Terror, the Three and Five Antis, and the Hundred Flowers, 1951-57

Terror as a Tool of Government

By 1951, the People’s Republic was less than two years old. Mao’s government had won the civil war, intervened in Korea and signed the alliance with Stalin — but inside China, GMD networks, secret societies, religious groups and remnants of the urban capitalist class were still everywhere. Between 1950 and 1957, the CCP responded with a sequence of mass campaigns: open terror against ‘counter-revolutionaries’, the Three Antis and Five Antis movements, and the very brief opening of the Hundred Flowers. Each campaign worked by a similar method — public denunciation, mass meetings, struggle sessions — and each ended by tightening party control.

Key Fact

Between 1950 and 1952 the CCP’s campaign against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ killed an estimated 700,000 to 2 million people. Mao himself spoke of executing about one in a thousand — deliberate state policy, not random violence.

The Mass Terror, 1950–52

The campaign against counter-revolutionaries opened in February 1951 and ran alongside the Korean War. The official targets were former GMD officials, secret-society members, ‘bandits’ in the south-west, religious leaders and anyone accused of links to imperialism. In practice, local cadres met quotas: each county was expected to identify a set proportion of ‘enemies’. Suspects were paraded before struggle sessions — large public meetings where they were denounced, made to confess, beaten or made to wear placards. Many were executed publicly to make the lesson visible.

Terror was not the only tool. The CCP also built the laogai — a network of forced-labour camps modelled partly on the Soviet Gulag. By the mid-1950s the laogai held millions of prisoners working on canals, railways, farms and mines. The system became one of the regime’s permanent features, run by the Ministry of Public Security and combining punishment with cheap labour for the new state.

The Three Antis Campaign, 1951

In late 1951 the focus turned inward, onto party officials. Mao launched the Three Antis against corruption, waste and bureaucracy. The targets were inside the system: officials taking bribes, units padding their accounts, cadres shielded from criticism by paperwork. Workers were encouraged to put up ‘big-character posters’ (handwritten denunciations pinned in public) accusing their superiors. Around 4,500,000 government employees were investigated. Most were rebuked or demoted; an estimated 4,500 were executed. The campaign showed the urban population that the CCP would discipline its own — and reminded officials that nobody was untouchable.

The Five Antis Campaign, 1952

The Five Antis followed in early 1952 and turned the same machinery on the urban capitalist class. Its targets were bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and leaking state economic intelligence. Tens of thousands of business owners were paraded through struggle sessions, especially in Shanghai. Many were forced to pay heavy fines, hand their factories to the state in part, or simply leave the country. Reliable estimates suggest at least several hundred thousand were affected and several thousand committed suicide rather than face denunciation. The economic effect was profound: by 1956, almost all private industry and commerce had been absorbed into the state or into ‘joint state-private’ enterprises.

Because the Three and Five Antis sit in the long shadow of the famine and the Cultural Revolution, students sometimes treat them as small clean-up operations. They were nothing of the sort. They involved struggle sessions, public denunciations, suicides and the political destruction of the urban capitalist class as a force in Chinese life. Strong answers stress that by 1956 the bourgeoisie that had run the cities was gone — that mattered for everything Mao did next, from the First Five-Year Plan to the Hundred Flowers.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign, 1956–57

In May 1956, Mao adapted a phrase from a classical poem: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.’ He invited intellectuals — writers, scientists, professors, journalists — to criticise the party and propose reforms. Several factors lay behind the move. Stalin had died in 1953, and Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956 attacked Stalin’s personality cult; Mao did not want a Chinese version of de-Stalinisation imposed on him. Hungary’s 1956 uprising frightened the whole communist bloc into thinking about safety valves. Mao also believed the bulk of intellectuals — many trained before 1949 — were now safely loyal and could be trusted with limited debate.

The first response was muted. Most intellectuals were cautious. Then in early 1957 Mao gave a much sharper speech, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, urging open criticism. From May 1957 onwards, criticism poured in. Posters demanded an end to one-party rule. The student-aged writer Lin Xiling attacked Marxism. The literary editor Hu Feng (already arrested in 1955) became a symbol of intellectuals who had been crushed. Mao was reportedly stunned by the volume.

Mao later claimed he had ‘lured snakes from their holes’ — that the Hundred Flowers had always been a trap. Many CCP-published accounts repeat this. Western historians take a more divided view. Frank Dikötter (The Tragedy of Liberation) and Jonathan Spence (The Search for Modern China) both argue that the early stages were probably a genuine reform — that Mao expected mild criticism, was alarmed by the volume, and reframed the campaign as a trap once it had ended. The historiography is contested. Top-band answers acknowledge both views rather than collapsing the campaign into a single story.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign, June 1957

In June 1957 the door slammed shut. Mao now declared the criticism a plot by ‘rightists’, and Deng Xiaoping was put in charge of the response. Around 500,000 people were labelled rightists between June 1957 and 1958. Many lost their jobs, were demoted, sent to laogai camps, or rusticated to the countryside — sometimes for the next twenty years. The intellectual class as a critical voice was effectively destroyed for a generation. The result mattered for what came next: when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958, almost no senior figure was willing to challenge it.