by Philip Short
At this juncture, a new factor intervened.
Some of the younger writers, encouraged by continuing signs of cultural liberalisation, had at last plucked up their courage and begun to test the limits of the Party's new tolerance. Conservatives were outraged. On January 7, 1957, a group of cultural commissars in the PLA published a letter in the People's Daily, complaining of a resurgence of traditional literary forms at the expense of socialist realism, and that the principle of art serving politics, which Mao had enunciated at Yan'an, was being honoured in the breach. The avalanche of favourable comment that followed showed their views were widely shared.71
As always, when Mao felt his aims being thwarted, he dug in his heels.
Publicly, his response was low-key. Five days after the letter appeared, he sent a selection of his poems, written in the classical style, for inclusion in the inaugural issue of the magazine Shikan (Poetry). The implicit message was that, contrary to the PLA group's assertions, traditional literary forms still had their place in China.72
In private, Mao was more forthright. The critics had got it wrong, he told a conference of senior Party officials later the same month. There was not too much freedom but too little. Writings hostile to Marxism, such as the works of Chiang Kai-shek, should be published openly in China, because ‘if you haven't read anything written [by him], you won't be able to do a good job of opposing him’.73 Circulation of Cankao xiaoxi (Reference News), a compendium of Western news reports for restricted use by senior officials, should increase a hundredfold in order ‘to publicise imperialist and bourgeois [thinking]’.74 Even men like Liang Shuming should be free to spread their ideas: ‘If they have something to fart about, let them fart! If it's out, then one can decide whether it smells bad or good … If the people think their farts stink, they will be isolated.’75
It was wrong to quarantine things, Mao declared. Better by far to ‘vaccinate’ the masses by exposing them to harmful ideas, so as to strengthen their political immunity.76 The guiding principle should be:
Truth stands in contrast to falsehood and is developed out of the struggle against it. Beauty stands in contrast to ugliness and is developed out of the struggle against it. The same is true of good and bad things … In short, fragrant flowers stand in contrast to poisonous weeds, and are developed out of the struggle against them. It is a dangerous policy to forbid people to meet face to face with false, ugly and antagonistic things … Such a policy would lead to … people being incapable of facing the outside world, and unable to meet the challenge of a rival.77
Within the Party, the use of ‘negative teaching material’ had been current since the 1930s. But this time Mao was proposing that the same method be applied among the population as a whole. If disturbances resulted, he maintained, that was nothing to be afraid of:
Wouldn't it be a little strange if we communists, who have never feared imperialism or Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang … were now to be afraid of students causing trouble and peasants raising a fuss over the co-operatives? Fear is no solution. The more afraid you are, the more ghosts will come to visit you … I think that whoever wants to cause trouble should be allowed to do so for as long as he wants. If a month is not sufficient, give him two months. In short, don't stop the show until he's had enough. If you stop the show too hastily, one of these days he will cause trouble again … What good will come out of this? The good will be that we will expose problems fully and distinguish right from wrong … We can't just stifle everything all the time … Contradictions have to be exposed before problems can be solved.78
Mao's audience of provincial Party secretaries, the men who would have to manage ‘trouble’ in the event that it arose, was distinctly underwhelmed. A few weeks later he conceded that ‘50 or 60 per cent’ of the Party disagreed with him, and 90 per cent of high-ranking cadres.79 His blasé statements that ‘in a population of 600 million, I would think of it as normal if every year there were a million people making trouble’,80 and that even, in a worst case, if large-scale disorders did result, ‘We'd just go back to Yan'an, that's where we came from anyway!’,81 can only have alarmed them still more.
Ten or twelve years earlier, their opposition might have given Mao pause. By 1957, he was beyond that. Both of the major decisions he had taken since the founding of the People's Republic, disregarding the doubts of his colleagues – to enter the war in Korea, and to speed up collectivisation – had been triumphantly vindicated. If the Party was reluctant again this time, it simply made him want to push all the harder. In his speeches that spring, he paraphrased a favourite statement of Lenin's, which he had first quoted in 1937: ‘The unity of opposites is temporary; antagonistic struggle is absolute.’ Harmony was transient; strife was eternal. The student who, forty years earlier, had written, ‘it is not that we like chaos, but simply that … human nature is delighted by sudden change’, now told his colleagues: ‘It is good if life is a bit more complicated, otherwise it is too boring … Should there be only peace and no trouble … [it] would lead to mental sluggishness.’82
There were other, more practical reasons for Mao's determination to press ahead. The shortage of engineers and technicians, which had helped trigger the liberalisation movement in the first place, was merely the tip of the iceberg. China had a proletariat of 12 million, and a petty bourgeoisie (including the peasantry) of 550 million. To develop the economy, all their energies were needed. But that, Mao argued, required a policy of mutual supervision, in which petty-bourgeois intellectuals were free to criticise the communists, and they, in turn, ‘educated’ the petty bourgeoisie.83
These ideas were given formal expression for the first time before a wider public on February 27, 1957, in a speech entitled, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. It lasted four hours, and was delivered before an invited audience of nearly 2,000 people, including scientists, writers, and leaders of the democratic parties.84
Mao began by speaking in laudatory terms of the process of self-transformation, of being ‘steeled’ in the communist cause, that intellectuals had undergone. Thought-remoulding, he said, was still necessary, but in the past it had been ‘a bit rough, [and] people were hurt’. From now on, the policy would be different.
[The slogan of] ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend’ … was put forward in recognition of the various different contradictions in society … If you want to grow only [fragrant flowers] and not weeds, it can't be done … To ban all weeds, and stop them growing, is that possible? The reality is that it is not. They will still grow … It is difficult to distinguish fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds … Take, for example, Marxism. Marxism was [once] considered a poisonous weed … The astronomy of Copernicus … the physics of Galileo, Darwin's theory of evolution were all, at the start, rejected … What is there to fear from the growth of fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds? There is nothing to fear … Among the bad flowers there might be some good flowers … [like] Galileo [and] Copernicus. [Conversely], flowers that look Marxist are not always so.85
The use of ‘crude methods’ to solve ideological problems, Mao added, did more harm than good. What if agitation ensued? ‘I say, let them agitate to their hearts’ content … I, too, created disturbances at school because problems could not be resolved … Expulsion is the Guomindang way. We want to do the opposite of Guomindang methods.’
The speech was not published at once, but tape-recordings were played to gatherings of intellectuals and Party cadres in cities all over China.
Reactions were mixed. One man was allegedly ‘so stimulated by Chairman Mao's address that he could not sleep for one whole night’.86 Robert Loh, a Shanghai businessman, remembered: ‘I was in a daze. After Mao's speech anything seemed possible. For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to hope.’87 But most were wary. As the Chinese proverb has it, ‘A man who has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a piece of rope.’ The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong wrote of ‘early spring weather’, which
brought the risk of sudden frosts.88 The historian Jian Bozan was blunter. Intellectuals, he said, did not know whether to trust Mao or not. ‘They have to guess whether [his] call is sincere or just a gesture. They have to guess to what extent, if the call is sincere, flowers will be allowed to blossom, and whether the [policy will be reversed] once the flowers are in bloom. They have to guess whether [it] is an end, or just a means … to unearth [hidden] thoughts and rectify individuals. They have to guess which problems can be discussed, and which problems cannot be discussed.’ The result, he added, was that most had decided to remain silent.89
Their prudence would have been yet more marked had they known what Mao had said in the secrecy of the Party conclaves that had preceded the public launching of the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In public, he had declared that the bourgeoisie and the democratic parties had made ‘great progress’; in private, he said they were untrustworthy. In public, he had spoken of the students ‘loving their country’; in private, he complained that 80 per cent of them had bourgeois backgrounds, so there was ‘nothing strange’ if they opposed the government. In public, he had insisted that ‘poisonous weeds’ must be allowed to grow; in private, he said they would be cut down and turned into fertiliser. In public, he had said there were ‘only very, very few’ counter-revolutionaries; in private, that they must be ‘resolutely suppressed’. In public, he had spoken of allowing disturbances; in private, of allowing ‘bad people’ to ‘expose and isolate themselves’.90
To Mao's dialectical mind, these were just two sides of the same coin. ‘In a unity of opposites,’ he explained, ‘there is always one aspect, that is primary and the other secondary.’91 The problem was that, with Mao, which was which could change.
Throughout March and April, Mao laboured to get the Hundred Flowers Campaign off the ground. It proved a herculean task. Beyond the ambiguities in his own position (which, to the extent that the intellectuals sensed them, fed into their misgivings), the middle and lower ranks of Party officialdom remained deeply hostile. They, after all, were the natural targets of any antibureaucratism campaign, and once rectification started, they would be at the receiving end of the agitation and disturbances Mao promised.
At the summit of the hierarchy, the Politburo was curiously silent. The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was Mao's show. ‘I am alone with the people,’ he would say later, and in a sense he was.92 So long as his colleagues supported him in public (which they did), it hardly mattered if Liu Shaoqi and the Beijing Party leader, Peng Zhen, were privately lukewarm, or that Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were personally enthusiastic.93 ‘Blooming and contending’, as it came to be called, was not susceptible to administrative fiat. People had to be persuaded to speak their minds, and grass-roots Party officials had to be persuaded to let them do it.
To that end, Mao undertook a three-week-long train journey through eastern China, in which he acted, in his own words, as a ‘wandering lobbyist’.94 Half his time was spent trying to convince Party cadres that the coming movement would be ‘calm and unhurried’, ‘ultra-fine drizzle, not torrential rains’, and would not be permitted to expand into large-scale mass struggle. The other half was devoted to calming the fears of non-Party groups. In the process, the rationale for the campaign – and the means by which it would be conducted – became more sharply defined.
Now that class struggle against the landlords and the bourgeoisie was basically at an end, Mao explained, differences between the Party and the people had naturally come to the fore. ‘In the past we fought the enemy alongside the people. Now, since the enemy is no longer there … only the people and we remain. If they don't argue with us when they have grievances, who can they argue with?’ If these differences were to be resolved, people had to be encouraged to think for themselves. ‘If we … do not allow [this], our nation will be sapped of its vitality.’ The method used would be criticism and self-criticism, with the democratic parties playing the leading role. ‘[They must make] sarcastic comments revealing our shortcomings,’ Mao declared. ‘We must brace ourselves and let them attack … The Communist Party has to let itself be scolded for a while.’95
At face value – and, in the end, most intellectuals did take it at face value – this was a heady prospect, especially when Mao went on to speak of permitting, at least in academic and press circles, a significant erosion of the Party's monopoly of power. Up until now, he acknowledged, a non-communist might be the president of a university, or the editor of a ‘non-Party’ newspaper, but in reality power was always held by a deputy who was a Party member. In future, non-communists should have ‘position and power in fact, not just in form. From now on, no matter where, whoever is the chief is in charge.’96
By mid-April, Mao's efforts were beginning to bear fruit.
He had found it necessary to promise Party officials that, as a general rule, ‘blooming and contending’ would be limited to criticisms which ‘strengthened Party leadership’, and would not be permitted to produce ‘disorganisation and confusion’.97 He had also referred to the intellectuals’ fears that the Party was setting a trap – and alert cadres would have noticed that he did not deny that this might be the case.98 Fortified by these assurances, the hierarchy stopped dragging its feet.99
Even the People's Daily, whose silence on the new policies had faithfully reflected the Party's doubts, now fell into line, though not until Mao had summoned the editor, Deng Tuo, to a blistering session of reproaches, which he delivered in his bedroom, sprawling on his outsized bed, covered in piles of books. One of Deng's deputies, Wang Ruoshui, a neat, fastidious man, who was called midway through to join them, remembered being struck by the slovenliness of the scene, as the Chairman, now a flabby figure, well past middle age, raged at them in his nightrobe: ‘Why are you keeping the Party's policies secret? There's something fishy here. In the past, this paper was run by pedants. Now it's being run by a corpse.’ Glaring at Deng, he went on: ‘If you can't shit, get off the privy and make way for someone who can!’ When the beleaguered editor offered to resign, Mao waved the offer aside. Wang was ordered to write an editorial promoting the ‘Hundred Flowers’, which appeared on April 13. From then on, the word began to spread among the population at large that non-communist criticisms of the regime would be welcomed.100
A week later, the Politburo met, and decided to bring forward the official start of the campaign. Provincial leaders were told to report on the status of ‘blooming and contending’ within fifteen days.101 But Mao was not willing to wait even that long. In practice, he said, rectification had ‘already been going on for two months’. While Chinese celebrated the May Day holiday, the ‘Hundred Flowers’ slogan was blazoned across the front page of the People's Daily, followed by every other newspaper in the country as, within the Party and outside it, the movement got formally under way.102
The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was the most ambitious attempt ever undertaken in any communist country to combine a totalitarian system with democratic checks and balances. Even Mao was unsure what it would produce. ‘Let's try it and see what it's like,’ he said at one point. ‘If we acquire a taste for it, there will be no more worries.’103 What would happen if the Party did not ‘acquire a taste for’ being criticised was left discreetly unsaid.
As May unfolded, non-communist academics, writers and artists, members of the democratic parties, businessmen, and even some workers and rural officials, gradually plucked up their courage and decided to speak out – or more often were persuaded to do so against their better judgement.
Although the Central Committee had stated that participation by non-communists must be voluntary, local Party officials were under strong pressure to ensure that ‘blooming and contending’ in their units was seen to be a success.104 Wu Ningkun, an American-educated professor of English at an elite Party school, remembered being approached by a senior colleague, who complained that, at faculty meetings, ‘no one seems willing to air their views … Chicken feathers and garlic skins [i.e. trivia] are all that has bee
n brought up.’ After several further proddings, Wu recounted, ‘I had no reason to question their sincerity, so I spoke up.’105 A woman cadre in the Changsha Police Department was told that if she wanted to join the Party, she should show willing and ‘come up with something’.106 One of the leaders of a merchants’ association in Beijing's main shopping street, Wangfujing, was urged by the local Party Secretary to speak out, ‘to set an example for the others’.107 He, too, racked his brains and complied. So did millions of others.
The main thrust of the criticism that ensued was that the communists, whom the intelligentsia had welcomed in 1949 as liberators from Guomindang misrule, had developed, after less than eight years in office, into a new bureaucratic class which monopolised power and privilege and had alienated itself from the masses.108 Mao, it turned out, had not been wrong in the lessons he drew from the Hungarian revolt: in the eyes of non-communists, Party officials had indeed become ‘an aristocracy divorced from the people’. One of the most trenchant critiques came from Chu Anping, editor of the influential non-Party newspaper, Guangming ribao, who observed that the communists had turned China into a ‘family domain, all painted a single colour’.
Lesser figures were still blunter. Party members behaved as ‘a race apart’, one professor wrote. They received preferential treatment, and regarded the rest of the population as ‘obedient subjects, or to use a harsh word, slaves’. An economics lecturer complained: ‘Party members and cadres who wore worn-out shoes in the past now travel in saloon cars and put on uniforms made of wool … Today the common people avoid the Party like the plague.’ He went on:
If the Communist Party distrusts me, it's mutual. China belongs to [all of its] 600 million people, including those who are counter-revolutionaries. It does not belong to the Communist Party alone … If you [Party members] work satisfactorily, all well and good. If not, the masses may knock you down, kill you and overthrow you. This cannot be described as unpatriotic, for the communists would no longer be serving the people. The downfall of the Communist Party would not mean the downfall of China.