The People’s Republic of China 139
a succession of massive campaigns, mobilizing the entire population to
carry out Party policies. Early campaigns included attacks on prostitu-
tion, venereal disease, drug addiction, illiteracy, and bribery and cor-
ruption. These were largely successful in educating people in the ideals
and national goals of the Party. There were also strong pressures in
some more destructive campaigns to fi nd, expose, and attack “enemies”
of the Party and the Chinese people within their own midst.
Everyone in the nation now belonged to a “work unit” (danwei).
Factories, schools, trading companies, villages, and farms were all orga-
nized into work units, and every work unit was under Communist Party
supervision. The work unit controlled every aspect of a person’s life:
salary, housing, medical care, and so on. No one could move, change
jobs, or travel any distance without permission of the work unit. Thus,
the Chinese Communist Party exercised a degree of control over peo-
ple’s lives that was never imaginable under the strongest emperors of
the past.
In 1956, Mao was startled by the uprising of the Hungarian people
against the Soviet Communists and their Hungarian collaborators. Mao
argued that the Chinese Communist Party needed to remain close to
the masses of the people in order to prevent such a rebellion against its
rule in China. Under the slogan “Let a hundred fl owers bloom,” Mao
and the Party leadership invited all people to write their criticisms of
the Party and the government, so that its leaders might “learn from the
masses” and get in closer touch with the people. At fi rst, people were
reluctant to speak up in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, but after a
few received public praise for their criticisms, many began to express
their unhappiness with heavy-handed Party control over all aspects of
intellectual work, including art, literature, and historical scholarship. In
June 1957, Mao changed course dramatically and called for harsh criti-
cism and suppression of all these “class enemies” who had attacked the
policies of the Chinese Communist Party.
In the blink of an eye, the Hundred Flowers Campaign turned into
an antirightist campaign that sent 400,000 to 700,000 intellectuals to
labor camps, ending their careers and robbing the country of many of
its best educated minds. At the same time that he was lashing out at
intellectuals, Mao was growing impatient with shortcomings in the
economy. In 1958, he called for a massive new economic campaign.
Presiding over a mostly agricultural economy, the government had
to fi nance its industrialization by extracting every possible surplus from
agricultural production. Some surpluses were achieved in the early
1950s by the restoration of peace, collectivization, and reclaiming new