Free Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan

“contradiction” between the demands of one’s conscience and the demands of “the organization,” by which she meant the party. But someone in the back of the audience interrupted her. “Who are you?” he barked. “What’s your name?” Without hesitating, Lin Zhao shot back: “Who are you? Who are you to question me? Are you a police officer, prosecutor, or court official? A plainclothes agent?
    “It’s okay, I’ll tell you. My name is Lin, the character with two trees in it. Zhao, the character with the sword over the mouth next to the sun,” she said. She paused for a moment, then added: “Whether the sword is over the mouth, or the sword is over the head, I don’t care. Since I’m standing here, I don’t care where the sword is!”
    Word of Lin Zhao’s eloquence spread quickly across campus, and the next day, posters appeared that attacked her by name. But as others rushed to her defense, Lin Zhao herself went missing. A friend found her passed out in bed, her pillow soaked with red wine. On her desk was a piece of paper with three lines of poetry in her handwriting:
    The heavens have wronged me,
    If I cannot endure it,
    Who will bear this responsibility?
    Lin Zhao would never take the spotlight again in the Hundred Flowers Movement. After that night, Zhang said, she refused to participate anymore in the “blooming and contending” and instead withdrew to the rare books collection of the university library. It was as if she sensed the danger approaching and was struggling to reconcile the conflict she had described between her conscience and her loyalty to the party.
    The debates on campus continued without her. But as the days passed, the party began to isolate its critics and reassert control. “Any word or deed at variance with socialism is completely wrong,” Mao declared, and the statement was painted in large white characters on the side of a building on campus. At the end of the month, the editors of the campus literary magazine convened a meeting to expel Zhang. This time, Lin Zhao stood with his accusers. She was still trying to make sense of the events of the past few weeks, and had not yet abandoned her faith in the party. Now that the party had labeled him a Rightist, she believed it. She was truly angry, Zhang recalled, and felt he had betrayed her. “I feel I have been deceived,” she said.
    Mao formally launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign with an editorial in the People’s Daily about a week later. “Certain people,” it said, were using the Hundred Flowers Movement as a pretext to “overthrow the Communist Party and the working class, and to topple the great cause of socialism.” His original speech inviting public criticism of the party was published in state newspapers, but Mao rewrote history and added a new section setting limits on what could be criticized—words he had never uttered at the start of the Hundred Flowers Movement. After months of promising people they would not be punished for speaking out, the party began to do just that.
    At Beida and elsewhere, the optimism and excitement of the spring gave way to a summer of fear, suspicion, and mistrust. As Mao turned from cultivating “blooming flowers” to rooting out “poisonous weeds,” the party began a witch hunt. One by one, those who had voiced “Rightist” opinions were identified and summoned to self-criticism meetings, where they were told to confess their crimes, implicate colleagues, and renounce friends. Many students, still loyal to the party and convinced they had really lost their way, did what the party asked. Others believed they had done no wrong but tried to figure out how they could save themselves. As tensions on campus grew and the campaign got uglier, Lin Zhao found it increasingly difficult to ignore her own doubts about the party. “No sound at this time is better than any sound,” she wrote in a note to a friend, in a frank warning indicating she no longer trusted the authorities.