Right and Wrong.
是非
Moral judgment, with the reasons written down.
Right and Wrong
Moral judgment, with the reasons written down.
Lead essays & audio editions · 2
essay · Episode 2The Arithmetic of Guilt: When Killing Became a PercentageIn 1951, criminal guilt ceased to be a question of fact and became an industrial production target. How bureaucratic murder quotas mathematically manufactured counterrevolutionaries.▶ Listenessay · Episode 9Complicity by Attendance: Struggle Sessions and the Universal Raised HandIn a traditional autocracy, the ruler asks only that you remain quiet while his executioners do their work. Under the Chinese Communist Party, silence was abolished: every colleague, neighbor, and child was required to raise a hand.▶ ListenThe May Thirtieth MovementOn 30 May 1925, British municipal police opened fire on unarmed Chinese student and worker demonstrators outside Louza Police Station on Shanghai's Nanking Road, killing thirteen and sparking a titanic nationwide wave of anti-imperialist strikes and boycotts that rapidly expanded Communist Party membership from one thousand to ten thousand.Read →Land redistribution in the base areasIn late 1928 on the heights of Jinggangshan, Mao Zedong enacted the Jinggangshan Land Law, launching the Chinese Communist Party's first systematic rural land redistribution by confiscating all landlord holdings and giving landless tenant peasants a tangible material stake in defending the Red Army.Read →The Futian IncidentIn December 1930, an internal witch-hunt against suspected Kuomintang 'Anti-Bolshevik League' conspirators in southern Jiangxi triggered a mutiny within the Red Twentieth Army at Futian, which was crushed with merciless severity, resulting in the torture and execution of thousands of dedicated communist officers and setting a chilling precedent for party purges.Read →The Nanjing MassacreIn December 1937, following the fall of the Nationalist capital, invading Japanese forces unleashed six weeks of systematic murder, mass rape, and widespread arson across Nanjing, murdering hundreds of thousands of disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians in one of the most horrific war crimes of the twentieth century.Read →The Yellow River dykes breachedIn June 1938, facing imminent Japanese encirclement of Zhengzhou after the fall of Xuzhou, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the deliberate dynamiting of the Yellow River dykes at Huayuankou, unleashing a catastrophic deluge that temporarily stalled Japanese motorized columns but drowned hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants and displaced millions.Read →The Henan famineBetween 1942 and 1943, severe drought and catastrophic locust swarms combined with predatory Nationalist grain requisitions to starve an estimated two to three million peasants across Henan province, permanently alienating the rural population from Chiang Kai-shek's regime.Read →The Yan'an Rectification MovementIn February 1942, Mao Zedong inaugurated the Yan'an Rectification Movement, subjecting tens of thousands of communist cadres to intensive study, criticism, and self-criticism over three years, permanently discrediting Soviet-trained Returned Students and enshrining Mao Zedong Thought as the supreme ideological orthodoxy of the Chinese Communist Party.Read →The Rescue Campaign inside RectificationIn the summer of 1943, secret police chief Kang Sheng transformed the ideological rectification campaign into the paranoid Rescue Movement, using psychological terror, sleep deprivation, and torture to extract false confessions from thousands of patriotic students, accusing over ten thousand young volunteers of being Kuomintang and imperialist spies.Read →The Outline Land LawIn October 1947, the Chinese Communist Party promulgated the Outline Land Law, formally decreeing the abolition of the feudal land tenure system and the confiscation and redistribution of all landlord property. Passed at a national land conference presided over by Liu Shaoqi, the law unleashed a wave of violent peasant mobilization that supplied the PLA with millions of recruits, porters and grain levies to win the civil war.Read →
The Land Reform LawOn 30 June 1950, the Central People's Government passed the Agrarian Reform Law, extending the confiscation and redistribution of rural land into central and southern China. Carried out by work teams who classified hundreds of millions of villagers into rigid class strata, the campaign shattered the traditional gentry, executing over a million landlords and redistributing half of China's cultivated acreage.Read →Land reform killingsMao put the dead at about 100,000. The historians who have counted since put them in the millions.Read →The campaign to suppress counterrevolutionariesIn October 1950, as Chinese troops entered the Korean War, Mao Zedong launched the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, initiating the young regime's first nationwide wave of mass political terror. By setting execution quotas of one to two per thousand of the population, the campaign executed hundreds of thousands of former Nationalist personnel, religious leaders, and political dissidents in public stadiums across China.Read →The three-anti and five-anti campaignsLaunched in late 1951 and early 1952, the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns subjected party cadres and urban private capitalists to relentless mass interrogation and public humiliation. Ostensibly targeting corruption and tax evasion, the dual campaigns effectively nationalized the commercial economy, terrorizing private business owners into submission and securing state monopoly over urban enterprise.Read →Thought reform of intellectualsIn autumn 1951, the Communist Party launched a nationwide Thought Reform campaign across China's universities and cultural institutions, forcing scholars, writers, and Western-trained professionals into humiliating self-criticism. Demanding that intellectuals renounce their 'bourgeois individualism' and pledge fealty to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the campaign extinguished academic freedom and broke the independent spirit of the intellectual class.Read →The Hu Feng case and the campaign to root out hidden counterrevolutionariesIn the summer of 1955, an esoteric literary dispute over socialist realism transformed into one of the PRC's most terrifying witch-hunts when critic Hu Feng was declared head of an anti-Party counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Mao personally published Hu's private correspondence to expose supposed subversion, unleashing the nationwide Sufan campaign that purged hundreds of thousands of state employees and terrified the intellectual establishment.Read →The Hundred FlowersIn May 1956, Mao Zedong surprised the Party hierarchy by unveiling the 'Hundred Flowers' campaign, urging China's educated classes to voice frank critiques of Communist Party bureaucracy. Convinced that socialist transformation was already secure, Mao sought to enlist intellectuals to invigorate national culture and check bureaucratic sclerosis, initiating an extraordinary political thaw that soon escaped the regime's control.Read →The Anti-Rightist CampaignOn 8 June 1957, the People's Daily published the thunderous editorial 'What Is This For?', slamming the brakes on the Hundred Flowers and launching the catastrophic Anti-Rightist Campaign. Directed by Deng Xiaoping, the purge branded over 550,000 scholars, writers, scientists, students, and loyal party cadres as 'Rightists', banishing them to remote labor camps and extinguishing critical public debate in China for a generation.Read →