How should we measure the time of a Maoist campaign? What is the legacy for its authors and for China today? This concluding chapter reviews the major themes of the book. It also explores the tensions between linear and circular conceptions of time, how they shaped the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns, and what this watershed period in modern Chinese history can tell us about the agency of the writer in contemporary China and the role of literary circulation in the perpetual reimagining and rewriting of the Chinese state.

Can individual writers change the national climate? Following Mao’s comments on the “poetry case,” Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe took divergent paths in dealing with the local literary establishment and finally with the shift from Hundred Flowers to Anti-Rightist campaign. Their strategies in response to the unfolding campaigns reveal that the year 1957 marked a critical transformation in the way Chinese writers perceived the relationship between their own use of language and the social reality of which, and into which, they wrote. The “poetry case” also taught Mao and the Party leadership that a liberal policy toward literary production and loosened censorship did spur creativity but fostered the growth of linguistic and social networks that they could neither mediate nor compete with in kind.

In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

Where did these flowers come from? They have been traced back to the poet Allen Ginsberg and his November 1965 call for “Masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to be arranged at the frontline of protests. But ten years earlier, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the power of flowers had already been put to work. In fact, it was the potency of the flower in China, its ability to do things, to move, and to move people, that not only foreshadowed but had helped inspire Ginsberg and his movement. And it was Mao, not Ginsberg, who Hoffman cited in the last sentence of the quote above. In China, in the years 1954–58, floral arrangements, motifs, illustrations, fashion, and even architectural decoration, were to be found in virtually every sphere and level of society. Flowers decorated the stage as Chairman Mao spoke to the political elite; they appeared not only in newspaper headlines, in the decorative illustrations of magazines and journals, in cartoons, in song, and in poetic paeans to the young nation, but also in private diaries and letters and in poetry and big-character posters (dazibao 大字報) expressing dissent and anger. Where did these flowers come from?

What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.

The Hundred Flowers movement marked a turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China. How did it begin? While Mao has been credited with sole authorship of the Hundred Flowers, this chapter exposes the plural and deep roots of the blooming of 1957. It traces the gradual coalescing of the political and literary fields, as “let a hundred flowers bloom” spread from a nineteenth-century novel to a twentieth-century campaign slogan. From 1949 to 1956, before they were Mao’s, the Hundred Flowers were captured and appropriated by a growing field of writers, philosophers, scientists, poets, and politicians. In the process, a literary trope became a central term in political discourse and political discourse became a field of creative play. This chapter argues that practices of literary circulation shaped and powered the birth and transformation of the Hundred Flowers.

How were writers not labeled in the first waves of the Anti-Rightist campaign affected? Did they change their writing practices in response to the public excoriation of what were now “poisonous weeds”? How did they balance demands to continue to publish with the now clear danger of circulating texts that could be interpreted as anti-Party, anti-socialist, or simply circumspect in their ambiguity? We inherit a historiography that delineates between those who were labeled and those who acquiesced, but this bifurcation masks complexity and diversity among both groups. This chapter, through the diary and letters of Wu Mi, explores the ambiguous and precarious position of those writers not labeled in the summer of 1957. It also follows those writers who were labeled in 1957, their experiences through and after the removal of their “Rightist” label, and reflects on what it means for literature to “interfere with life.”

What held the textual community of the People’s Republic together? This chapter explores how literary acts by individuals across a spectrum of influence, from Mao Zedong to Xu Chengmiao, created meaning and connection out of the imagery of the Hundred Flowers. Despite his leadership of the Leninist state mechanism, in early 1957 Mao joined in what had been dismissed as “language games” with his own extended allegory and metaphor that borrowed more from writers like Ai Qing than from Party formulism. This chapter argues that Mao’s creative appropriation of the imagery of the Hundred Flowers enabled him to speak to a broad audience that included the Soviet leadership, Party conservatives, and literati across the political spectrum. The creative circulation of the Hundred Flowers enacted a resurrection of literary communities with roots in dynastic China. Finally, we turn to the writers Guo Xiaochuan, Xiao Jun, and Xu Chengmiao to observe how personal literary practice connected writers to the growing national movement and how the movement of a literary trope created a national community.

How did people respond to the political campaigns of the Mao era? This chapter looks beyond the dominant images of the Hundred Flowers to explore reactions to the now national campaign among writers and cultural workers. Drawing on contemporary diaries and letters, this chapter uncovers diverse intellectual and emotional responses to the movement, in tension with the jubilant bloom visible across China’s media-sphere. It shows how individual responses to the Hundred Flowers were intwined with perceptions of Mao as a leader and with a perceived disconnect between signals from the Party center and local conditions. We find those in support of Mao and against local authorities; we find those, like Xu Chengmiao, who see the Hundred Flowers as a source of great hope; and we find those who doubt both central and regional leadership. Belying depictions of the Hundred Flowers as an outpouring of dissent against the Party, we find a tangled undergrowth of diverse and nuanced responses to the movement.

Following the blooming of the Hundred Flowers came a metaphorical springtime. How was it formed? As metaphorical wordplay continued to shape public discourse, the sustained input of creative writers gradually transformed the discussion of flowers to a broader theme of spring. Poets such as Ai Qing wove ever more detailed depictions of bucolic scenes to both comment on the state of the Republic and to join in the word play that was now present across genres of writing. In the process, an ever-expanding circle of writers joined the metaphorical and allegorical debate, including Zhou Shoujuan, who saw the movement as a resurrection of the literary public sphere of the May Fourth era. We also observe the migration of metaphorical imagery from text to visual-culture, as floral scenes and those of spring became omnipresent in magazines and newspapers.

What could you do if you felt out of step with Maoism? What if the great blooming of early 1957 did not reflect your feelings about the People’s Republic? How could you express yourself with the language available to you and circulating throughout public discourse? This chapter traces the frequent but disparate and isolated practices of botanical metaphor inspired by the Hundred Flowers but deployed in critique, echoing practices that have remained potent since the Book of Odes. It begins with the story of Jiang Rende, who arranges grass on his desk and thinks of Lu Xun, and reveals a world of critical but disconnected deployments of the botanical imagery of the Hundred Flowers.