Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries

Background

After the founding of the People's Republic, remnant Nationalist forces, bandits and agents remained active in many areas, and bandit uprisings were particularly serious in newly taken regions such as the Southwest. In March 1950, under Liu Shaoqi's direction, the CPC Central Committee issued directives on wiping out bandits and on suppressing counterrevolutionary activities; on 23 July the Government Administration Council and the Supreme People's Court jointly issued a directive on suppressing counterrevolutionary activities. According to the historian Yang Kuisong, Mao Zedong was at that time stressing that the focus of all work was "the struggle for a basic improvement in the state's financial and economic situation", and did not make large-scale suppression a priority.

The "Double Ten Directive" and the Campaign

On 10 October 1950 the Central Committee issued its "Directive on Correcting the Rightist Deviation in Suppressing Counterrevolutionary Activities" (the "Double Ten Directive"), criticising cadres who had misread "combining suppression with leniency" as one-sided leniency and ordering that "primary, incorrigible" counterrevolutionaries who deserved death "should be sentenced to death at once", with verdicts made public and reported prominently in the press; it also required opposition to extorted confessions, banned corporal punishment, and required death sentences to be approved by Party committees at provincial level. Nine days later the Chinese People's Volunteers entered Korea. Yang quotes Mao explaining to Minister of Public Security Luo Ruiqing that the financial problems had previously been unresolved but that now "the war to resist America and aid Korea has begun" — "don't waste this opportunity". The campaign ran alongside land reform and the Korean War.

On 20 February 1951 the Central People's Government Council approved the Regulations on the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries, which prescribed death or life imprisonment for offences such as colluding with imperialism to betray the motherland, armed rebellion, espionage and using secret societies for counterrevolutionary ends; offences not listed could be punished "by analogy", and the Regulations applied to offences committed before they took effect. Mass arrests and public executions followed across the country, with the masses widely mobilised to take part.

Contraction

On 10 May 1951 Luo Ruiqing told the Third National Public Security Conference that "the total number of counterrevolutionaries executed nationwide has now reached one per thousand of the national population, and some areas have exceeded this ratio; an appropriate contraction is needed". He relayed Mao's instructions: executions in rural areas should generally not exceed one per thousand of the population, and in cities should be below that, with 0.5 per thousand appropriate; those who deserved death but had not aroused great popular anger could receive "a death sentence with a two-year reprieve and forced labour". The conference resolution took the power to approve arrests back to the prefectural level and the power to approve executions back to the provincial level, stipulating that "anyone between deserving and not deserving execution must not be executed". Luo's report to the Fourth National Public Security Conference in September acknowledged deviations and errors in the later stage of the high tide, "a very small number" of them "errors of indiscriminate arrests and killings". Yang notes that arrests and executions continued in some areas after the contraction; East China executed nearly 40,000 more people between May and October.

Scale

National totals in Luo's reports are blanked out in the published texts. His September report listed 220,000 killed, 340,000 imprisoned and about 600,000 placed under control in the Central-South region, and 160,000 killed, 240,000 imprisoned and 100,000 under control in the Southwest. Yang Kuisong cites a January 1954 report by Vice-Minister of Public Security Xu Zirong: since the campaign began, more than 2.62 million people had been arrested nationwide, of whom more than 712,000 were killed, more than 1.29 million imprisoned and 1.2 million placed under control at one time or another, while more than 380,000 were released after education — an execution rate of about 1.24 per thousand of a population of some 500 million. Yang argues that because of under-reporting, the actual number executed may have been higher.

Assessments and Aftermath

In his political report to the CPPCC on 23 October 1951, Zhou Enlai said the people's democratic dictatorship "has been further consolidated amid the victorious progress of the three great movements" of resisting America and aiding Korea, land reform and suppressing counterrevolutionaries. In "On the Ten Major Relationships" (1956), Mao said "it must be affirmed that the suppression of counterrevolutionaries in 1951 and 1952 was necessary" and that those killed were counterrevolutionaries "with heavy blood debts whom the common people hated bitterly"; he also said future suppression in society should involve "fewer arrests and fewer executions", that within government bodies the rule should be "no executions and few arrests", and that the democratic parties "still have opinions about the suppression of counterrevolutionaries". In 1987 the NPC Standing Committee confirmed that the Regulations on the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries were no longer applicable. The CPC's 2021 historical resolution lists "suppressed counterrevolutionaries" among the measures of the early years of the People's Republic.