How a Ming Dynasty play triggered the decade-long chaos of China's Cultural Revolution
In short: Wu Han was a preeminent historian who became a high-ranking Beijing official. Yet, his scholarly work on a Ming dynasty official transformed into a lethal political weapon. By allegedly using historical allegory to critique Mao Zedong, Wu inadvertently sparked a purge that dismantled the Chinese Communist Party's established bureaucracy.
Born in 1909, Wu Han rose to prominence as a pioneering researcher of the Ming dynasty, a field previously considered taboo under the Qing. By the 1940s, he was a leading intellectual and member of the China Democratic League, eventually joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1957. As Vice Mayor of Beijing, he wielded history as a political tool, famously interpreting the life of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, to mirror the shifting political needs of the new People's Republic.
The catalyst for his downfall was his 1961 play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. While Mao initially encouraged the project, hardliners like Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng later reframed the work as a dangerous allegory. They argued that the play’s depiction of a righteous official dismissed by an emperor was a direct insult to Mao, equating him with the Ming ruler and comparing the dismissed official to Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had been purged for criticizing the Great Leap Forward.
The attack on Wu was a calculated maneuver to strike at his political patron, Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen. On November 10, 1965, critic Yao Wenyuan published a scathing denunciation that ignited a wider campaign against Wu and his associates, Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha. This struggle served as the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution, a ten-year upheaval that decimated the party establishment. Wu was stripped of his positions, persecuted, and died in prison in 1969, though the exact cause of his death remains uncertain due to reports of physical abuse and recurring illness.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Wu Han (historian)
- Also: Wu Han | Chinese historian | Britannica
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