Dayton Lekner’s A Hundred Flowers: How Literature Shaped Maoism is an original and stylistically elegant book that recenters literary practice at the heart of Maoist politics. Employing botanical metaphors to examine the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–57) and the ensuing Anti-Rightist crackdown, Lekner shows how creative writing and textual circulation actively constituted Maoism.

In the introduction, titled “Buds,” Lekner explicitly moves beyond the two dominant approaches to the study of Maoism—the “statist model,” which views Maoism as imposed from above, and the “inspired model,” which understands Maoism as embraced from below. Instead, Lekner proposes a third perspective: Maoism as a lived, co-authored practice. This participatory, co-constitutive model centers on literary practice and the circulation of metaphor as primary to the production and experience of Maoism. Creative writing and literary circulation, in this account, actively constituted revolutionary politics. Texts “went viral,” elite and amateur writers negotiated with and co-authored official discourse, and the boundary between state language and individual creativity remained porous and unstable.

Lekner structures the book as a botanical ecosystem: the four sections—“Flowers,” “Weeds,” “Weather,” and “Seeds”—mirror the production and circulation of botanical metaphors that the book aims to foreground. This is more than a clever device. It allows him to consider how metaphors shaped literary, cultural, and political participation and blurred the boundary between official discourse and individual creativity in Maoist China. This unique structure prioritizes dynamic process and entanglement over tidy separation, mirroring how the campaigns unfolded in real time.

The four chapters in the “Flowers” section portray the initial blooming phase of the Hundred Flowers campaign, when literature and politics seemed mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic. Chapter 1 traces the prehistory and gradual evolution of the famous “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” (baihua qifang) slogan, showing how it circulated through literary, political, and cultural channels well before Mao Zedong’s formal endorsement of the slogan. In this multivalent botanical metaphor, elite political language remained intertwined with classical allusions and poetic traditions, allowing writers, artists, and journalists to reinterpret and expand it.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how both transnational exchange and indigenous literary practice shaped the language of the campaign. As the “thaw” that followed Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” presented Mao Zedong with a political and ideological dilemma, the botanical trope rooted in the Chinese classical tradition offered a rhetorical solution. Through close readings of speeches and writings by Mao and Guo Moruo, Lekner highlights the creative play of language that blurred the boundaries between propaganda and literary expression.

Chapter 3 traces how floral imagery expanded into a collective “springtime” trope in 1956–57 across newspapers, poetry, fables, and the visual arts. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of “social imaginary” and Timothy Mitchell’s “state effect,” Lekner argues that Mao-era cultural policy emerged through ongoing interaction with literary creativity rather than solely through top-down ideological imposition. Through the writings of Ai Qing and Zhou Shoujuan, among others, the chapter demonstrates how allegory, personal reflection, and classical allusion cultivated a vibrant, multilayered vision of “springtime” that exceeded the confines of propaganda and expressed a genuine, if short-lived, sense of hope and pluralism.

Chapter 4 shows how individuals at all levels (Mao, writers, provincial editors, and students) participated in the same literary ecosystem. Literary circulation fostered a sense of community and enabled forms of expression that did not necessarily require strict ideological conformity. The chapter highlights both the creative possibilities of this “community garden,” as Lekner calls it, and the tensions that foreshadowed its darker consequences, which subsequent chapters explore more fully.

The three chapters in the “Weeds” section explore the perils behind the dynamic circulation of botanical metaphors. Chapter 5 shifts focus to the intensified, diverse—and at times dissenting—responses expressed in private diaries and letters from early 1957 even as public media projected a harmonious and unified celebration of the campaign. Lekner categorizes these diverse intellectual and emotional responses into four distinct groups: the inspired, the hopeful, the wary, and the cynical.

Chapter 6 examines how individuals and student groups appropriated, inverted, and reconfigured the state-sanctioned botanical metaphors of the Hundred Flowers Campaign to articulate dissent, dissatisfaction, and political critique. By mid-1957, the boundary between political affirmation and literary protest had blurred as grassroots campus networks developed multilayered, nuanced, and autonomous discursive communities that operated beyond the effective control of the propaganda apparatus.

Chapter 7 examines Fei Xiaotong’s 1957 essay “The Early Spring Weather of the Intellectuals” (Zhishifenzi de zaochun tianqi), which employed botanical and seasonal metaphors to capture the psychological ambivalence and cautious optimism of Chinese intellectuals during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. As the Anti-Rightist Campaign gathered momentum, however, the Party viewed the essay as incriminating evidence, and it became a litmus test for identifying alleged “Rightists.”

The two chapters in the “Weather” section focus on the climate of discourse and how writers tried to read the political weather. Chapter 8 contextualizes the experiences of two Sichuanese writers, Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe, to examine how state-writer relations shifted amid the intensification of political campaigns. Rather than portraying writers as engaged in “guerrilla warfare” through the production of hidden subtexts or as subordinated to a rigid state-controlled literary system, the chapter highlights a more fluid process of negotiation, participation, and proactive adaptation. Chapter 9 portrays how Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe defended their writing against local Sichuanese literary and political forces while navigating ambiguous signals and the eventual crackdown by political and cultural authorities. The chapter shows the limits of literary agency as the political climate shifted in mid-1957.

The final section, “Seeds,” comprises two chapters and the Conclusion. Chapter 10 traces the fate of floral and seasonal metaphors and examines how the Anti-Rightist Campaign recast memory and history as heterodox. Chapter 11 examines how writers navigated the new climate through the diary and letters of Wu Mi. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, botanical metaphors became perilous, yet the pressure to write persisted. In the Conclusion, Lekner reflects on the legacy of these campaigns and the broader role of literary practice in Maoism. He argues for studying the period without retrospective binaries: literature and campaigns were inseparable; metaphors shaped political reality as much as they reflected it.

The book’s methodological innovation—treating botanical metaphors as generative forces—offers a fresh way to understand campaign dynamics. By showing how the slogan of “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” escaped Mao’s control and took on a life of its own, Lekner convincingly demonstrates that Maoism was formed through entangled textual practices. His sustained metaphorical analysis and granular case studies constitute a genuine contribution to the “new cultural history” of the PRC. That said, the approach that Lekner elaborates in the Introduction is not entirely original. Earlier Chinese literary and film scholars such as Ban Wang, Cai Xiang, and Zhuoyi Wang have already developed participatory frameworks for understanding the relationship between politics and cultural production/circulation. The book’s central focus on “the literary aspects” (p. 4) of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns makes its relative neglect of literary scholarship all the more surprising. More explicit conversation with these existing studies would have better highlighted the book’s contributions and strengthened its interdisciplinary claims.

While Lekner convincingly attributes the botanical metaphors of the Hundred Flowers Campaign to classical Chinese literature, the May Fourth tradition, and the Yan’an legacy, he overemphasizes, and at times misrepresents, the influence of Soviet literature on Maoist China. The book repeatedly claims that the Soviet literary “thaw” under Kruschev inspired the Hundred Flowers discourse in China (pp. 29, 57, 93, 151, 158, and 224). However, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in February 1956 had already sown the seeds of the later Sino-Soviet Split, which constrained the translation and reception of Soviet literary works in China. The claim that the Soviet “thaw” influenced Chinese literature appears especially misguided when the author writes:

While Nikolayeva’s Harvest and “The Manager of the Machine Tractor Station and the Chief Agronomist” were translated into Chinese in 1951 and 1955, respectively, Ehrenburg’s and Panova’s novels could not have influenced the Chinese cultural scene in 1956–57. The first Chinese translation of Ehrenburg’s The Thaw, by Qian Cheng, was not printed until 1963 and circulated only as a restricted internal publication. The Chinese translation of Vera Panova’s The Seasons of the Year by Bai Sihong was not published until 1985.

I also found it regrettable that the book’s discussion of botanical metaphors does not include dedicated sections examining ethnic minority representation and gender dynamics. Discussion of films such as Five Golden Flowers (Wuduo Jinhua, 1959) and Colors of Spring (Wanziqianhong zongshi chun, 1959), for example, would have further enriched the book by illuminating the intersections of botanical metaphors with gender and ethnic representations.

Additionally, the book unfortunately contains a noticeable number of production errors. To name just a few: Zhou Yang 周扬 is miswritten as 周陽 (p. 45) and erroneously identified as “the Soviet minister of culture” (p. 25); the Chinese title of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass 野草 is mistyped as 也草 (p. 69); 嘈杂 (caoza) is mistranscribed as 喵杂 (miaozao) (p. 71); 將仁德 is miswritten as 蒋仁德 (p. 109); and the artist Anselm Kiefer’s last name is misspelled as “Keifer” throughout the book. There are also numerous instances of missing punctuation, extra or missing spaces, and needless repetition—for example, the Chinese characters for Guo Moruo appear more than 10 times in the book rather than once at first mention. While these lapses do not fatally undermine the book’s arguments, they suggest both a careless peer review process and rushed copyediting.

These critiques notwithstanding, A Hundred Flowers remains a valuable and original work. Its greatest achievement is to make the years 1956–57, before the hardening of categories that later events would impose, feel alive and open-ended again. By focusing on process rather than outcome, Lekner offers a human-scale window into how revolutions are lived through language and imagery. Future scholars will need to reckon with this book, whether by extending its metaphor-circulation approach to other domains or by integrating it more fully with ethnic and gender analysis. Lekner should be commended for this admirable effort to uncover the hidden micro-histories behind the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns. Not only does the book make a valuable addition to the study of PRC history, but it also serves as a welcome companion to recent monographs by literary scholars, including Yu Zhang’s Going to the Countryside (2024) and Benjamin Kindler’s Writing to the Rhythm of Labor (2020).