Mao’s famous speech in 1957, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,’ usually known under the misleading title ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom,’ was certainly no plea for freedom, but it did recognize non-antagonistic contradictions between classes and, more importantly, between the people and the government even under a Communist dictatorship. The way to deal with opponents was ‘rectification of thought,’ an elaborate procedure of constant molding and remolding of the minds, to which more or less the whole population seemed subject.
