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Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957)

In 1957 the CCP lurched from "let a hundred flowers bloom" to "luring snakes from holes," branding 550,000 intellectuals "rightists" and exiling them to labor camps. At Gansu's Jiabiangou farm, most of 3,000 rightists starved. A turning point for Chinese intellectuals; "open conspiracy" entered the political lexicon.

Time

June 1957 – 1958 (make-up into 1958)

Place

Nationwide; universities, government organs, media hardest hit

Decision-makers

Mao Zedong ("luring snakes" architect); Deng Xiaoping (in charge); Peng Zhen, Kang Sheng (execution)

Background: Hundred Flowers and Khrushchev's secret speech

In 1956 Mao proclaimed "let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools contend," urging intellectuals to speak up. That February Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's cult shook the CCP. Late 1956, the Polish and Hungarian uprisings erupted; Mao feared similar turmoil in China.

In spring 1957 the Center's rectification directive invited non-Party "blooming and contending." May–June saw Peking University's "Democracy Wall" — big-character posters criticizing the Soviet model, demanding democracy. Mao publicly promised "the speaker is blameless" while privately resolving to "lure snakes from holes" — what Ding Shu later called an "open conspiracy."

Who decided

Mao Zedong launched and led it. Key points:

• February 27, 1957: speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People"; April 27 the Center issued the rectification directive, published May 1 in People's Daily, inviting non-party criticism ("blooming and contending").
• May 15, 1957: Mao wrote "Things Are Beginning to Change," estimating rightists at 1–10% of non-party intellectuals — Zhu Zheng notes the eventual 500,000+ rightists were "about one-tenth of five million intellectuals, roughly from here."
• June 8, 1957: the Center issued Mao's personally drafted "Directive on Organizing Forces to Counter the Rightists' Wild Attacks"; the same day People's Daily ran Mao's editorial "Why Is This?" — the campaign formally began. June 10's "The Workers Have Spoken" targeted intellectual backgrounds. October 15 the Center issued "Standards for Classifying Rightists."
• The "open conspiracy" claim: when accused of a trap, Mao replied he had announced it in advance — an "open conspiracy" (阳谋). Scholars dispute this: the Cambridge History holds Mao had no "lure-the-snakes" intent when launching rectification; most scholars date the crackdown decision to around May 15, not before blooming began. (Unverified: scholarly dispute, presented side by side.)

Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the Secretariat, headed the Central Anti-Rightist Leading Group — "presided over and actively advanced" the campaign at Mao's instruction. In 1980 Deng admitted: "In the 1957 anti-rightist drive we were activists; I bear responsibility for the excesses — I was General Secretary." Yet in March 1980 he also said the struggle "must still be affirmed… the error was in its expansion." Peng Zhen also helped lead it.

Who decided

Mao Zedong launched and led it. Key points:

• February 27, 1957: speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People"; April 27 the Center issued the rectification directive, published May 1 in People's Daily, inviting non-party criticism.
• May 15, 1957: Mao wrote "Things Are Beginning to Change," estimating rightists at 1–10% of non-party intellectuals.
• June 8, 1957: the Center issued Mao's personally drafted counter-attack directive; People's Daily ran Mao's editorial "Why Is This?" — the campaign formally began.
• The "open conspiracy" claim: Mao replied he had announced it in advance — an "open conspiracy." Scholars dispute this; most date the crackdown decision to around May 15. (Unverified: scholarly dispute.)

Deng Xiaoping, then General Secretary of the Secretariat, headed the Central Anti-Rightist Leading Group at Mao's instruction. In 1980 Deng admitted: "In the 1957 anti-rightist drive we were activists; I bear responsibility for the excesses." Peng Zhen also helped lead it.

Detailed timeline: four phases

Phase 1: Blooming (May – early June 1957). Urged to "help the Party rectify," intellectuals and students raised fundamental issues — one-party rule, the Soviet model, personnel systems. Chu Anping's "Party-empire" thesis shook the leadership.

Phase 2: Anti-Rightist launch (June 8, 1957). The People's Daily editorial "What Is This For?" opened the campaign. Mao's June 19 speech set criteria sorting "contradictions among the people" from "contradictions with the enemy," "fragrant flowers" from "poisonous weeds."

Phase 3: Labeling rightists (July–October 1957). The October 15 notice on "Criteria for Classifying Rightists" was sweepingly broad. A 5% quota drove indiscriminate labeling to fill targets.

Phase 4: Make-up and labor camps (late 1957 – 1958). Rightists were rusticated, expelled, exiled to Beidahuang, Jiabiangou and other camps. The 1958 "make-up" added more.

Who executed

Deng Xiaoping headed the Central Anti-Rightist Leading Group; party committees and work units at every level executed it.

Quota psychology: Mao's 1–10% estimate became the de facto expectation. In practice "set percentages were universally applied, and where the ratio fell short it was forcibly filled" — a mechanism Deng himself later admitted.

Named-and-shamed expansion: the July 9, 1957 notice expanded the denunciation list from 4,000 to ~8,000 nationally, with newspaper namings rising from 3% to 10%.

Targets: democratic parties, universities, literary circles, journalism, party cadres. Rightists were henceforth classed among the "black five categories."

Emblematic figures

Chu Anping: Guangming Daily editor-in-chief; his "Party-empire" thesis made him a rightist; vanished in 1966 (fate unverified).

Zhang Bojun & Luo Longji: Democratic League leaders; their "political design institute" proposal became the "Zhang-Luo Alliance"; both labeled rightists.

Lin Xiling: Renmin University student; speeches criticizing the Soviet model made her a rightist; 20 years of labor.

Gu Zhun: Economist labeled for speaking up; his diaries are intellectual-history treasures.

Lin Zhao: Peking University student labeled in 1957, imprisoned for words in 1960, executed 1968 (see People page).

Jiabiangou: the rightists' death camp

Gansu's Jiabiangou farm held 3,000+ "rightists" from 1957. In extreme hunger they ate bark and roots, even — per oral history (unverified) — each other. By late 1960 only hundreds of the 3,000+ survived.

Fu Zuogong, Dong Jianyi, Shen Dawen and others died there. Wang Bing's documentary The Ditch records it; Yang Xianhui's Jiabiangou Notes is key reportage.

Scale & methodology

Who opposed

No organized, public, principled opposition to the Anti-Rightist Campaign itself is documented from the time.

• MacFarquhar's research: inside the Politburo (including alternates), at least 9 people opposed the rectification (the blooming), not the later anti-rightist drive — "telegrams flew in like snowflakes demanding the rectification be restricted." Note: this was resistance to blooming, not defense of rightists.
• Those labeled rightists — Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji ("Zhang-Luo Alliance"), Chu Anping ("party天下" remarks), Lin Xiling — were the campaign's targets, not its opponents. The 96 never "rehabilitated" (Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Peng Wenying, Chu Anping, Chen Renbing and 91 others) can be seen as those who never confessed.

Official reassessment came only decades later: the 1981 Historical Resolution called it "gravely expanded… causing unfortunate consequences" while still affirming the counterattack "entirely correct and necessary." Deng in 1986: "excessive in places, should be redressed — but we do not negate it wholesale."

Unlike zhenfan, where Huang Kecheng offered technical remonstrance, almost no one in the party spoke for the labeled rightists at the time. Correction was entirely posthumous, in the post-1978 redress era. The absence of contemporaneous opposition is itself part of the historical record.

Impact

Intellectuals' spiritual castration. After the campaign, intellectuals were terrified into silence. "A hundred schools" became a joke; "open conspiracy" entered the lexicon.

Prelude to the Great Leap. Eliminating dissent inside and outside the Party left no one to oppose 1958's madness. Later resisters like Lin Zhao and Zhang Zhixin were forged in this trauma.

Incomplete "correction." The 1980s "corrected" 550,000 rightists but called it "excessive scope," not a mistake; 96 were never rehabilitated. No official apology to this day.

The blooming in detail: the forums, the Democracy Wall and the six criteria

The blooming was not an abstract slogan; it had concrete venues and dates. In May 1957 the United Front Work Department and the State Council convened forums of non-Party figures, inviting leaders of the democratic parties and intellectuals to criticise the Communist Party, and edited records of the meetings were published in the newspapers. On May 21, at a United Front forum, Zhang Bojun proposed a 'political design institute' so that major decisions would first be discussed with the democratic parties and non-Party figures; Luo Longji proposed a committee of the ruling party, the democratic parties and public figures to review deviations in past campaigns. On June 1, Chu Anping told a United Front forum that China had become a 'Party empire', arguing that non-Party people held posts without power from the State Council down to the grass roots, and that the root of sectarianism lay in the Party leading everything. At the time all of these speeches were published as positive contributions to rectification. No one imagined that within weeks they would become the principal evidence for rightist classification, with the 'Zhang-Luo alliance' and the 'Party empire' thesis denounced point by point in People's Daily editorials.

Blooming on campus was fiercest at Peking University. On May 19, 1957, students began posting big-character posters criticising Party and Youth League organisations on campus and the Soviet model, and demanding free speech and democracy; the wave became known as the May 19 Movement, and the wall where the posters gathered was called the Democracy Wall. The Peking University student Lin Zhao took part; Lin Xiling, a student at Renmin University, spoke at Peking University defending the protesters in the Hungarian events and criticising the Soviet intervention. Fei Xiaotong's March article 'Early Spring Weather for Intellectuals', about intellectuals' hesitation to speak after successive campaigns, was re-examined once the blooming began. On June 19, People's Daily published the revised text of Mao's 'On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People'. Compared with the original February speech, the published version added six political criteria for distinguishing fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds, the most important being benefit to socialism and benefit to Party leadership. From then on speech was judged not by whether it was factually right but by whether it met those two criteria; statements made during the blooming were checked against them line by line, and the mass operation of labelling rightists unfolded.

Disposal: the hat that would not come off, re-education through labour, and punishment of families

The punishments meted out to those labelled rightists varied in severity, but none was light. The heaviest were expulsion from post and dispatch to re-education through labour or reform through labour. In August 1957 the State Council issued its Decision on Re-education Through Labour, making laojiao an instrument by which people could be held for long periods without any court trial; many rightists were sent to farms and factories for re-education without ever appearing before a court, for nominal terms of one to three years that were in practice extended on the ground that reform must continue. The next level down were kept in post under observation, demoted and put on reduced pay, or sent down to labour in the countryside. Even the lightest cases faced criticism in their own units, written self-examinations and supervision by colleagues. A rightist's personnel file contained the classification materials and followed him for life: transfers, promotion, Party membership and military enlistment all foundered at the political vetting stage. Between 1959 and 1964, in five batches around occasions such as the tenth anniversary of the state, some rightists had their hats 'removed'. What was removed was only the label; the file record and the political treatment did not recover, and as 'hat-removed rightists' they remained objects of screening in every campaign of the following twenty years.

Collective punishment was the part of rightist disposal written in no document but experienced by everyone. Spouses were pressed to draw a clear line, and some marriages ended under that pressure. Children were treated differently at school; at admission time their family origin kept them out of key schools and sensitive fields of study, and failing political vetting for the army or for jobs was open policy, not individual prejudice. When a rightist was exiled to a distant farm, the family left behind in the city survived on meagre wages or relatives' help; visits required unit permission and long journeys, and many families were separated for years. The case of Lin Zhao shows how deep it went: labelled a rightist at Peking University in 1957, arrested in 1960 for helping to edit an underground journal, and executed in Shanghai in 1968 — after the execution her family was charged five fen for the bullet. Her mother broke down mentally after her daughter's death and killed herself some years later. Lin Zhao's full story is on this site's People pages; it is cited here only to show how rightist status escalated across a generation, step by step, to the irreparable.

The corrections of 1978–1980 and what was left undone

Correction of the Anti-Rightist verdicts had to wait until Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution over. In 1978 the Central Committee approved and forwarded a report on removing the hats of all rightists, separating hat-removal from correction: removing the hat removed the label, while correction overturned the original verdict. In 1979 the Centre directed that every rightist classified in 1957 be re-examined case by case. Over the following two years review bodies were set up across the country and worked through the original classification materials. The result is the set of figures given in this page's numbers section: 552,973 people had been labelled rightists nationwide on the aggregated reporting basis; on review, 552,877 were corrected, and 96 were not. Of the 96, five were held at central level — Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Chu Anping, Peng Wenying and Chen Renbing — and the remaining 91 were held by the localities; the official reason was that these 96 people's statements were indeed anti-Party and anti-socialist and the original verdicts stood. Chu Anping had disappeared in 1966, his fate unknown, so there was not even a living person to whom correction or its refusal could be announced.

The substance of correction was limited. Those corrected were restored to posts and salary grades, with withheld wages repaid in whole or in part, and those with work units were reassigned jobs. But more than twenty lost years could not be compensated, the dead of the labour farms could not be brought back, and most of the dead of places such as Jiabiangou never entered any correction list at all — they were already dead, and the review only covered the living. More fundamental was the characterisation: the 1981 Resolution on Party History held that the anti-rightist struggle itself had been entirely correct and necessary, and that the error lay only in its grave over-expansion. The 550,000 corrected people were thus explained as collateral damage in a correct struggle, not as victims of a wrongful campaign. The Party has never apologised to the rightists as a group, and the existence of the list of 96 preserved the symbol of the campaign's legal correctness. The memoirs and oral histories written by surviving rightists in old age, and the records of Jiabiangou made by Yang Xianhui and Wang Bing, are the most important archive of this campaign outside the official narrative; they form part of this page's sources, and they show why archival work cannot wait for the official archives to open.

How the emblematic figures ended

The degree to which the campaign destroyed individuals can be read in the endings of its emblematic figures. Luo Longji, vice-chairman of the Democratic League and former minister of forest industry, was stripped of all posts after being labelled in 1957 and died of illness in Beijing in December 1965, aged 69, still a rightist, thirteen years before correction. Zhang Bojun, former minister of communications and Democratic League vice-chairman, designated the country's number one rightist, lived at home without a post after his removal and died in Beijing in May 1969, likewise without living to see correction. Chu Anping's end is the least known: labelled a rightist and sent down, he disappeared after the Cultural Revolution began in 1966; neither his family nor the authorities ever gave an account of him, and to this day there is no firm record of his death or burial place — this page marks his fate unverified. The three were the most weighty speakers of the 1957 blooming and the officially designated representatives of the 'Zhang-Luo alliance' and rightist speech. In the review after 1978 they were precisely among the 96 denied correction at central level. More than twenty years after the campaign, all three were dead and the verdicts still stood: correction or its refusal no longer meant anything to them personally, only to the historical narrative.

The economist Gu Zhun is a sample of another kind. Labelled a rightist in 1957 for speaking frankly in a seminar, he was sent down to labour reform in Xi County, Henan; his wife, under pressure, killed herself in 1968, and Gu himself died in Beijing in December 1974. Through the years of labour and sidelining he kept reading and writing, and the diaries and manuscripts he left, published after his death, became one of the most important sources on the intellectual condition of his generation. Gu did not live to see the correction of 1979, and his work became widely known only in the 1990s. Compared with Zhang, Luo and Chu, rightists at Gu's level — in localities and work units — were vastly more numerous. Most of their names appear on no list, and their experiences can only be pieced together from diaries, memoirs and materials kept by their families. The names in this page's emblematic-figures section are a tiny minority; behind the figure of 550,000, every single person went through a process like theirs — labelling, struggle, exile and the punishment of their families. Recording the Anti-Rightist Campaign means recording neither numbers alone nor famous names alone — which is why this site continues to collect individual rightist cases in its Persecution and People sections.

The turn in public opinion: newspapers reversing overnight

The reversal of public opinion in the Anti-Rightist Campaign was concentrated in the press, and its speed and thoroughness deserve separate record. During the blooming, newspapers such as Wenhui Bao and Guangming Daily carried large quantities of forum speeches and critical articles and were the blooming's most active platforms; Chu Anping was himself editor-in-chief of Guangming Daily. In mid-June 1957 the wind changed abruptly: critical articles written or approved by Mao himself appeared in succession, People's Daily editorials denounced Wenhui Bao's 'bourgeois orientation' by name, and on July 1 it published Mao's editorial 'Wenhui Bao's Bourgeois Orientation Must Be Criticised', reclassifying the statements of the blooming period as evidence of a rightist attack on the Party. Editors and reporters who had published blooming-period speech now had to print self-criticisms and denunciations of themselves in their own pages. Pu Xixiu, deputy editor of Wenhui Bao and a journalist famous for wartime reporting during the resistance against Japan, was labelled a rightist and struggled repeatedly at criticism meetings. What happened to the press sent every intellectual the most direct possible message: words encouraged yesterday are criminal evidence today; if this can happen to a newspaper, an individual has nowhere to hide. The habit, maintained for decades afterwards, of Chinese intellectuals sounding out the political wind before speaking in public can be traced back to these few weeks.

Questions in old age: open letters and the fight to open the archives

In old age, surviving rightists began to speak collectively. Since the 2000s, groups of survivors have used overseas websites and open letters to make three demands: a formal official apology, financial compensation, and the opening of the Anti-Rightist archives with publication of the full list of rightists. None of these demands has ever received an official response; the letters cannot be published inside China, and signatories' related writings inside the country remain subject to censorship. At the same time, small spontaneous acts of commemoration and oral-history collection have appeared in various places, with survivors racing to speak their experiences into recorders and cameras before they die. The Jiabiangou survivors dwindle year by year, most witnesses are around ninety, and the rescue of first-hand testimony is on a countdown. The figures and cases on this page rest on exactly these late-life testimonies and memoirs; they remind the reader that an archive is not an abstract pile of paper, but the testimony left by concrete people in the last stage of their lives.

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