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SCMP Reporter

Zhu Rongji

(1928-present)

Born in Hunan , Zhu was premier  from March 1998 to March 2003. Of the 550,000   people officially condemned in the anti-rightist campaign, he acquired the most prominent post after rehabilitation.

Zhu joined the  Communist Party in October 1949 while studying electrical engineering at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. After graduation, he went to work for the Northeast China Department of Industries in 1951 as deputy head of its production planning office.

He was labelled a rightist in April 1958, when he was working in the State Planning Commission as group head and deputy division chief, after criticising Mao Zedong's  'irrational high-growth' policies during the Great Leap Forward.

He was briefly sent to work on a farm and then became a teacher at a school for cadres. Rehabilitated in 1962 as a 'well-re-educated person', he was assigned to work as an engineer for the State Planning Commission's national economy bureau until 1969.

During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu was purged again, and from 1970 to 1975, he  worked at a 'May 7th cadre school', a type of farm camp used for re-education.  He spent five years feeding pigs, tending sheep, cutting weeds and harvesting crops.

From 1975 to 1979, he served as the deputy chief engineer of a company run by the pipeline bureau of the Ministry of the Petroleum Industry and as the director of the Industrial Economics Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

When Deng Xiaoping  initiated economic reforms in 1978, Zhu was picked out  for his progressive thinking, his refusal to compromise   his ideals and his aggressive economic ideas. He was judged to have been politically rehabilitated in September 1978, and  his party membership was restored.

Chu Anping

(1908-1966?)

An intellectual, liberal journalist and political commentator, Chu was labelled one of the top rightists in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign for saying 'the Party dominates the world' and purged in June 1957, from his post as chief editor of  Guangming Daily, a newspaper of the eight democratic parities. He was deposed two months after  he had been appointed, with the support of propaganda official Hu Qiaomu and Guangming Daily president Zhang Bojun  ,  to help  develop the newspaper  into an outlet for the democratic parties.

Labelled an 'anti-party, anti-people, anti-socialism bourgeois rightist', he was deprived of all official positions and spent the rest of his life isolated in a Beijing courtyard, tending sheep, before going missing early one morning from his home in September 1966. He was officially declared dead in 1982 by the central government, but his body was never found and  the rightist label was never expunged from his record.

Born into a prestigious family in Yixing  , Jiangsu province , in 1909, Chu  graduated from Shanghai's Guanghua University in 1932   and worked as an editor of a Central Daily supplement in Nanjing  before he went to England to study in 1936.

When he returned in 1938, Chu   became the editor of  Central Daily and  was  a professor at Fudan University and at a teaching college in Hunan.

In September 1946, he founded the semi-monthly magazine The Observer and invited prominent intellectuals from different parts of the spectrum to contribute articles. It developed  into a leading intellectual magazine  until it was closed down by the Nationalist Party in December 1948.

When the People's Republic of China was established, he was invited to be the commissioner of General Administration of Press and Publication  and deputy director of the publication bureau.

During the rectification campaign, he delivered a speech entitled 'Comments Made to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou [Enlai ],'  at a June 1 meeting of the Central Party Committee's United Front Work.

People's Daily and Guangming Daily  published the full text the next day,    which criticised the  domination of the Communist Party. At one point he said:  'The party leads the country, but that doesn't mean the nation is owned by the party.'

Luo Longji

(1896-1965)

In the 1957 anti-rightist campaign, Mao Zedong labelled Luo, an  intellectual and politician,  one of the most prominent rightists.

Born in Anfu county in Jiangxi  province in 1896, Luo was regarded as a child prodigy, and his father ensured that  his son would receive a good, traditional Chinese education. Luo was admitted to Tsinghua University in 1913 as the top-scoring applicant for Jiangxi and joined the May Fourth Movement as a student leader. He studied politics at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University as a government-sponsored student from 1921 and earned a PhD from a British university.

Luo returned to teach at Shanghai's Guanghua University in 1928 and founded Xinyue magazine. As its editor, Luo published articles on human rights and the law and was jailed by the KMT for criticising its dictatorship. He then began supporting the Communist Party in its battle against the Japanese and the Kuomintang and taught politics at several prominent universities.

After the establishment of the People's Republic, he was appointed forestry minister, a standing committee member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, NPC member and vice chairman of the China Democratic League. He criticised the political policies in a CPPCC meeting in March 1957 and was labelled a rightist in June for apparently irritating Mao Zedong. Mao claimed Luo and Zhang Bojun had teamed up to lead the democratic parties in an anti-party, anti-socialism bourgeois fight.

He was purged in January 1958 and died of a heart attack in 1965. His rightist label was never removed.

Zhang Bojun

(1895-1969)

Zhang, a politician and intellectual, was labelled by Mao Zedong as the No 1 rightist in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign.    Zhang proposed that the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the National People's Congress,  the democratic parties and  society in general all should contribute to  open discussions with the Communist Party and find ways to bolster democracy and a separation of powers.

Born into a landlord family in Tongcheng, Anhui province ,  Zhang and his two younger brothers were brought up by uncles after his father died when he was six. Well educated in a top middle school, he studied English at Wuchang Normal University from 1916 to 1920 and became an English teacher at a teaching college in 1920.

In 1922, he was sponsored by the Anhui government to study philosophy at Berlin University and became a Communist Party member in 1923 through a personal friend  of Zhu De ,  a top party leader.

Zhang left the CPC after the 'August First' military uprising in 1927, and  in collaboration with others, founded the Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party in 1930 and the China Democratic League in 1941. Both parties  survive today.  Zhang worked as English professor at Sun Yet-sen University in Guangzhou and was  involved in democratic  activities.

He was appointed vice-chairman of the second CPPCC, and became an  NPC member. He was also minister of transport and president of Guangming Daily.  After delivering a speech on  a political development proposal,  he was labeled a rightist and accused by Mao Zedong in June 1957 of setting up the 'Union of Zhang and Luo' (Longji),  which caused him to be purged and stripped of all posts and titles in January 1958.

Zhang died of stomach cancer in 1969 but was never rehabilitated.



Four other prominent figures faced labels  as rightists; one recovered, rose to premier