During 1956, when mass unrest swept through parts of Eastern Europe, there were some reverberations in China, such as strikes and withdrawals from agricultural cooperatives. Perhaps to defuse unrest, or to engage intellectuals in the next stages of socialist development, the Party leadership, in particular Mao, encouraged intellectuals to speak out in this period, and many cautiously began to do so. This apparent sanctioning of dissent encouraged students also to protest and many workers to start asserting their demands through petitions, marches, hunger strikes, sit-ins and strikes. Mao and the Party responded in mid-1957 by suppressing all dissent and hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were blacklisted, students expelled, and many sentenced to manual labour or exile.