From Asia Sentinel:
The Chinese Communist Party crushed the intellectuals of the 100 Flowers Campaign half a century ago. Now victims are demanding justice and compensation from a government that remains deaf to their plight
Fifty years after Chairman Mao Zedong launched his mass persecution of China’s intelligentsia, the victims, in a different world and a different China, want a public apology and financial compensation. But, terrified of revisiting its history, the Communist Party will not apologise or pay any compensation. It wants the anniversary of the persecution to pass unreported and unnoticed.
Mao launched his famed Hundred Flowers campaign in February of 1957, calling on intellectuals to “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” It was a call that the newly socialist nation’s intellectuals answered with a vengeance by going after the Communist Party fang and claw. It didn’t take long for Mao and the party to realize he had seriously miscalculated, and he almost immediately launched a new anti-rightist campaign against as many as 500,000 to 1 million scholars, writers, artists and officials – out of five million people then classified as intellectuals. [Full Text]
