Word: mao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mao Tse-tung had called for honest criticism of his government and, lo, from Canton to Chungking there was criticism. The walls of Peking University blazed with multicolored placards pointedly demanding "What is more precious than individual liberty?", angrily proclaiming that "Graduate students know very little because they are allowed to study only Russian methods in physics lab." Engineer Li Pei Ying of Tientsin declared: "Intellectuals live a life that is less peaceful than it was under Japanese or Kuomintang rule...
Inevitably, some of the critics went beyond the bounds outlined by Chairman Mao in his now famous "secret" speeches (TIME, May 27 et seq.). Chu An Ping, editor of the Kwangming Daily, which speaks for Red China's eight tame "democratic" parties, had the temerity to suggest criticism of Mao himself: "People have raised many opinions against the junior monks, but no one has yet said anything about the old monks...
Wrecking Praises. Four months ago when Mao insisted that the time had come to begin hothouse cultivation of "the hundred flowers" of criticism, the suspicion was that he was looking for noxious weeds to bare their heads to the party scythe. He had to wait awhile; it was weeks after Mao's "rectification" campaign began before China's timid intellectuals found the courage to raise their voices. For his attack on Mao, Editor Chu An Ping was suspended from his party. General Lung's co-workers publicly rebuked him for "slandering the Soviet Union with malice." Critics...
...Queer Talk." Even more revealing than Mao's own admissions was the violence of the public criticism unleashed by Red China's current "rectification" campaign. At a discussion meet in Peking's China People's University, Ko Pei-chi, lecturer in industrial economy, chemistry and physics, took at face value Mao's slogan "Let a hundred schrools of thought contend." Wrote Ko, recalling Communist promises of a higher standard of living: "Who are those whose standard of living actually has been raised? It is those party members and cadres who used to wear torn shoes...
...Peking People's Daily, which published it as an example of the kind of criticism Chairman Mao does not welcome, all this was nothing but "queer talk and absurd theories." But perhaps Ko's remarks had some bearing on the most startling admission in Mao's no longer secret speech: "The question of whether socialism or capitalism will win [in China] is still not really settled...