Mass persecution of intellectuals is a Chinese tradition that started with Emperor Shih huang-ti Shih huang-ti in the third century b.c.e. Shih had hundreds of Confucian scholars killed, and he burned many books in order to establish an ideology favorable to his regime. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party, led by Mao, launched several movements to suppress dissenting intellectuals and officials, thereby sowing the seeds for the future Cultural Revolution. In 1957 Mao advocated the “Hundred Flower Blossom” movement Hundred Flower Blossom movement[Hundred Flower Blossom movement] , inviting intellectuals to criticize party leadership. However, when criticism turned on one-party dictatorship, Mao abruptly declared his critics “rightists” and sent a half million of them to labor camps. Two years later, when Defense Minister Peng Dehua Peng Dehua criticized Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” “Great Leap Forward”[Great Leap Forward] movement—an ambitious economic program that had created a nationwide depression—Mao launched a campaign to purge Peng and his friends. During the early 1960’s, in the midst of the open debate and split with the Soviet Union, Mao conducted the “Socialist Education Movement” to “rectify party powerholders who take the capitalist road.” Mao aimed to prevent China from becoming like the Soviet Union, which he regarded as a capitalist country in disguise. The final catalyst of the Cultural Revolution came from Wu Han, a leading nonparty intellectual and deputy mayor of Beijing, who published a historical play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, depicting an honest official in the Ming Dynasty who lost his job after pointing out the mistakes of the emperor’s land program. In late 1965 radical communists in Shanghai called the play a veiled defense of ousted Peng and—by extension—an attack on Mao, sparking a nationwide debate on Wu’s play and works by other intellectuals. Cultural Revolution, Chinese China Mao Zedong
