Tuesday, October 08, 2024

From 高大伟 David Cowhig's Translation Blog: " 1958: Party’s “Rightist” Speech Collection After Hundred Flowers Campaign" 【高等学校右派言論选編 中共中国人民大学委員会社会主义思想敎育办公室】

Pix Credit here ("What I longed for has arrived")



The course of the development of  Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory, as well as of its application, has evolved in parallel with the development of China from one to another stage of its historical development.  One of the more interesting points of that parallel development, a junction point, was the so-called period of the Hundred Flowers campaign and its consequence, the Anti-Rightist campaigns that followed. Both resonate deeply to contemporary times, and each looked back not just to the Yanan Rectification of the 1940s but as far back as the great schism of 1927.

Some of the errors unearthed during the blooming of the hundred flowers were complied for the edification fo those permitted to profit from it in a book, Selected Rightist Speeches from Institutions of Higher Education published by the Office of Socialist Ideology Education, Communist Party Committee, Renmin University of China 【高等学校右派言論选編 中共中国人民大学委員会社会主义思想敎育办公室】 September 1958 First Printing.

Now David Cowhig has brought a partial translation of some of the material in that 1958 compilation in several postings to his blog-- 高大伟 David Cowhig's Translation Blog.


An online comrade alerted me to this book which is online at Marxists.org at 高等学校右派言論选編 in scanned PDF format. I did optical Chinese character recognition of the scanned PDF file using Wondershare PDF Element with excellent results and then converted the PDF into a Word document available here. There are a few places where the OCR did not get the correct Chinese character; there you can refer to the link at Marxists.org and rely on human optical character recognition — still a bit better. I corrected the Chinese text in a few places where the OCR missed the correct character.

Once I had the Word doc, I used ChatGPT 4o to get a quite respectable Chinese -> English translation.

The book is an 800 page long collection of criticisms that the Party put into the ‘rightist’ category. Many rightists were sent to labor camps and prisons for twenty-odd years until nearly all were exonerated, politically rehabilitated and returned to Chinese society in the late 1970s through the efforts of Hu Yaobang (see 1997 Dai Huang: Excerpts from “Hu Yaobang and the Rectification of Injustices”) and others. (here)
Cowhig has provided a translation of portions of the work:

Part I 1958: Party’s “Rightist” Speech Collection After Hundred Flowers Campaign

Party II 1958: Party's "Rightist" Speech Collection Aftre Hundred Flowers Campaign: On the People+s Democratic Dictatorship (the first 100 or so pages of the work). 

For student's of the history of the development of Chinese Marxist-Leninism and its trajectories, these sources provide a quite valuable window on a tumultuous time, and a pathways towards better understanding of the current stage of development of Chinese Marxist-Leninism.

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