Which Chinese government are you referring to?

Interesting Smithsonian article on the Hundred Flowers campaign.

In short, after having slaughtered ~700,000 counterrevolutionaries, Mao encouraged "constructive criticism," and the massive amount of criticism directed at the Communist Party, the outcry from intellectuals and those critical of the new government, scared him into quashing his own movement and shipping many thousands of people off to labor camps or mass executions. You could technically have obeyed his policies exactly and been killed for it, in this case.

TL;DR Mao invites opposition, people post fliers to a wall, he backtracks, thousands are killed.