The Chinese Intelligentsia During the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Movement

The Chinese Intelligentsia during the Hundred Flowers and Anti-rightist Movement

After the coming to power of the CCP and the formation of the People's Republic of China, thorough and drastic changes began to take place in China. A country which had been founded on a mixture of Confucianism and a very spiritual lifestyle, with ancestor worship and even praying to the god of a particular object, which had went through various revolutions and changings of the guard, began to follow the influence of a Red Giant.

The theories of Communism which were developed through a collaboration of Marx and Engels began to penetrate China through the Soviet influence. The sweeping changes that were introduced by Mao Zedong and his party would influence China in every aspect, and attempt to eradicate the old ways, which were consider to be corrupted and no longer represented what was right for the country as a whole.

The CCP changed the way the government was set up, changed the way foreign relations were handled, re-evaluated the economic policies of the country, and, possibly more drastically, attempted, arguably successfully, to control and change the way people thought. The anti rightist movements of the 50s and 60s attempted to do just that. These movements followed on the heels of what was known as the Hundred Flowers.

The Hundred Flowers slogan was "Let a hundred Flowers Bloom, a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend". The movement which had started in the spring of 1956 was a movement that was began by the party to do several things. The main theme behind the movement was to welcome criticism of the party by the intellectuals of the country, and was considered a good way for the party to prove that it cared about the people, was interested, and listening to what they had to say.

According to Teiwes:

Lu (Ting-i) argued the victory of socialist transformation and a fundamental change in the political outlook of intellectuals created conditions for the Hundred Flowers. He held that free discussion and independent thinking were necessary to avoid academic stagnation and declared the imposition of narrow, doctrinaire restrictions on intellectual life the "bitter enemy" of true Marxism Leninism. (219)

Mao was under the impression that Communism was so perfect that intellectual criticism would not be hurt, but benefit the attitudes in the country. This was a major change in the way this type of thing had been handled previously.

The Communist party had been very adamant in keeping down what they called counter-revolutionary forces prior to coming into power. This movement was different however in that prior movements had come from the peasantry, and this movement was allowing for the intellectuals to come to the forefront.

The party members who promoted the program expected only minor criticisms and were not really anticipating anything drastic from this new openness.

The intellectuals themselves felt similarly, as Teiwes writes:

Despite considerable caution on the part of intellectuals, the new atmosphere did result in significant debates in a number of academic fields Ð'- e.g., on hereditary, the periodization of history, the role of Marxism-Leninism in philosophy, and socialist realism in literature. Moreover, in journalism changes included a more lively style, greater space devoted to free discussion, the encouragement of professionalism including Western style pursuit of the full story, and greater use of Western news sources, at least in restricted publications. (220)

In the political realm, there was even room for other parties, such as the democratic parties of China.

Unfortunately the Hundred Flowers movement was short lived. The intellectuals, after cautiously testing the waters, burst through the damn, and the party had more to deal with than they had expected.

Teiwes writes that the movement was a failure for multiple causes:

The Hundred Flowers was based on the assumption that non-Party intellectuals, despite their ideological backwardness, were basically in sympathy with CCP goals and could be counted on to make positive contributions to even so sensitive an affair a Party rectification. Since their differences with the Party were "contradictions within the people," there were no fundamental clashes of interest and few conflicts which could not be settled by persuasive methods. But bourgeois intellectuals as a group had been grievously violated, and their relations with Party cadres were marked by mutual mistrust. (273)

The Hundred Flowers movement had given the intellectuals of China the courage to stand up and be heard, even when it was criticizing the party. However, when the Party realized just how much and how strongly there was criticism, they quickly reversed their stance on the issue, and suddenly those people who had spoken out where labeled as rightists and considered enemies of the state. The rightist movement in China showed a return to the old ways of the Party.

Mao, having started the initiative of the Hundred Flowers, was also at the forefront of the anti-rightist movement. Mao attempted to show the Hundred Flowers movement as a trap designed specifically by him to catch the party's enemies.

However, Teiwes points to the fact that it's is not likely that the blooming of the Hundred Flowers was originally set up as a trap, but that after it became clear that a counterattack was necessary on the party of the CCP against these intellectuals, the criticism continued for a time allowing the CCP to target these intellectuals in turn (278).

The Hundred Flowers was probably one of Mao's greatest mistakes while leading the party for so many years. The contradictions of the two movements were great, as they seem to be exact opposites of each other, both coming from the same leader, and it seems as if Mau was aware of his mistake:

Even more striking was his turnabout concerning the press, not only in terms of general principles but also in that Mao chose to launch his most bitter attack on Wen-hui pao which had been one of the most faithful implementers of his "blooming and contending" policy, and whose criticisms he had praised as "beneficial" in April. Whatever his leadership colleagues or victimized intellectuals may have thought of such protestations, it appears that Mao was not above political expediency in an effort to escape responsibility for the Hundred Flowers miscalculation. (Teiwes, 281)

During the Anti rightist movement