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Three-Anti and Five-Anti Campaigns (1951–1952)

In 1951–1952 the CCP launched the "Three-Anti" (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-bureaucratism) in Party/state organs and the "Five-Anti" (anti-bribery, anti-tax-evasion, etc.) against private business. "Tiger-hunting," mass struggle sessions; Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan executed. Suicides numbered in the tens of thousands.

Time

Three-Anti: Dec 1951–Apr 1952; Five-Anti: Jan–Jun 1952

Place

Nationwide; focused on major cities and industrial centers

Decision-makers

Mao Zedong (initiator); Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai; Bo Yibo (finance); municipal committees

Three-Anti: "tiger-hunting" in the Party

December 1, 1951: The Center's decision on "streamlining, production increases, and opposing corruption, waste and bureaucratism" launched the Three-Anti. In January 1952 Mao called for "tiger-hunting" — catching big embezzlers, "the worst to be executed."

Liu Qingshan & Zhang Zishan (executed Feb 10, 1952). The Tianjin prefectural Party chief and deputy embezzled huge sums (17.1 billion old yuan), were expelled and sentenced to death. Mao minuted: "Precisely because their rank is high, their service great, their influence wide, we must resolve to execute them." Paraded in Baoding, then shot — the Three-Anti's emblematic case.

Organs held "confession and self-criticism"; everyone "passed the test." Many cadres broke down over minor issues inflated into crimes.

Who decided

Mao Zedong was the supreme decision-maker: the December 1, 1951 three-anti decision; the December 30 instruction to treat it as "a great struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie"; the January 26, 1952 five-anti directive; Liu Shaoqi's March 2 instruction to "knock down capitalists' prestige"; Mao's August 4, 1952 victory declaration.

Core executors: Bo Yibo, Chen Yi, Zhou Enlai.

Who decided

Mao Zedong was the supreme decision-maker. Key decisions:

• December 1, 1951: the Central Committee's decision on "three-anti" (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-bureaucratism), targeting the Party and state organs.
• December 30, 1951: Mao's instruction — treat the three-anti struggle as "a great struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie."
• January 26, 1952: Mao drafted the directive launching "five-anti" in large and medium cities — a "large-scale, resolute, thorough struggle" against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on contracts, and theft of economic intelligence. "Rely on the working class, unite law-abiding bourgeoisie and other citizens."
• March 2, 1952: Liu Shaoqi's instruction — take shop clerks as the basic masses, "make capitalists pass through a trial before the workers, and knock down their prestige."
• August 4, 1952: Mao declared victory — "the three-anti and five-anti movements have ended victoriously."

Core executors: Bo Yibo (head of the central thrift-inspection committee, sent by Mao to Shanghai), Chen Yi (Shanghai mayor, returned late February), Zhou Enlai.

Five-Anti: assault on private business

January 26, 1952: The Center ordered a time-limited, all-out Five-Anti struggle in cities: anti-bribery, anti-tax-evasion, anti-theft of state property, anti-shoddy work, anti-theft of economic intelligence.

Private businesses were graded into five categories from law-abiding to completely law-breaking. "Back-calculation" of years of "illegal gains" bankrupted many firms. Capitalists in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing and Guangzhou jumped from buildings (exact numbers unverified).

The Five-Anti's essence was destroying private enterprise via campaign, paving the way for the 1955–1956 joint state-private ownership (socialist transformation).

Who executed

Three-anti: "tiger-hunting" teams humiliated embezzlers at mass meetings. Five-anti: Central Committee → local party → thrift committees → worker-clerk "combat teams." Shanghai: 600,000+ workers/clerks, 300,000+ denunciations. Coercion: sleepless interrogations, encirclement, starvation, relay questioning; family members forced into struggle. The February 3 regulations barred managers from leaving or firing staff.

Who executed

Three-anti execution: "tiger-hunting" teams dragged real and imagined embezzlers before mass meetings for humiliation; workers denounced bosses, cadres denounced each other, children were encouraged to inform on parents.

Five-anti execution chain: Central Committee → local party committees → thrift-production committees → worker-clerk "combat teams."

• Shanghai: Vice-Mayor Pan Hannian's February 5 mobilization accused capitalists of "ingratitude"; the municipal thrift committee took over; newspapers flooded with denunciation letters; factory and shop managers were arrested.
• Workers and clerks as the main force: 600,000+ private-sector workers and clerks joined in Shanghai with 300,000+ denunciation materials; Tianjin's 276 "combat groups" unearthed 177 "big profiteers" in half a month.
• Labor-capital confrontation meetings: Chen Yi declared every capitalist must pass review by workers and clerks — "if the workers and clerks don't pass them, no conclusion can be given."
• Coercion: Tianjin workers interrogated "three days and three nights without sleep"; capitalists were watched even at meals. Shanghai workers used "encirclement, starvation, binding, stripping, relay interrogation." In one case, a boss couple was isolated in separate rooms to force "thorough confession" — leading to suicide.
• Family mobilization: relatives were forced to join the struggle; one boss's wife was "gagged, bound and beaten"; another was detained and forced to kneel for an hour.

Methods: "leniency for confession" and mass struggle

"Leniency for confession, severity for resistance" — continuous with Zhenfan and Land Reform. Work teams entered units, mobilizing mutual denunciation. Many were falsely accused over "historical issues" or personal grudges.

"Masses struggling against masses": workers vs. bosses, subordinates vs. superiors. One Shanghai capitalist was struggled for seven days and nights straight, losing his mind. The technique peaked in the Cultural Revolution.

Scale & methodology

Who opposed

No one opposed the campaigns on principle. Mao himself braked Shanghai (February 22, 1952); Chen Yi imposed inspection discipline and removed "leftist" cadres after returning; Bo Yibo recorded the suicides. Corrections came only after excesses damaged the economy.

Who opposed

Overall: no one opposed the three-anti/five-anti on principle. All recorded corrections were technical pullbacks after excesses, mostly from Mao himself and local leaders.

• Mao himself (February 22, 1952): "delaying five-anti in Shanghai is better for the whole economy" — the top-level brake on Shanghai's excess.
• Chen Yi (Shanghai mayor): after returning in late February, stressed inspection discipline — "no encroachment on the lawful rights of business households"; dealt with the cadres responsible for the "leftist" deviation (Tan Zhenlin, Gu Zhun's underground-party network marginalized).
• Bo Yibo: sent by Mao to Shanghai, faithfully recorded "the firepower was extremely intense… 48 capitalist suicide incidents, 34 dead."

As with zhenfan and the anti-rightist drive: no one in the party questioned the campaign itself; corrections came only after excesses damaged the economy and triggered a suicide wave.

Impact

Doom of private enterprise. After the Five-Anti, private owners rushed to apply for "joint ownership"; by 1956's socialist transformation, private ownership was essentially extinct.

"Campaign economics" begins. Solving economic problems via political campaign became the decades-long model; the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution economic disasters root here.

A society where none feel safe. The campaigns proved no one is safe — today's "tiger" may be tomorrow's "fly." The fear shaped Chinese officialdom's culture.

Background: entering the cities, the Korean War and fiscal strain

The background of the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns begins in 1949. At the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee, Mao warned the Party that after entering the cities it must guard against the bourgeoisie's 'sugar-coated bullets'. But once the regime took over the cities, cadres controlled approvals, rationing, taxation and construction, and corruption spread quickly: some used their authority to resell supplies, some colluded with private merchants to take kickbacks on military orders, and some simply embezzled public funds. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 sent military spending sharply upward and strained state finances, and cases of shoddy substitution and corner-cutting in front-line supplies that came to light provided the concrete pretext for the later Five-Anti charges of defrauding the state and cheating on work and materials. At the end of 1951 a nationwide production-and-economy drive began, and the embezzlement figures uncovered as economy checks proceeded were reported upward in growing numbers; the Three-Anti grew out of this. Two things must be seen at once: corruption in the early years of the regime was real, and the Party's way of dealing with it was never to build independent auditing and judicial procedures, but to launch a political campaign in which everyone had to pass the test.

The case of Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan was the trigger for the Three-Anti. Liu had been secretary of the Tianjin prefectural Party committee and Zhang its administrative commissioner; both were veteran cadres who had joined the revolution in the 1930s. Investigation found that they had embezzled and diverted sums totalling more than 17.1 billion old yuan — about 1.71 million yuan in the new currency after the 1955 reform set the rate at one new yuan to ten thousand old — drawn from airport construction funds, shipbuilding loans, river-works funds and grain money for cadres, among other sources. They were arrested in November 1951 as Hebei province uncovered the case. When some argued for leniency on account of their past service, Mao minuted that both must be executed; his stated reason appears earlier on this page. On February 10, 1952, after a public trial at a sports ground in Baoding, both men were shot, and the Hebei Party committee organised cadre discussions of the case as a warning. The deterrent effect was enormous: if prefectural secretaries of such seniority could be executed, no ordinary cadre dared hope for luck when his turn came to confess. After the executions, tiger-hunting accelerated sharply across the country; localities competed to report the tigers they had caught, and hunting tigers turned from investigation into a contest.

The Five-Anti in Shanghai and the wave of capitalist suicides

Shanghai was the Five-Anti's main battlefield. The city held the country's densest concentration of private industry and commerce. When the Five-Anti opened in the major cities in January 1952, Shanghai's campaign was run by the municipal Party committee's production-and-economy committee; the existing federation of industry and commerce was bypassed, and workers and shop clerks were organised into inspection and combat teams that moved into factories and shops to examine accounts, warehouses and the owners' private books. Owners were required to confess at staff meetings, and those whose confessions were judged incomplete went through the process again and again, talked at day and night in relays. Every firm was classified, and the classification directly determined fines and restitution: so-called illegal gains were back-calculated over years, with back taxes and penalties attached, and many factories had their working capital drained at a stroke. In February and March, Shanghai's commerce contracted sharply: shops closed, private factories ran below capacity, unemployed clerks multiplied, and tax revenue fell with them. The campaign had begun to consume the very finances it claimed to increase.

The wave of suicides is the grimmest record of this phase. According to Bo Yibo's later recollections and reports, during the tensest period of the Shanghai Five-Anti there were 48 recorded incidents of capitalist suicide, with 34 deaths; that figure covers only a limited period and only reported cases, so the true number must be higher, and this page's figures table above already lists it with its source. As to method, the most widely repeated account in Shanghai was jumping from buildings: owners leapt from the upper floors of their homes or factory buildings. The saying most often attached to this linked the deaths to Mayor Chen Yi: it is widely retold that Chen asked each day how many capitalists had jumped, and called those who jumped the 'airborne troops'. The nature of this source must be stated: the 'airborne troops' phrase appears in various memoirs and overseas reports and is a widely circulated anecdote; to date there is no official document and no text by Chen Yi himself to verify it, and this page marks it as an unverified circulating account, not to be cited as documented fact. True or not, the fact that the story circulated so widely among Shanghai business people at the time shows that suicide had become an ordinary topic of daily conversation.

Those who killed themselves included big capitalists as well as small and medium shopkeepers and factory owners. For many, what was lethal was not the fine itself but the method of struggle: besieged at staff meetings by day, kept back for more talking at night, with family members mobilised to stand against them, and confessions rewritten again and again — too light a confession did not count as confession. Some took non-existent offences onto themselves in their statements just to get through, and then, facing restitution sums they could not pay, saw no way out. The cases recorded earlier on this page — the isolation interrogation at the Southeast Pharmacy and the suicide by poison of Cao Xiusheng and his wife — belong to this category. From March 1952 the Centre, recognising the cost to the economy and to life, began stressing policy limits: classification should leave room, restitution could be paid in instalments, and those in hardship should be looked after. On March 25 the Shanghai Five-Anti was redeployed after rectification, with Chen Yi stressing inspection discipline in his mobilisation speech, as recorded above. The campaign's intensity fell thereafter, but the dead could not be brought back.

Final classification, restitution and the close of the campaigns

From May to June 1952 the two campaigns entered the phase of final classification and disposal. The Five-Anti's standards were adjusted several times: the Centre issued successive instructions requiring lenient classification of offending firms, deduction of reasonable portions from calculated illegal gains, and restitution set at levels that would not force factories to close or shops to shut. In the final national results, law-abiding and basically law-abiding firms formed the large majority, partly law-abiding firms roughly a fifth, and seriously or completely law-breaking firms only a minority, with proportions varying by place; the figure of about one to five per cent for completely law-breaking firms given in this page's numbers section refers to this outcome. Lenient classification did not mean the campaign left no real consequences: owners classed as offenders carried a political stigma, and restitution, back taxes and fines gravely weakened large numbers of private firms. More importantly, the Five-Anti sent every private businessman an unmistakable signal: under this regime, private property and business autonomy had no institutional protection, and a campaign could come again at any time.

Disposal in the Three-Anti followed the same pattern. Some cadres branded as tigers were downgraded or cleared after re-examination, but the screening was conducted inside the campaign itself, beyond any outside oversight. The official summary of the Three-Anti proclaimed a great victory, publishing the sums of embezzlement uncovered as the campaign's achievement. In October 1952 the Centre declared the Five-Anti essentially concluded; the experience of the two campaigns was summed up as combining reliance on the masses, strict punishment and education and rescue. After the campaigns, policy toward the private economy moved fast: the general line for the transition period was put forward in 1953, planned joint state-private ownership began in 1954, and by 1956 whole-trade joint ownership was complete, with capitalists bought out at a fixed rate of interest and private industry and commerce disappearing as a class in China. In sequence, the Five-Anti broke the capitalist class's will to resist politically and was the precondition for the speed of the 1956 transformation — the concrete meaning of what this page's Impact section calls the doom of private enterprise.

The tiger-hunting contest and the Regulations on Punishing Embezzlement

Tiger-hunting spun out of control because of how it was organised. After Mao raised the call in January 1952, every locality and department had to submit a tiger-hunting plan with a projected number: first state how many tigers you would catch, then go and find them. A low projection drew criticism for rightist conservatism; a high one had to be fulfilled. The result was an escalating contest: some units counted accounting irregularities, banquets and gifts, and over-claimed allowances as embezzlement to make up the tiger count; some tiger-hunting teams interrogated suspects in relays without sleep, refusing to let them go until they confessed a sum that qualified. The threshold for a 'tiger' was embezzlement of 100 million old yuan or more (10,000 yuan in the new currency), with lower grades for small tigers and 'flies', and everyone below the line still had to pass the test and write a self-examination. Under this mechanism the reported numbers climbed steadily: by the spring of 1952 the tigers reported nationwide ran into the tens of thousands, a considerable share of them downgraded or overturned in the later final classification. Bo Yibo acknowledged in his memoirs that the Three-Anti had indeed involved coerced confessions and over-expansion, and that many cases were corrected at classification. The reason this page's numbers section records only that the authorities published a figure of tens of thousands of tigers with no systematic count is that the tiger figures shifted repeatedly during the campaign, and even the official summary could give only an approximation.

As the campaigns proceeded, the legal instrument was also supplied. On April 21, 1952, the Central People's Government Council adopted the Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Punishing Embezzlement, the Three-Anti's principal legal basis. The regulations graded punishment by the sum embezzled, allowed death for large sums with grave circumstances, and punished family members who knew and failed to report or who helped conceal; they also retained a leniency clause, reducing or remitting punishment for those who surrendered and informed on others. Like the Zhenfan regulations on counterrevolutionaries, the text had the form of written law, but in a campaign environment the decisive steps — establishing the sum and judging whether a confession was thorough — were taken by tiger-hunting teams and mass meetings, with the judicial organs merely completing the paperwork afterwards. Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan were executed before the regulations were even issued; their sentences rested on the campaign's political decision, not on this law, and that sequence itself shows that in the Three-Anti and Five-Anti, law was an instrument for ratifying the campaign after the fact, not a framework restraining it. After the campaigns ended, the embezzlement regulations did not become a standing mechanism of daily anti-corruption work; corruption remained a matter for later campaigns. The model of campaign in place of institution continued until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The tail of the buyout: fixed interest, ending in 1966

After joint state-private ownership, former capitalists received fixed interest of five per cent a year on their assessed private share capital, as the price of the buyout of their capital; the arrangement was originally set to run for ten years. Recipients were nominally remoulded into labourers living by their own work, and many were placed in factory management posts or given positions in bodies such as the political consultative conference and the federation of industry and commerce. But the status of 'fixed-interest household' remained a political label in every later campaign: in the Anti-Rightist Campaign another group of business figures was labelled, and when the Cultural Revolution began the interest payments were stopped in 1966, and capitalist families, as bourgeois elements, had their homes ransacked and were struggled once again. From passing the test in the Five-Anti of 1952, to the gongs and drums of joint ownership in 1956, to the stopping of interest and the house raids of 1966, was only fourteen years. Laying that line out whole makes the Five-Anti's meaning clearer still: it was not an isolated campaign against corruption or lawbreaking, but the first step in the complete uprooting of private ownership in China.

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