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

Her friend promptly turned the note over to party officials.
    Shen Zeyi, who had coauthored the big-character poster with Zhang, was one of the first prominent student activists to confess. Before a full meeting of students and faculty, he renounced all ties with Zhang. Later, state newspapers published an essay he wrote titled “I Apologize to the People.” Over the following months, others who had spoken out came under growing pressure to capitulate in struggle sessions. Security agents shadowed the most vocal students. The lively campus debates over ideas became denunciation meetings, and at times they got physical, with students shoved to the ground and forced to bow their heads. Some held out longer than others, but eventually, almost everyone targeted in the campaign gave in. A handful of students fled to their hometowns in the provinces or attempted to seek refuge in foreign embassies, but they could not escape the party’s grasp. In the end, it made little difference if you confessed or not. Once you had been labeled a Rightist, you were doomed.
    As others were falling in line, though, Lin Zhao was moving in the opposite direction. She found the the Anti-Rightist Campaign sickening. She was upset by the personal attacks, and distraught over the lives that were being ruined, and she saw the party’s behavior as a betrayal of those who had trusted it most. The Hundred Flowers Movement was over, criticism of the party was no longer welcome, but Lin Zhao decided to get more involved, not less, as if her conscience had finally triumphed over her feelings for “the organization” and she wanted to make up for lost time. She tried to help Zhang publish one last issue of the magazine of the Hundred Flowers Society, and she wrote a bitter poem under a pen name, describing the denunciations of classmates as a “saber cutting my young heart, leaving it scarred and marked.” At times she was openly defiant, reading aloud on campus from the Lu Xun short story “Diary of a Madman,” in which the protagonist is convinced the people around him are practicing cannibalism and pleads with the reader to “save the children.”
    Lin Zhao could have chosen a different path, Zhang said. Her own participation in the Hundred Flowers Movement had been limited, and if she had stayed quiet, she might have escaped punishment. But at the self-criticism meetings, she refused to admit wrongdoing or express remorse. Instead, she surprised those in the room by talking back to her accusers. As a classmate recalled, when one of the party members asked her to describe her views, Lin Zhao replied, “My view is that all people are equal, and should live in freedom, harmony, and peace. We shouldn’t attack people like this. If you must do this, then do it. But what good is a society like this? It’s no good at all.” She said the party’s invitation to the public to help correct its faults had been “insincere,” and that it didn’t care now whether those who took up its offer lived or died. She refused to renounce Zhang and other friends who had been labeled Rightists. When the party members continued to criticize her, she retorted that they were dancing on her body and wiping blood from the bottom of their shoes on her face. As the weeks passed, the pressure to confess was intense. Lin Zhao’s friends pleaded with her to get it over with, to protect herself and say what the party wanted to hear, as everyone else had. Instead, Lin Zhao swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. Classmates found her and saved her, but party officials later said the suicide attempt was a sign of her “vile attitude,” another offense against the people.
    By autumn, the worst of the Anti-Rightist Campaign seemed to have passed. The Rightists had been humiliated and silenced. They were outcasts on campus, shunned by their classmates and subject to arbitrary harassment. But the struggle sessions were over, and a semblance of normalcy returned to the