Hundred Flowers campaign

In Chinese history, a movement from 1956 to 1957 of open political and intellectual debate, encouraged by Mao Zedong.

The campaign was intended to rouse the bureaucracy and to weaken the position of the Chinese Communist Party's then dominant pro-Soviet ‘right wing’. It rapidly got out of hand, resulting in excessive censure of party personnel.

The Hundred Flowers campaign was begun in May 1956, soon after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's ‘secret speech’ attacking the excesses of Stalinism, and was brought to a close in May 1957, with 200,000 intelligentsia critics being exiled to remote rural areas in what became known as the anti-rightist campaign. The name was derived from a slogan from Chinese classical history: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.’