Abstract: Adopting a local perspective, this case study explores archives and interviews to discuss the Anti-Rightist Movement at the grassroots level in Bo County, Anhui Province. Two key issues, how the “rightists” had been defined by local authorities (as compared to those by the higher authorities) and what kinds of people were labelled “rightists”, are scrutinized based on detailed cases. The cases in Bo County show that local criteria defining “rightists” were arbitrary and inconsistent, and that local “rightists” decisively selected by their superiors based on various reasons in daily life including factionalism. The author argues that there were no rightists in China and that the label “rightist” was created by the authorities based on their own imaginations.