CCP propaganda suggested that the Hundred Flowers produced an inflow of mild and moderate criticism. In reality, the government came under siege from critics and letter writers. While some accepted the criticisms at face value, Mao himself dismissed most of them as self-serving, ridiculous or irrelevant. A June 1957 editorial drew a line under the Hundred Flowers campaign, while Mao’s earlier speech on “correctly handling contradictions” was republished – after being edited to suggest that not all contradictions could be tolerated. The Hundred Flowers gave way to a new purge called the Anti-Rightist movement, initiated in the summer of 1957. Between 300,000 and 550,000 individuals were identified as Rightists, most of them intellectuals, academics, writers and artists. The majority were publicly discredited and lost their jobs, while a smaller number were forced into labour camps for ‘re-education’. As with the earlier Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries and Antis campaigns, thousands were also driven to suicide. What had begun in early 1956 as a promise of liberalisation and tolerance, finished in late 1957 with persecution, coercion and brutality.
https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/hundred-flowers-campaign/
A Halt to the Hundred Flowers Campaign
On June 8, 1957, Chairman Mao called a halt to the Hundred Flowers Campaign. He announced that it was time to pluck the “poisonous weeds” from the bed of flowers. Hundreds of intellectuals and students were rounded up, including pro-democracy activists Luo Longqi and Zhang Bojun, and were forced to publicly confess that they had organized a secret conspiracy against socialism. The crackdown sent hundreds of leading Chinese thinkers to labor camps for “re-education” or to prison. The brief experiment with freedom of speech was over.
https://www.thoughtco.com/hundred-flowers-campaign-195610
That’s what they want for us... :-(((