Performing Loyalty: Classification of College Students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign

Abstract

This paper examines the Chinese Communist Party's political classification of college students during the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957. Using digital databases, classified documents, and personal memoirs, this paper traces the inception and implementation of classification at central government and school levels and, in the process, explores the lived experience of political labeling. I argue that the Anti-Rightist campaign was not simply a campaign against "rightists" but also a wider project to classify the entire population as "leftists," "centrists," and "rightists," in order to solicit political loyalty and marginalize dissent. The most important factor contributing to the classification was political performance (biaoxian) in the Rectification campaign and not inherent rank, such as class status. Such behavior-based classification became more prominent in Red Guard activism, linking the Anti-Rightist campaign with the Cultural Revolution.