Jerome Cohen: An anniversary worth remembering ... Mao's crackdown on intellectuals
[Mr. Cohen is a New York University law professor specializing on China and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
This is a time for commemorations in China, some public, others necessarily private. The 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's rule is currently the subject of official celebrations in both places. Also, thanks to the autonomy conferred on their Special Administrative Region, tens of thousands of devoted Hong Kong democrats recently demonstrated their continuing determination to remember the June 4, 1989, massacre in the territory. In mainland China, by contrast, any attempts to recall the Tiananmen tragedy were again severely repressed.
Yet a third major event of modern Chinese history -- the "antirightist movement" of 1957-58 -- is being publicly ignored in both the mainland and Hong Kong, despite its impact on millions of Chinese intellectuals and the course of their country's development, and despite its relevance to many contemporary problems.
Just 50 years ago, a series of editorials in the People's Daily, the voice of the Chinese Communist Party, abruptly terminated Mao Zedong's brief effort to "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools Contend." Mao had hoped that by permitting China's intellectuals openly to vent their pent-up criticisms of the first seven years of Communist rule, the regime would not only enlist their cooperation in the country's economic development but also subject the Party apparatus to a much-needed exposure of its many abuses of power.
But it soon became clear that Mao had underestimated the depth and breadth of the intellectuals' hostility. Their wall posters and speeches seethed with a sense of injustice that reflected the oppression of previous political campaigns, the Party's domination of society, the prejudice against non-Party members, the deadliness of Soviet-style education, the disappointments of the socialist economy and the failures of the legal system. So the Party leadership launched a mass movement to stamp out "bourgeois rightist" thinking and to intensify the "re-education" of millions of officials, democratic activists, journalists, teachers, scholars, economists, lawyers, students, artists, writers and others for whom the previous years of "thought reform" had evidently proved insufficient.
Throughout the country hundreds of thousands of "rightists" were suspended from their work or study, many lost their jobs, and the entire Soviet-style formal legal system that had been taking root was ended. Some "extreme rightists" were prosecuted as "counterrevolutionaries" and sent off to criminal punishment. A few student leaders were executed before large crowds. But most serious critics of the regime were subjected to a novel form of "administrative punishment" called "re-education through labor" that was announced shortly after the onset of the "anti-rightist movement."...
Read entire article at WSJ
This is a time for commemorations in China, some public, others necessarily private. The 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's rule is currently the subject of official celebrations in both places. Also, thanks to the autonomy conferred on their Special Administrative Region, tens of thousands of devoted Hong Kong democrats recently demonstrated their continuing determination to remember the June 4, 1989, massacre in the territory. In mainland China, by contrast, any attempts to recall the Tiananmen tragedy were again severely repressed.
Yet a third major event of modern Chinese history -- the "antirightist movement" of 1957-58 -- is being publicly ignored in both the mainland and Hong Kong, despite its impact on millions of Chinese intellectuals and the course of their country's development, and despite its relevance to many contemporary problems.
Just 50 years ago, a series of editorials in the People's Daily, the voice of the Chinese Communist Party, abruptly terminated Mao Zedong's brief effort to "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools Contend." Mao had hoped that by permitting China's intellectuals openly to vent their pent-up criticisms of the first seven years of Communist rule, the regime would not only enlist their cooperation in the country's economic development but also subject the Party apparatus to a much-needed exposure of its many abuses of power.
But it soon became clear that Mao had underestimated the depth and breadth of the intellectuals' hostility. Their wall posters and speeches seethed with a sense of injustice that reflected the oppression of previous political campaigns, the Party's domination of society, the prejudice against non-Party members, the deadliness of Soviet-style education, the disappointments of the socialist economy and the failures of the legal system. So the Party leadership launched a mass movement to stamp out "bourgeois rightist" thinking and to intensify the "re-education" of millions of officials, democratic activists, journalists, teachers, scholars, economists, lawyers, students, artists, writers and others for whom the previous years of "thought reform" had evidently proved insufficient.
Throughout the country hundreds of thousands of "rightists" were suspended from their work or study, many lost their jobs, and the entire Soviet-style formal legal system that had been taking root was ended. Some "extreme rightists" were prosecuted as "counterrevolutionaries" and sent off to criminal punishment. A few student leaders were executed before large crowds. But most serious critics of the regime were subjected to a novel form of "administrative punishment" called "re-education through labor" that was announced shortly after the onset of the "anti-rightist movement."...