Three Antis and Five Antis Campaigns

Launch

In 1951 the campaign to increase production and economise exposed widespread corruption, waste and bureaucratism. Mao Zedong drafted directives for the Central Committee calling for "a great cleansing of the whole Party", saying the struggle against corruption, waste and bureaucratism "should be regarded as just as important as the struggle to suppress counterrevolutionaries" and that "only by shooting a number of the most serious embezzlers can the problem be solved". On 1 December 1951 the Central Committee adopted a decision on streamlining administration, increasing production and economising, and opposing corruption, waste and bureaucratism; on the 8th it directed that the anti-corruption struggle be waged "with great fanfare", and the "Three Antis" campaign spread through Party, government and army bodies and state enterprises.

The Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan Case

The campaign's most prominent case was that of Liu Qingshan, former Party secretary of the Tianjin prefecture and then deputy Party secretary of Shijiazhuang, and Zhang Zishan, the Tianjin prefecture's Party secretary. According to an article on the Party's 12371.cn website, they were found to have misappropriated funds for airfield construction, disaster relief grain and relief grain for cadres' families, among other things, to the value of more than 17.16 billion yuan in old currency (more than 1.716 million yuan in current currency). Arrested in November and December 1951, they were tried with the Central Committee's approval at a public rally in Baoding on 10 February 1952, where the Supreme People's Court's approval of their death sentences was announced; both were executed that day. Official accounts later called it New China's "first shot against corruption".

The "Five Antis"

Many of the corruption cases exposed involved private businessmen. On 26 January 1952 Mao drafted a directive calling on cities nationwide to "rely on the working class, unite the law-abiding bourgeoisie and other townspeople" against "the law-breaking bourgeoisie" in a struggle against bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing state economic information; the big cities entered the "Five Antis" in early February. Workers and shop assistants were organised to denounce their employers; according to Hu Qizhu, more than 600,000 employees in Shanghai took part, submitting more than 300,000 accusations.

On 5 March Mao proposed classifying private businesses into five categories — law-abiding, basically law-abiding, semi-law-abiding, seriously law-breaking and completely law-breaking — estimating that the first three made up about 95% in the big cities, and set principles such as "leniency for the past, strictness for the future; leniency for the majority, strictness for the few; leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist". On 8 March the Government Administration Council approved the Central Economy Inspection Committee's rules on embezzlers and Beijing's standards for classifying businesses: embezzlers were graded by amount and degree of confession, with penalties ranging from supervision to death, death sentences requiring approval by the centre or the greater administrative regions; "completely law-breaking" businesses could at most face death and confiscation of property.

Consequences

According to the 12371.cn article, the "Three Antis" produced 42 death sentences, 9 suspended death sentences, 67 life sentences and 9,942 fixed-term sentences. The "Five Antis" hit the private economy hard: Mao's directive warned that "confessions may not be extorted by corporal punishment; suicides must be strictly guarded against, and where they have occurred, preventive measures must be drawn up at once", and Hu Qizhu, drawing on research by Yang Kuisong and Chen Yung-fa among others, writes that among Shanghai capitalists "suicides, strokes and breakdowns were frequent", and that many private firms stopped work or made losses afterwards. The Central Committee then narrowed the scope and shortened the campaign; Hu says the "Five Antis" was declared basically over nationwide in June 1952. Officials too were purged in the "Three Antis", among them Gu Zhun, formerly head of Shanghai's finance and tax bureaux, who was dismissed.

Assessments

An order of the Government Administration Council signed by Zhou Enlai in March 1952 said the campaigns had "educated state employees and the whole people" and would "sweep away the poison of the old society and establish the honest and simple ethos of the new society". Official Party history holds that they consolidated the leading position of the state sector and paved the way for the socialist transformation of capitalist industry and commerce; the CPC's 2021 historical resolution likewise lists the "Three Antis" and "Five Antis" among the measures of the early People's Republic.