Still, few among Mao’s colleagues relished the prospect of another Rectification Campaign, let alone one in which non-party members were allowed openly to voice their discontent. The Chairman sugared the pill by promising a ‘gentle breeze and mild rain’, as those who had strayed from the path would face ideological education rather than disciplinary punishment. Even then, senior leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen feared that the situation might spiral out of control if people were encouraged to air their grievances openly.
Many inside the party preferred a clampdown on all popular opposition. The Chairman had to do the rounds. A few counter-revolutionaries might take centre stage, he ventured on 18 January 1957, but repression would only make matters worse. ‘Don’t be afraid of disturbances, the bigger and the longer, the better,’ he said a few days later. ‘Let the demons and ogres come out, let everybody have a good look at them . . . let those bastards come out.’ They were nothing but a few poisonous weeds that appeared among fragrant flowers, and they were bound to grow every year, no matter how often they were pulled up. Then, on 27 January, he wondered: ‘Even if mistakes in the party line were made and the country were to descend into chaos, even if several counties and provinces were occupied, with rebel troops all the way up to West Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, would the country collapse? Not as long as the army is reliable.’17
Mao’s big day came on 27 February 1957, almost exactly one year after Khrushchev’s secret speech, as he addressed an enlarged session of the Supreme State Council Conference. His speech was entitled ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. In Hungary, Mao explained, people had taken to the streets four months earlier, but most of them were not counter-revolutionaries. The fault lay with the party, in particular bureaucratic cadres who failed to distinguish between legitimate concerns expressed by the people and more malicious threats posed by enemies of the regime. The result was that force instead of persuasion had been used. In China too, Mao acknowledged, mistakes had occurred in the past, for instance during the political campaigns of 1951 and 1952. Many of those sentenced to labour camps, he reassured his audience, would soon benefit from an amnesty. He even expressed regret at the loss of innocent lives. He also warned that if legitimate complaints by ordinary people were badly handled, China could go the way of Hungary, as contradictions among the people would turn into contradictions between the people and the party, making the use of force necessary. The Chairman rang with sincerity, as he enumerated examples of serious errors made by the Chinese Communist Party. He was harsh with the party bureaucracy. He announced that a Rectification Campaign would soon be inaugurated to help party members improve their work. The public at large were required to help the Chinese Communist Party by airing their grievances so that social injustices could be redressed. No retaliation would be taken against those who spoke out. Again came the Chairman’s dramatic call to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend’. Mao ended his speech by comparing himself to a star in an opera, growing too old to continue playing the leading role. He hinted that he might soon step back from the stage.18
The speech was a tremendous achievement. Mao came across as an earnest proponent of a more humane form of socialism, departing radically from past tradition. The Chairman did what he did best: rally a majority around him with promises of a better future. The meeting was attended not only by ranking party leaders and government officials, but also by members of organisations outside the party. It was taped and played to select audiences around the country. Robert Loh, who listened to the speech with 200 other delegates in Shanghai, was convinced that Mao was utterly sincere. For more than a year he had been preparing his escape to Hong Kong, but now he was dazed. ‘After Mao’s speech everything seemed possible. For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to hope.’19
Criticisms were slow in coming. In Beijing, the mayor Peng Zhen used his clout to control the official newspapers, including the People’s Daily, and hold back the campaign.20 Again, Mao took to the roads, travelling south to drum up support. On the one hand, he used all his charm to cultivate intellectuals and democrats, urging them to overcome their hesitations and speak out. On the other hand, he met army and party cadres, telling them that he understood why they were itching to repress the students who were on strike. ‘An intellectual has a tail just like a dog,’ he explained, ‘if you pour some cold water on it, he will tuck it between his legs, but if you try a different attitude he will wag it high in the air, and he will look quite cocky. Just because he has read a couple of books he feels quite cocky. When working people see his cocky air, when they see that attitude, they feel a little uncomfortable.’21
Mao himself was deeply suspicious of intellectuals, but he hoped that the true followers would take up the gauntlet by speaking out against the party bureaucracy. It was a high-risk gamble. After Mao had used all his influence to have the full weight of the propaganda machine finally move behind the campaign in late April, some mild rebukes were offered at first. But in May the tone became more strident. Soon a torrent of criticism burst out.
Big posters were glued on the walls of factories, dormitories and offices, as people wrote their views on bright sheets of pink, yellow and green paper. Some wrote pithy slogans in favour of democracy and human rights, others offered lengthy essays presenting probing analyses of the role of democracy in a socialist state, the existence of glaring social disparities in a system premised on equality or the existence of corruption inside the party ranks. Students protested against the tight control that the party maintained over culture and the arts. They railed against past injustices and the harshness of the early campaigns against counter-revolutionaries, speaking up in favour of Hu Feng. Wu Ningkun, whose house had been ransacked at Nankai University a year earlier during the hunt for Hu Feng sympathisers, called the whole campaign ‘unjustifiable and preposterous’. ‘A flagrant violation of civil rights, a premeditated official lynching’, he continued. ‘The campaign itself was a mistake, an attempt to stamp out freedom of thought and speech on the model of the Stalinist purges, which have already been exposed and denounced by Khrushchev.’ Wu confidently waited for an apology from Nankai University.22
Another target of popular ire was Moscow, as people took the party to task for slavishly emulating the Soviet Union. And everybody, it seemed, denounced poor housing and low wages, contrasting a falling standard of living to the privileges that party members enjoyed. A few penned long diatribes against the entire system, attacking the communist party and Mao Zedong in person, comparing the Chairman to the pope. Under Chiang Kai-shek, one critic wrote, there had been more freedom of speech than in New China. Even the state-controlled press carried searing indictments of the communist party. In an article entitled ‘The Party Dominates the World’, Chu Anping, who had studied at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski, took Mao Zedong to task for thinking that the world belonged to him. Chu Anping was a member of the Democratic League, as were Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji, who organised a series of meetings with democrats with no party affiliation. Many demanded that party representatives withdraw from schools, state organs and joint enterprises, while a few mocked the Chairman himself. Particularly hurtful must have been Luo Longji’s comment that Mao was an ‘amateur intellectual’ of the proletariat trying to lead professional intellectuals of the bourgeoisie.23
A few took up the farmers’ cause. Dai Huang, a committed party member and celebrated war correspondent, was taken aback by the lavish banquets and fine houses enjoyed by local cadres in the countryside, when life for most farmers was little better than before liberation. He wrote a long letter to the Chairman offering his suggestions. Fei Xiaotong, a sociologist who had made his name studying the countryside before liberation, published his account of a visit to a remote village in Jiangsu he knew from the 1930s. As soon as he had arrived, several elderly women approached him to complain about food shortages. He wrote a mildly critical report, pointing out that it was ‘si
mple-minded’ to believe that collectivisation would solve every problem.24
Much more violent confrontations took place in closed forums attended by party officials. In Shanghai the deputy mayor welcomed 250 students who had returned from abroad after liberation. The meeting was held in the Culture Club, the art deco building that had once housed the prestigious French Club. There were graduates from some of the best universities around the world, and when asked to speak out they did so with extraordinary vehemence, blasting the lies and broken promises of the regime. They assailed the arbitrary and unjust treatment of intellectuals, and were incensed by the brutal repression that had accompanied every campaign for thought reform. But most of all they were embittered by the waste of their talents in New China. Dozens yelled simultaneously, their voices shrill with emotion. The deputy mayor soon lost his poise, and sweat started running down his face. His hair was untidy, his uniform wrinkled. ‘He sat gripping the arms of his chair and his eyes darted from one shouting member of the audience to another.’
The climax of the meeting came when an engineer complained that he had given up a US$800-a-month job in order to return and serve the motherland. He had not been allowed to do anything useful ever since, as even minor technical suggestions he made were rejected as ‘bourgeois’. He had been transferred four times since coming back from abroad in 1951. Each time his salary had been readjusted downwards, and now he was paid a mere pittance. The engineer became angrier and angrier, and suddenly he took off his jacket and rushed up to the deputy mayor to shake the coat in his face. ‘For six years I have not bought a single garment,’ he shouted. ‘For six years I have not been allowed to use my ability or my training. Because of what I have endured I’ve lost thirty pounds. Why? Why? How long do you expect us to put up with your stupidity, your indifference? Do you think we will all sit back quietly and let you Communists grow fat and insolent?’ By now everyone in the audience was screaming wildly.25
There were small victories. In Shanghai the mayor apologised publicly to a professor who had been unjustly persecuted as an anti-party element. After the apology, other wrongly accused intellectuals were released from prison. Among them was Henry Ling, who had been the president of Shanghai University from 1945 to 1949. The experience of six years behind bars was visible in his emaciated frame, but he was delighted to be free and keen to follow the country’s new path.26
Students had been striking and demonstrating sporadically since the summer of 1956, but now tens of thousands took to the streets. On 4 May 1957, some 8,000 of them converged on Beijing, marking the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, an abortive student uprising dating back to 1919. They created a ‘Democracy Wall’ covered with posters and slogans charging the communist party with ‘suppression of freedom and democracy in all the country’s educational institutions’. They called for a nationwide movement of protest, and liaised with demonstrators in other cities. In Chengdu and Qingdao students turned violent, beating up local officials and ransacking party premises. A full-scale riot broke out in Wuhan, as students from a middle school who were furious about enrolment policy stormed the party headquarters, breaking down doors and rummaging through the files. Several party officials were tied up and marched through the streets.27
Workers, too, took to the streets. Like the students, they had been active in strikes for almost a year, paralysing parts of the economy in Manchuria, Tianjin, Wuhan and Shanghai, but now matters came to a head. In Shanghai alone, major labour disturbances involving over 30,000 workers erupted at more than 580 enterprises, dwarfing anything the country had ever seen, even during the heyday of the nationalist regime in the 1930s. Minor incidents were also registered at another 700 factories, including walkouts and organised slowdowns in production.28
Some workers turned violent, tearing slogans and posters about increased production from the walls. Daring denunciations of communism appeared instead. Party officials were heckled at packed meetings, as workers made long and bitter complaints. In one incident, disgruntled workers frogmarched a local official to the Huangpu River, where they dunked his head in the water at two- to three-minute intervals. After an hour the man’s face was covered with mud and blood, and he jumped into the river in an effort to swim away. A bystander who offered help was stoned by the workers. In Shanghai and elsewhere, the sight of terrified and cringing party cadres became common. ‘Several times, in the streets,’ reported Robert Loh, ‘I saw cadres being reviled, insulted and jeered at by angry mobs.’ In the words of another protagonist, Tommy Wu, the art student who had taken part in Tiger-Hunting Teams years earlier, ‘it was truly a public catharsis’.29
Robert Loh himself was bemused by the whole situation and preferred to keep a low profile, despite exhortations from party officials to speak out. He escaped to Hong Kong a few weeks later. Others, too, were prudent. Yue Daiyun, the party member who had tried to protect an impoverished tailor from the execution squad during land reform, was equally guarded: ‘Despite my sympathy with those who were speaking out, some sense of inner caution prevented me from joining this chorus of critical voices. I felt it prudent to wait and see what would happen before commenting openly myself.’ Instead she decided to participate in the campaign by joining together with other young teachers, discussing the publication of a new literary magazine.30
Around the country party officials were taken aback by the torrent of criticism unleashed by the Hundred Flowers. In Beijing the Chairman himself was in a state of shock. He had badly miscalculated. ‘He stayed in bed,’ his doctor Li Zhisui noted, ‘depressed and apparently immobilised, sick with the cold that called me back, as the attacks grew ever more intense. He was rethinking his strategy, plotting the revenge.’31
On 15 May 1957, Mao wrote an article entitled ‘Things are Changing’. It was distributed to leaders within the party. Mao told them: ‘We shall let the rightists run amok for a time and let them reach their climax. The more they run amok, the better for us. Some say they are afraid of being hooked like a fish, and others say they are afraid of being lured in deep, rounded up and annihilated. Now that large numbers of fish have come to the surface of themselves, there is no need to bait the hook.’ Mao was planning a counter-attack, and asked the propaganda machine to encourage more people to come out and criticise the party. He was particularly infuriated with members of the democratic parties who had proved themselves to be so unreliable. ‘They are nothing but a bunch of bandits and whores,’ he told his doctor.32
Behind the scenes the People’s Daily was told to prepare to attack those the Chairman now dubbed ‘rightists’. A hint came on 8 June, when an editorial by Mao accused a small number of people of attempting to assail the party and overthrow the government. On 11 June the speech he had given on ‘Contradictions among the People’ several months earlier was finally published, but its conciliatory tone was completely reversed. The article had been carefully rewritten to make it appear as if a trap had been laid for opponents of the regime all along, designed to ‘lure the snakes of reaction out of their holes’. Everything was turned on its head, making it seem that the Chairman’s encouragement of debate had been nothing but a cunning strategy to unmask all the enemies of revolution.
The period of blooming and contending was over. Mao was forced back into a temporary alliance with his opponents inside the party. Assailed from all sides, they, too, found unity behind their Chairman. Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen, who had had their doubts all along, pressed for sweeping measures against all rightists. The Chairman put Deng in charge of the campaign, which targeted hundreds of thousands of individuals. On 15 May Mao had opined that the number of rightists was ‘1, 3, 5 or up to 10 per cent, as the case may be’. As the months went by, the number of victims gradually increased, eventually reaching over half a million people.33
The democrats whom Mao had described as ‘bandits and whores’ were accused of having followed an ‘anti-communist, anti-people, anti-socialist bourgeois line’. Chu Anping, who had denounced the party
for thinking that it dominated the world, was expelled from the party and forced to confess in one meeting after another. Others were harassed by student activists, who organised themselves spontaneously into hunting squads. On two occasions loyal students from the People’s University burst into the office of Zhang Bojun, then minister of communications, while Luo Longji, soon labelled ‘China’s Number One Rightist’, was hounded at his own home. As leaders of the Democratic League, they were accused of heading a secret ‘Zhang–Luo Anti-Party Alliance’ and stripped of all their positions.34
Much harsher measures were invoked against those who had joined in riots. In Wuhan, several middle-school students were executed before a crowd of 10,000 people. They, too, were accused of taking orders from the ‘Zhang–Luo Anti-Party Alliance’.35
People turned against each other. Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji themselves tried to discredit each other. At one point Luo walked up to Zhang’s residence and smashed his walking stick against the front door in a fit of anger. Other members of the Democratic League, including Wu Han, a historian and head of the Beijing branch of the league, did not want to lag behind, joining a chorus of accusations against both Zhang and Luo. Sometimes the politics of denunciation ripped apart entire families. Dai Huang, who had spoken out on behalf of the farmers, was taken to task by his own wife, who put up a wall poster accusing him of plotting against the party. Fei Xiaotong was forced to repudiate his report on the countryside and debase himself in a confession to the National People’s Congress, accepting that he had supported the ‘Zhang–Luo Anti-Party Alliance’ and had ‘opposed the goals of socialism’.36
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 35