Hundred Flowers Campaign 1956-1957: Mao Invites Criticism

The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a brief period in 1956–1957 when Mao Zedong invited China’s intellectuals and non-communists to criticise the Communist Party openly. Its slogan, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend”, promised a new tolerance. Within weeks of the criticism peaking in May 1957, the party reversed course and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, punishing hundreds of thousands of people and silencing independent voices for a generation.

Background

By 1956 the Communist Party had ruled mainland China for seven years, since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Land reform, the nationalisation of industry and campaigns against “counter-revolutionaries” had transformed the country, often violently. Many educated Chinese had supported the new state, but they were watched with suspicion and subjected to “thought reform”.

Events abroad unsettled the party. In February 1956 Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denounced Stalin, and in October 1956 the Hungarian Revolution showed how anger against a communist party could explode. Mao argued that China could avoid such a crisis by allowing problems to be aired and resolved, rather than suppressed.

The call to criticise

Mao first used the hundred flowers slogan in spring 1956, and the propaganda chief Lu Dingyi publicised it in a speech in May. At first few people responded. On 27 February 1957 Mao gave a speech, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, arguing that disagreements between the people and the party were not necessarily hostile and could be settled by discussion.

In late April 1957 the party launched a “rectification” campaign against bureaucracy, sectarianism and subjectivism in its own ranks, and asked outsiders to help. Leaders of the small “democratic parties” that survived alongside the Communist Party, along with professors, writers and students, were urged to speak frankly.

The flowers bloom: May–June 1957

The response, when it came, was far stronger than expected. In meetings and newspaper columns, critics attacked privileges enjoyed by party members, the arrogance of cadres, the copying of Soviet methods and the injustices of earlier campaigns. The editor Chu Anping complained that the party treated the whole country as its own possession. The minister Zhang Bojun proposed a “political design institute” in which non-communists would help shape policy.

At Peking University, students covered a wall with posters from 19 May 1957, an early “democracy wall”. Some criticism went beyond reform of the party to question one-party rule itself. There were also student protests and strikes in several cities.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign

On 8 June 1957 the People’s Daily published an editorial titled “What is this for?”, signalling that the critics had gone too far. The party now declared that “bourgeois rightists” had used the campaign to attack socialism. Deng Xiaoping, as party general secretary, played a leading role in directing the crackdown.

Work units were given quotas of rightists to identify. Officially more than 550,000 people were labelled rightists; some historians believe the true number of people punished was higher. Many lost their jobs, were sent to labour camps or remote farms, or were exiled to the countryside, and their families also suffered. Some died in the camps during the famine that followed. Victims included Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Chu Anping, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong and the writer Ding Ling.

The text of Mao’s February speech was published in revised form in June 1957, with new passages setting limits on acceptable criticism. Mao later spoke of luring “snakes out of their holes”, giving rise to the view that the whole campaign had been a trap.

Trap or miscalculation?

Historians still debate Mao’s intentions. Roderick MacFarquhar and others argue that Mao sincerely hoped for limited, constructive criticism and was shocked by its scale, and then claimed afterwards that he had planned the outcome. Other scholars, pointing to Mao’s own words and to the speed of the reversal, believe he at least partly intended to flush out opponents. Many historians see elements of both.

What is clear is the result. Intellectuals learned that criticism was dangerous, and few dared to object when the Great Leap Forward began in 1958 with wildly unrealistic targets.

Timeline

• 1956, February: Khrushchev denounces Stalin in Moscow.
• 1956, May: Lu Dingyi publicly explains the “hundred flowers” policy.
• 1957, 27 February: Mao’s speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”.
• 1957, late April: The party launches a rectification campaign and invites criticism.
• 1957, May: Criticism peaks; posters appear at Peking University from 19 May.
• 1957, 8 June: A People’s Daily editorial signals the start of the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
• 1958: The Great Leap Forward begins, with dissent largely silenced.
• 1978: The party begins rehabilitating most of those labelled rightists.

Why it matters

The Hundred Flowers Campaign and its brutal sequel destroyed trust between the Communist Party and China’s intellectuals. By removing independent critics, it made the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution easier to impose, and the word “rightist” became a mark of lasting stigma for hundreds of thousands of families.