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/