The Dismissal of Marshal P'eng Teh-huai

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Abstract
There is little reason for thinking that the anti-rightist campaign of 1957–58, which closed the Hundred Flowers interlude, was undertaken in order to overcome an organised opposition in the central leadership of the Chinese Communist Party rather than to deal with a political situation that was clearly getting out of hand. The victims were either bourgeois intellectuals and members of the so-called “democratic parties” or communist officials of the second rank, for the most part provincial administrators. Their fate presumably strengthened the hand of the doctrinaires in the Party and weakened the will of the moderates to oppose the extravagances of the subsequent “great leap forward”; and there are doubtless many in China as well as the West who believe that Mao's personal involvement in the fiasco of liberalisation may have constituted the first stage in a process which would lead eighteen months later to his withdrawal from the chairmanship of the republic. The political repercussions were, however, long-term; the immediate effect of the change of line may have been to cement rather than undermine the solidarity of the leaders.

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