Glossary

The phrase “Red and Expert” began as a slogan in the 1957 “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” which targeted Chinese intellectuals critical of the Communist regime. The slogan communicated the imperative for those with specialized scientific or technical knowledge (“expert”) to be loyal to the Party and the socialist cause (“red”). As Mao wrote at the time:

Red is politics; expert is one's job. To be only expert and not red is to be a white expert. If one pursues politics so that one is only red and not expert, doesn't know one's job and doesn't understand practical matters, then the redness is a false redness and one is an empty-headed politician. While grasping politics, one must be thoroughly familiar with one's job; grasping technique must start with redness. If we are to overtake Britain in 15 years, then we must mold millions upon millions of intellectuals whose loyalty is to the proletariat” (MacFarquhar 1987, 28). 

Though the slogan implores specialists to be both “red and expert,” the slogan’s meaning has shifted from one era to another, sometimes emphasizing the demand for redness, at other times emphasizing the need for expertise. At the height of the Maoist era, the phrase was regularly used to bludgeon bourgeois intellectuals for their lack of proletarian consciousness, and was used later to celebrate the potential “red” laymen had to develop expertise equal to but distinct from that of the professional scientist or engineer. After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping resuscitated the slogan to push the Party towards embracing technocratic expertise. As a set of regulations issued by the Central Committee in 1980 explained, the injunction to be red and expert then meant that “a Communist Party member who does not earnestly study expert knowledge and has been a layman for a long time in his own work cannot make a real contribution… His so-called political consciousness and advanced nature are mere empty talk” (Deng 1980). The slogan fell out of use in the late Deng era, and is only occasionally used today. 

‍