was precisely this persecution that eventually altered public perception of the intellectual community so that “they were no longer to be viewed with suspicion as bourgeois. This new intellectual… possessed [a] wisdom [that had been] acquired through great suffering.”14 Consequently, regardless of what Mao’s intention had been for the Hundred Flowers Campaign, no one can deny that the movement imparted a legacy that today continues to be maintained by China’s newest generation of intellectuals.

Notes

1. Nikita Khrushchev, “Secret Speech to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Party Congress, February 25, 1956,” Modern History Sourcebook, n.d., https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/krushchev-secret.asp/.

2. June Grasso, Jay Corrin, and Michael Kort, Modernization and Revolution in China: From the Opium Wars to the Olympics (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2009), 150.

3. Ibid., 150.

4. Ibid., 150.

5. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, comps., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 426.

6. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 166.

7. Ibid., 168.

8. Ibid., 166.

9. Richard Kraus, “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” in Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, ed. Ben Wang (Boston: Brill, 2011), 257.

10. Ibid., 257.

11. Ibid., 259.

12. Ibid., 259.

13. Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 178.

14. Kraus, “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” 262.

Bibliography