In 1957 Mao turned from his Hundred Flowers campaign, during which he had encouraged the urban intelligentsia to criticize the Party openly, to the Anti-Rightist Campaign, when those same intellectuals and Party members were arrested and sent to forced labor camps.  It was Maoism at its worst, and it needs to be remembered.

    I raise this today because of the op-ed by Jerome Cohen in the Wall Street Journal, available at the Time blog here. 

    And I raise it because the Party will be sure that it is not raised in the PRC.  It is another one of those terrible historical events, one of so many, that the Party represses in fear of its own legitimacy.  If Chinese people knew the whole history of the CCP, would they be as tolerant of its authoritarianism now?

    I should also mention that in the comments section of the Time blog a reader suggests that the Confucian tradition of remonstrance by intellectuals had something to do with the Hundred Flowers/Anti-Rightist campaigns.  Only in the most culturally attenuated sense.  Intellectuals were very hesitant to criticize the Party in 1957.  They had already been subject to "thought reform" in the early 1950s.  Universities had been reorganized to privilege Marxist-Leninist thought.  Departments of Political Science (my original discipline) were abolished because there was no need for the systematic analysis of politics: ideology provided all of the answers.   The "Hu Feng clique" (he was a literary scholar) had already been persecuted:

After the revolution, in
1955, there was a massive state-run campaign against Hu Feng and the group of
young writers he promoted in his literary journals and publication series. Hu
Feng and his group were vilified as bourgeois individualists and
counterrevolutionaries. They were made into a “clique” (jituan), a term with very negative sectarian connotations
in the Maoist rhetoric. Its members were arrested and
became persona non grata in the cultural world. The media was filled with
articles and cartoons attacking Hu Feng’s theory, the realization of that
theory in the creative practice of his associates, and their subversive
political behavior. Although as many as 2000 may have come under criticism,
according to official documents of the People’s Highest Inspectorate only 100
were either arrested or “isolated” for self-reflection. By 1956, the Hu Feng
“clique” was thought to be composed of 78 members, of whom 23 were the core.

         In short, by 1957 remonstrating intellectuals had already been thoroughly beaten down.  They had to be cajoled by Mao to come forward, most notably with his speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," in its original February 1957 form.  Intellectuals did not trust Mao; they were deeply wary of anything like remonstrance.  And Mao repaid their skepticism a hundred times over.  He smashed them.  He used them to strengthen his own political position, just at he would do during the Great Leap Forward, especially to Peng Dehuai, and even more extensively during the Cultural Revolution.

       1957 had very little to do with Confucianism but very much to do with a Legalist inflected will to power.  That year might have been a turning point of sorts, the end of the "golden years" of post-war reconstruction and political stability and the beginning of continuous injustice and persecution.

       And it should be remembered today.