Chu Anping

Early Life and Academic Background

Chu Anping was born in 1909 in Yixing, Jiangsu. He graduated from Guanghua University in Shanghai in 1932, while concurrently serving as a professor at Fudan University, teaching courses including Comparative Constitutional Law and Government and Politics of Various Countries. In 1936, at age 27, he went to study at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski, receiving systematic training in British liberal political thought.

The Observer and a Career in Liberal Journalism

In 1945 Chu founded the weekly Objective (客观) in Chongqing. On 1 September 1946 he founded and edited The Observer (观察) weekly in Shanghai, with contributors including the noted liberal scholars Fei Xiaotong, Zhu Ziqing, and Xiao Qian; the magazine rapidly became the most important platform for liberal Chinese intellectuals in the 1940s, renowned for its independent and objective editorial stance. On 24 December 1948, the Nationalist government banned The Observer on charges of 'inciting rebellion,' dealing a severe blow to Chu's journalistic career.

1957: Editor-in-Chief of Guangming Daily and the "Party-World" Speech

On 1 April 1957, Chu was appointed editor-in-chief of Guangming Daily, one of a number of appointments under the 'Hundred Flowers' policy in which the Party invited non-Party democratic figures to head party-affiliated newspapers. On 1 June that year, at a forum for non-Party figures convened by the Party's United Front Work Department, he delivered an address titled 'A Few Suggestions for Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou,' putting forward his 'party-world' (党天下) thesis — arguing that 'the Party leading the country does not mean the country belongs to the Party' — and criticising the CCP's comprehensive monopoly over every sphere of national life. On 8 June, People's Daily published an editorial written personally by Mao Zedong, 'What Is This For?,' launching the Anti-Rightist Campaign; Chu's remarks became one of the campaign's most prominent targets. On 12 November that year he was removed as editor-in-chief of Guangming Daily and subsequently labelled a 'major rightist,' stripped of all his positions.

The 1966 Disappearance

After the Cultural Revolution began, Chu Anping was repeatedly denounced and had his home ransacked by Red Guards, and was made to sweep streets by day. On 31 August 1966 — the same day the writer Lao She drowned himself in Taiping Lake — Chu attempted suicide by jumping into the Chaobai River near Qinglongqiao on Beijing's western outskirts; rescued, he was placed under the watch of a 'rebel faction' of the Jiusan Society. In early September he returned home from custody to find the house ransacked a second time and stripped of belongings, and he left home and was never seen again. On learning of this, Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the Ministry of Public Security to form a task force, which searched nationwide for two years without result. In June 1982, the CCP Central United Front Work Department formally notified his son, Chu Wanghua, of an official finding that Chu Anping had died — though the time, place, and manner of his death remain unknown to this day.

Non-Rehabilitation and Historical Assessment

After 1978, roughly 550,000 people labelled rightists were gradually 'corrected,' but the CCP Central Committee designated five central-level rightists whose cases would not be corrected: Zhang Bojun, Luo Longji, Peng Wenying, Chu Anping, and Chen Renbing. Chu remains among this small group of prominent rightists who have never been rehabilitated. The Observer magazine he founded and his 'party-world' thesis are still regarded as landmark documents in the history of Chinese liberal journalism and the narrowing of public discourse in twentieth-century China.