Read Online Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan - Free Book Online

documentary.
    So with the meager profit from another wedding film, Hu bought a train ticket to Qufu. He didn’t make an appointment or call ahead, he just went to see Zhang unannounced, because he didn’t want to give him a chance to say no. In the end, there was no need for concern. Of all the people Hu had interviewed thus far, Zhang was the most immediately forthcoming. He was a feisty old man, with a thick shock of gray hair and large, thick-rimmed glasses. He exuded confidence, and he spoke without fear or hesitation, often gesturing excitedly with his hands. At first Hu thought the reason Zhang was unafraid was that he had survived so much already, and so there was little more the party could do to intimidate him. But as he listened to him speak, Hu realized there was more to it than that. He noticed a sadness about the older man, and he realized that Zhang was speaking to him out of a sense of personal duty, too. Zhang eventually told him he had made a promise to Lin Zhao, and he intended to keep it.
    His story began in the spring of 1957. The Communist Party had consolidated its control of the nation, establishing its dominance over the cities with mass political campaigns as violent as land reform had been in the countryside. Its drive to build a socialist economy was nearly complete, with almost all private businesses nationalized and the farmland that had been distributed to peasants taken back and organized into cooperatives. After decades of war, China was at peace, having fought the United States to a stalemate on the Korean peninsula. But from his perch inside a walled estate on the grounds of the old Forbidden City, Mao was not satisfied. The party’s tight grip on almost all aspects of life had alienated and stifled the nation’s most educated citizens, and he knew it would be difficult to modernize China without the help of its scientists, scholars, and thinkers. Perhaps even more troubling, the party seemed to be drifting away from the masses and had begun to calcify into a privileged elite not unlike the one it had overthrown. Uprisings in Poland and Hungary in 1956 had shown what could happen when Communists lost touch with the people. Mao’s solution, at least the one he put forward in public, was a bold invitation to intellectuals and others outside the party to criticize Communist rule and offer suggestions for improvements. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend,” he declared. Though his colleagues in the leadership were nervous about opening the party up to attack, Mao seemed confident the public had been won over and predicted its criticisms would be like a “gentle breeze or mild rain” that would help keep the party in line.
    The Hundred Flowers Movement began slowly at first, as local cadres dragged their feet and intellectuals conditioned by the party’s violent record hesitated to stick their necks out. Then in the spring of 1957, Mao embarked on a tour of eastern China to jump-start the movement with assurances he was serious about letting people vent their dissatisfaction with the regime. By mid-April, scholars, writers, artists, businessmen, members of the minor political parties allied with the Communists, and others mustered their courage and began to speak out, often after being persuaded to do so by party officials under pressure to make sure the movement was a success. The “mild rain” that Mao had forecast quickly became a typhoon as long-suppressed frustrations with the party were suddenly unleashed. By mid-May, the storm had spread to Peking University, and Zhang was standing at the center of it.
    For weeks, party authorities on campus had been holding meetings of teachers and professors, encouraging them to join the campaign. But it was not until May 19 that the “blooming and contending” began in full at Beida. At dusk that day, Zhang and another classmate, Shen Zeyi, wrote a poem in large black characters on a sheet of red poster paper and