Editing Great Leap Forward (section)

===Hundred Flowers Campaign and Anti-Rightist Campaign===
In 1957, Mao responded to the tensions which existed in the Party by launching the [[Hundred Flowers Campaign]] as a way to promote free speech and criticism. Some scholars have retroactively concluded that this campaign was a ploy designed to allow critics of the regime, primarily intellectuals but also low ranking members of the party who were critical of the agricultural policies, to identify themselves.{{sfnp|Chang |Halliday |2005|p=435}}

By the time of the completion of the first 5 Year Economic Plan in 1957, Mao had come to believe that the path to socialism that had been followed by the Soviet Union was not appropriate for China. He was critical of [[Nikita Khrushchev|Khrushchev's]] reversal of [[Stalinism|Stalinist]] policies and he was also alarmed by the uprisings that had taken place in [[Uprising of 1953 in East Germany|East Germany]], [[Poznań 1956 protests|Poland]] and [[Hungarian Revolution of 1956|Hungary]], and the perception that the USSR was seeking "[[peaceful coexistence]]" with the Western powers. Mao had become convinced that China should follow its own path to communism. According to [[Jonathan Mirsky]], a historian and a journalist who specialized in Chinese affairs, China's isolation from most of the rest of the world, along with the [[Korean War]], had accelerated Mao's attacks on his perceived domestic enemies. It led him to accelerate his designs to develop an economy where the regime would get maximum benefit from rural taxation.<ref name="Mirsky2009">{{Cite magazine |last=Mirsky |first=Jonathan |date=26 February 2009 |title=The China We Don't Know |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/the-china-we-dont-know/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151016120725/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/the-china-we-dont-know/ |archive-date=16 October 2015 |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=56 |number=3}}</ref>

The [[Anti-Rightist Campaign]] started on 8 June 1957. The main goal was to purge "rightists" from the CCP and China altogether. It was believed that approximately 5 percent of the population was still "rightists" (Political conservatives sabotaging the revolution).<ref>{{Cite web |last=Brown |first=Clayton D. |title=China's Great Leap Forward |url=https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/chinas-great-leap-forward-1.pdf |website=US, Asia, and the World: 1914–2012}}</ref>