Hundred Flowers

In 1956, seven years after his victory in China’s Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong extended an invitation to the country’s intelligentsia: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred different schools of thought contend.”  As criticism of the Chinese Communist Party swelled, the Hundred Flowers project morphed into something cynical, known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign. As a result, many who had, in good faith, produced texts and essays critical of the party faced repression; many careers were destroyed.

Verso’s Hundred Flowers series aims to fulfill Mao’s promise in earnest by publishing writing on China from the mainland, the diaspora, and elsewhere. Once a key American ally, China has emerged over the course of this century as the only serious challenger to US global economic hegemony. Yet China remains largely opaque to the West, which is too often ignorant of both the country’s history and its contemporary internal dynamics. Books, newspaper articles, and magazine essays abound but at best present simplistic views of China; at worst, these accounts are misleading or scaremongering. Hundred Flowers offers a more nuanced perspective to facilitate serious debate in analyzing China’s past, present, and future.