The year 2017 just passed marked the 60th anniversary of the Anti-Rightist Movement launched by Mao Zedong. This year, people are recalling and studying the experiences and lessons of the Anti-Rightist Movement, but no one is talking about what the modern Chinese historian Song Yongyi calls the “alternative Anti-Rightist”. While the “Anti-Rightist” movement was Mao’s brutal killing of China’s intellectual elite, the “Alternative Anti-Rightist” movement was the intellectual elite’s killing of each other. Song Yongyi is a professor at California State University and the author of the e-book “Archives of the People’s Republic of China”. Starting today, we will listen to Song’s story of the “Alternative Anti-Rightist” in four installments. Today’s story is about how Fu Lei betrayed his friend Xu Chengcheng.
Fu Lei is a famous Chinese translator, writer and educator, and his “Letters from Fu Lei” are so influential that they are still a model for Chinese parents to teach their children. However, one would not expect that even Fu Lei, whose moral writings are a model for the world, had a disgraceful side during the 1957 anti-rightist movement – he betrayed his friend Xu Casting, the editor-in-chief of Wen Wei Po.
Song Yongyi said, “As you know, Wen Wei Po was criticized by Mao Zedong in the summer of 1957, and the editorial “Wen Wei Po’s bourgeois direction must be criticized” was written by Mao Zedong in the People’s Daily. Once Mao Zedong’s article was published, Fu Lei joined the ranks of those who publicly denounced Xu Casting in the newspaper. In fact, Xu Casting was a little kind to Fu Lei, because Fu Lei was a freelancer, Xu Casting hired him as a member of the editorial board of Wen Wei Po, giving him a certain social status. Fu Lei published four or five articles exposing Xu Casting at that time, especially the article “Identifying Rightists is not easy” published in Wen Wei Po on July 6, describing Xu Casting as ‘conspiratorial and syndicated, in the name of a fancy folk newspaper, implementing his strategy of running it as an anti-socialist newspaper and spearheading the bourgeois restoration. ‘ This is a very big hatchet job, and to years of friends, to you or a bit of a benefactor friend, this practice should be said that Fu Lei lost his character.”
Fu Lei’s betrayal, which stunned Xu Chengcheng, was also bound to cause Xu Chengcheng counterattack. Song Yongyi said, “Xu Casting in July 10 of a long check, ‘my crime against the party,’ explained how to discuss many issues closely with Fu Lei, he said: ‘anti-rightist struggle polished my eyes, I have to question Fu Lei, how do you care so much about the ‘Wen Wei Po’ loud and clear? What exactly is your relationship with Lu Yi and other rightists?’ Xu Casting of course beaten into a big rightist, but Fu Lei uncovered these things, and it caused the rightists to make up for it at the beginning of 1958, putting Fu Lei up and turning him into a rightist as well. This was also the initial cause of his death by suicide during the Cultural Revolution.”
Song Yongyi begins his account of the “alternative anti-right” by talking about Fu Lei. The story of Fu Lei’s betrayal of Xu Chengcheng tells the story of how many victims of the Anti-Rightist movement were also perpetrators. Song Yongyi says, “This is something to think about. In fact, from the ideological reform at the beginning of the ‘liberation’ period, all the way to the Anti-Rightist Movement, all the way to the Cultural Revolution, the consistent strategy of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party to purge Chinese intellectuals was to provoke intellectuals to rectify intellectuals, so that you could mix with each other and make his regime highly centralized and secure. What is rather sad is that few of the rightists who were rectified at that time were able to see through Mao’s power schemes, and the vast majority of them, right from the beginning, entered into the melee of tearing and biting each other. And the Chinese intellectuals still have no real understanding of the strategic deployment of the melee one that Mao and the CCP single-handedly manipulated.”
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