I'm working on my PhD in Chinese history. One of my Chinese colleagues mentioned the other day that he was taught in primary school that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was a trap designed by Mao to lure out rightist intellectuals who he already didn't trust. In all of my readings, I never came across this historiography of the event. Are there sources to support this viewpoint?
I want to start by saying that this is a complex topic, and I am by no means an expert on the matter. Feel free to disagree; we can examine the matter further together.
It's conventional wisdom that the Hundred Flowers Campaign (百花齊放、百家爭鳴) of 1956 was in fact a scheme devised by Mao Zedong to draw out the enemies of the regime, and get rid of them via the Anti-Rightist Movement (反右運動) in 1957. This perspective fits the popular view (at least among non-academics) that Mao was a diabolical evil genius of sorts who managed to single-handedly orchestrate major political upheavals like the Cultural Revolution. More recent academic research has pushed back against this "all-powerful Chairman Mao" view, recognising that Mao was not acting alone, and was influenced by forces both within and without the party. Just like any other politician, Mao had to negotiate and compromise with other actors in the political process; sometimes he got what he wanted, sometimes not.
Specifically with regards to the Hundred Flowers Campaign, some recent scholarship would suggest that Mao really did want to encourage criticism of the regime. By 1956, Mao saw that things were getting out of hand in the Communist Party – a huge bureaucratic apparatus had arisen with clearly defined ranks and privileges for cadres. In Mao's eyes, a new bureaucratic class had arisen within the party, which needed to be uprooted and removed. Along this line of thinking, it is posited that Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign precisely to encourage criticism of the party, assert the right of the people to protest, and stop bureaucratisation.
So why the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement? Some scholars believe the crackdown was neither initiated nor intended by Mao. Instead, the political elites around Mao felt that the protests were getting out of hand, and feared that the legitimacy of the party itself was at stake. It was they who forced Mao into a crackdown – Mao simply did not have enough power to overrule his colleagues.
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Source and Further Reading:
Wu, Yiching. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins. Harvard University Press, 2014.
(As the title suggests, this book is mainly about the Cultural Revolution, and the different appropriations of Mao Zedong thought at different levels of society.)