Sufan movement

The sufan campaign originated as the development of a campaign by Mao in early 1955 against Hu Feng, a Marxist literary critic, and a purported clique of writers and intellectuals who had criticised the Communist Party's restrictive policies towards literature and the arts. They called for more freedom of expression, but were persecuted as counterrevolutionaries. 81,000 intellectuals were "unmasked and punished" and another 300,000 were deprived of their civil rights on the grounds that they were "politically unreliable". The campaign officially began after the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a "Directive on launching a struggle to cleanse out hidden counter-revolutionary elements" () on 1 July 1955. On 25 August 1955, it issued "The directive on the thorough purge and cleansing of hidden counter revolutionaries" (). ==Aims and targets==

Unlike the 1951 Zhen Fan campaign (1950–52), which principally targeted those as threats from outside the state system such as former Kuomintang officials and supporters, the sufan campaign widened to purge those within the party, military and state agencies who Mao's circle saw as threats. Several top Party officials, notably the technocrats Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, were purged in the early stages of the campaign. Many other Party members and government officials were arrested on vague suspicions of counterrevolutionary activity and were made to 'confess' their political views. The Public Security Bureaus of the Ministry of Public Security were a particular target, as the communist leadership sought to ensure that China's security forces were under tight Party control. The ''People's Daily'', in an attempt to provide justification for the purge, reported that ten percent of Communist Party members were secret traitors and needed to be purged. This number appears to have been taken as a quota for the number of arrests that needed to occur. There was no judicial process involved; instead, people were targeted through administrative edicts in which regular criminal procedures were ignored. 2.2 million people were reported to have been investigated by September 1955. 110,000 people were purportedly "exposed" as counterrevolutionaries, though Mao continued the campaign for a further two years in the belief that another 50,000 major suspects were still at large. It was effectively a reaction by Mao against the rise of a technocratic bureaucracy dominated by pro-Soviet officials, following the implementation of China's Soviet-inspired First Five-Year Plan from 1953 onwards. Mao saw the new technocratic ethos in China's administration as a corruption of the "revolutionary spirit". The officials responsible were cast as "functional bourgeoisie" whose power was based on their bureaucratic authority rather than private property. In 1952, he was ordered to Beijing to become head of the State Planning Commission of China (SPC), where he later attempted a leadership challenge against Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. ==Outcomes==

The campaign was brought to an end in October 1957 after more than 18 million people had been targeted. Another 11 to 12 million people were still to be investigated when the campaign was ended. ==See also==

• 22 Years as a Class Enemy by Judith Shapiro • High Tide of Terror, Mar. 05, 1956, Time Magazine