Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962

Chang Xiping (常溪萍 1917–1968), who had joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1938 but had not gone beyond secondary school in his education, served as secretary of the party committee and vice-president at East China Normal University (华东师范大学 Huadong shifan daxue) in the mid-1950s.¹ Because the university’s president was a non-Communist academic, Chang was the actual chief administrator at that university. This article examines how Communist cadres like Chang dealt with professors and exercised leadership in higher education.

The period chosen for study, 1955 to 1962, may not fit into the common periodization in studies of Mao’s China, but it saw drastic shifts in the CCP’s relations with intellectuals as well as dramatic changes in Chinese higher education. This period began with the party center’s attempt to improve relations with intellectuals and the “Hundred Flowers” Movement, but the tide changed with the launching of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the summer of 1957, and educated professionals who had started their careers before 1949 were repeatedly attacked from 1958 to 1960. In 1961 the party center started a new endeavor to conciliate intellectuals, which reached its climax in 1962. Additionally, in Chinese higher education, 1956 saw the beginning of a critical reevaluation of the Soviet model, which had been closely emulated in the early 1950s; 1958 to 1960 were years of radical experiments, known as the educational revolution (教育革命 Jiaoyu geming);² and the years from 1961 to 1962 witnessed a retreat from the Educational Revolution.

The Communist cadres examined in this article include the Communists who held leadership positions at universities³ as well as those working in the party and government departments supervising higher education. In the period studied here, they were made up of two groups. The first and more powerful group included those who had joined the CCP before 1949 and who were called old cadres (老干部 laoganbu) after 1949.⁴ After 1927, the CCP had built its power basis in rural areas; therefore, most of the old cadres in the early years of the People’s Republic had come from villages and small towns and had little formal education. The second group was comprised of recent college graduates who had been admitted into the party in the early 1950s.

This article hopes to contribute to scholarship on relations between the CCP and intellectuals as well as on Chinese higher education in the early years of the People’s Republic. Early studies of the CCP’s relations with intellectuals viewed the party’s urge to enforce strict ideological orthodoxy as the main source of its conflict with the latter.⁵ More recent works have identified Mao’s radicalism as the cause of the tragic experiences of Chinese intellectuals after the mid-1950s. According to the commonly accepted narrative, soon after the party center had started its endeavor to improve relations with intellectuals, Mao began to view the bureaucratization of the party as a serious danger, and decided, over the objection of other leaders and the party establishment, to invite non-party intellectuals to criticize the Communist cadres’ “bureaucratism.” However, when he finally overcame the resistance in the party leadership, the criticisms from the intellectuals became too harsh for him. In response, again according to this narrative, Mao turned against intellectuals in the summer of 1957. By that time Mao had developed a new approach to economic development that would rely on the masses rather than the expertise of the educated professionals. This approach became a new source of the militant policy toward intellectuals advocated by Mao from 1957, a policy that was only temporarily restrained in the early 1960s, when, in the wake of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, moderate voices regained some influence in the party leadership.⁶

However, the above interpretations fail to notice the role that the Communist cadres played in the party’s conflict with and periodic suppression of intellectuals. This article demonstrates that from the early 1950s Communist cadres shared a common view of professors as being the politically most backward group at universities and...