The Anti-Rightist Movement and Its Ideological and Theoretical Consequences

Abstract

Abstract There were some setbacks in the international communist movement after the CPSU Twentieth Congress exposed Stalin's mistakes, as social riots broke out in some East European countries such as Poland and Hungary and some workers, students, and peasants in China also created disturbances. At the time, Mao Zedong maintained that the disturbances created by small numbers of people were nothing but "a pond of spring water rippling when the wind rises"; he also sensed problems in the political life of the Party and the state, as the ruling party's status was likely to bring about bureaucratism and a "special privilege" mentality among officials so that they would become divorced from the masses and reality. In the spring of 1957 the CCP Central Committee decided to launch a rectification movement involving the whole Party. Long before that, at the preparatory meeting of the Party's Eighth Congress, Mao had called for carrying forward the Party's glorious traditions and effectively combating subjectivism and sectarianism. He said, "Why did Stalin make mistakes? Because on a number of issues his subjective thinking failed to correspond with objective reality. Such cases still occur frequently in our work today." So it was necessary to combat subjectivism as found in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. To combat sectarianism was to "unite with those who have differences with you, who look down on you, or who show little respect for you, those who have had a bone to pick with you or waged struggles against you and by those at whose hands you have suffered." On April 27, 1957, the Party Central Committee issued instructions for the rectification movement: "Another universal and thoroughgoing rectification movement against bureaucracy, sectarianism, and subjectivism is going to be carried out in the Party"; the methods to be taken were to proceed in the way of "a gentle breeze and a mild rain, " seeking truth from facts, and making appropriate criticisms and self-criticisms. "Criticisms should be encouraged in a freewheeling style, and the principle of ‘saying all you know and saying it without reservations, blaming not the speaker but being warned by his words, correcting mistakes if you have made any and guarding against them if you have not’ should be firmly upheld." In order to mobilize the nonparty personages to air their views, Mao Zedong invited leading members of the democratic parties and some public figures without any party affiliation for a talk on Tiananmen Rostrum on April 30, and he proposed analyzing contradictions in every aspect, centering around the topic of handling contradictions among the people, and asked them to "effectively make an attack" in the fields of higher education, general education, literature and art, and science and public health, and to have their opinions published in newspapers, otherwise the bureaucracy could never be abolished. He also talked about questions of entrusting nonparty personages with responsibilities but without the authority inherent in their posts, of institutionalizing the Party committees in schools, and working for greatness and success.