This Week in China’s History: The Critique of “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” Published

November 10, 1965

Listen to the audio narration in the embedded player above!

There is much about the Cultural Revolution that defies belief, so perhaps it is fitting that one of its most important origins was the publication of a theater review. The review, printed on the front page of China’s newspapers, was blunt, calling its subject “not a fragrant flower but a poisonous weed.”

The production in question was a Peking Opera called Hai Rui Dismissed From Office (海瑞罢官 Hǎi Ruì bàguān). The play emphasized the importance of speaking truth to power, and the consequences of doing the same, but it would become an object lesson in just that. Its author was accused of treason: persecuted, prosecuted, and thrown in prison — where he would die — for suggesting that Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 was a tyrant.

The story begins not in the 1960s, but nearly four centuries earlier, late in the Ming dynasty. The Jiājìng emperor exemplified dynastic decline. He had ascended the throne controversially, defying traditional succession in what came to be known as the “Great Rites Controversy.” Once in power, he did little to reassure those who had resisted his claim. He abandoned the traditional audiences with his ministers, ignoring the counsel of his advisors, and for decades had no official audiences at all. The emperor’s circle grew smaller and smaller, and many duties were delegated to confidantes and allies. Malfeasance flourished in the absence of imperial oversight.

Hai Rui was one of those ministers that the emperor was ignoring, having passed the imperial examinations and worked his way from a minor provincial post to a position in the Ministry of Education. He was, depending on one’s position, an upright and incorruptible official, or a pedantic scold. He won popularity among the people for his advocacy and principle, but many enemies in the bureaucracy for his refusal to go along, or get along. 

Hai Rui’s position was not one that would normally have access to the emperor, but he was disgusted by the emperor’s neglect of his official duties. In Hai’s view, he was obliged to hold the emperor accountable and to demand that his ruler perform his role virtuously. In 1565, he submitted a memorial to the throne criticizing the emperor’s moral and professional conduct. For his troubles, Hai Rui was sentenced to death. It was an outcome for which he was well prepared: He had even brought his coffin along when he submitted his remonstrance — at least in the version told in the Peking Opera. This pretty story is, alas, likely apocryphal.

The Jiajing emperor was not especially old, but he had been in power for more than 40 years, and a dissolute life had taken its toll. Daoist alchemists were, it seems, advising him to ingest mercury: though intended to extend his life, this almost certainly had the opposite effect. The emperor died before the sentence could be carried out, and Hai Rui continued his career in government, though he was forced from office by complaints surrounding his overzealous investigation of corruption. He was called briefly out of retirement to serve the Wanli Emperor, died in office, and was thereafter remembered as an upright official who dared speak truth to power.

Though he had been rehabilitated from his death sentence, greater prominence for Hai Rui would come after the fall of not only the Ming dynasty but the entire dynastic system, nearly 400 years after his death, and it would come from the attention of another scholar-official.

Wu Han 吴晗 had studied history at Tsinghua University in the 1930s, focusing on the Ming dynasty and writing a biography of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. Wu also became active in politics as a part of the China Democratic League, a minor party that eventually threw its support behind the CCP. After the founding of the People’s Republic, he became a Vice-Mayor of Beijing, promoting cultural and historical activities while continuing his research on Ming history.

Hai Rui, Mao Zedong, and Wu Han all came together during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s program to collectivize agriculture, steel production, and many aspects of public life. Mao acknowledged some failures of the program, but attributed them mainly to his subordinates' reluctance to tell him the truth about, for example, grain yields and steel production. Mao himself invoked the example of Hai Rui and — in what seems either calculated cynicism or a staggering lack of self-awareness — castigated party officials who shirked their obligations by going along with party directives. Mao enlisted Wu Han (and other historians) to write stories about Hai Rui to hold up as an example of how officials should hold their leaders accountable. Wu Han’s article, “Hai Rui Criticizes the Emperor (海瑞骂皇帝) appeared in the People’s Daily in April 1959.

Later that summer, criticism of Mao and his policies burst into the open. By this time it was evident that the Great Leap was visiting disaster on China’s countryside: mass starvation, environmental devastation and social unraveling. When Party officials met at Lushan, in the mountains of Jiangxi, to discuss the Great Leap, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai gently but pointedly called Mao to account, suggesting that he had refused to change course when presented with evidence of catastrophe. Peng’s criticisms eventually led to Mao’s temporary removal from power, but this came at the cost of Peng’s career. He was removed from office and purged from the Party. After a brief rehabilitation, he too would be persecuted and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution.

The apparent similarities between Hai Rui and Peng Dehuai — government officials who were removed from office for daring to criticize their ruler’s conduct — became more visible in 1962 when Wu Han published his Peking Opera, Hai Rui Dismissed From Office. Wu Han denied that Mao, who had encouraged Wu Han to write about Hai Rui, was the veiled subject of the play. As Mao edged toward a return to power, interpretations of Wu Han’s play became an elaborate test for ideological purity. On November 10, 1965, future Gang of Four member Yao Wenyuan’s essay criticizing Wu Han’s play was published.

Yao accused Wu Han of bending history to suit his own political goals: the destruction of Mao Zedong Thought and the undoing of socialist revolution. “Hai Rui” was not just a play, nor even a simple allegory comparing Peng Dehuai with Hai Rui. In Yao’s view, it was a manifesto of counter-revolution taking aim at Chinese communism in a moment of weakness. Yao wrote,

“As is known to all, China in 1961 encountered temporary economic difficulties because it was attacked by natural calamities for three years in succession. With the imperialists, the reactionaries of various countries, and the modern revisionists launching wave after wave of attacks against China, the demons and spirits clamored for "individual farming" and "reopening of cases." They played up the "superiority" of "individual farming" and called for the restoration of individual economy and the "return of land." In other words, they wanted to demolish the people's communes and to restore the criminal rule of the landlords and rich peasants.”

Supporters of Wu Han — and opponents of the cult of Mao — struggled desperately to stop the escalation of a scholarly difference into civil war. Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing and a target of Mao’s supporters, persuaded Wu Han to write a self-criticism, confessing that he had been politically naive. Peng Zhen kept Yao Wenyuan’s essay out of the Beijing papers for several weeks, eventually meeting with Mao himself, but it was all to no avail. As Yan Jiaqi put it in his history of the Cultural Revolution, “Peng Zhen had apparently wanted to limit to the academic world what was essentially an academic dispute. Little did he know that Mao had already decided to use Hai Rui Dismissed as the excuse to initiate a large scale political movement.”

In December, somewhat cryptically, Mao announced “Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui.” Whatever it had once been, Wu Han’s play now became at once an emblem of culture wars that would tear China apart and a platform from which Mao would relaunch himself into political power. Wu Han and/or Hai Rui was a central preoccupation of the Party and the government for months, and when the Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, those who had attacked Wu Han’s play were in charge.

And what of the scholar-official who had written the play? After writing his self-criticism, Wu Han was sent to the countryside for socialist reeducation, and on returning to Beijing was subjected to round after round of criticism and torture. He was arrested and charged with treason in March, 1968. He died in prison in the spring of 1969. Some reports call his death a suicide, while others claim tuberculosis, but he was no less a victim of the Cultural Revolution no matter what the immediate cause. He was one of millions.

As culture wars rage, Wu Han and Hai Rui is a cautionary tale. Perhaps the lesson is to keep academia and politics separate, but I don’t think so. Scholarship cannot be divorced from politics. But, I think it ought to seem very dangerous when those with political power seek to determine what we can study and how we are to learn from it. That way, as the case of Wu Han can attest, lies madness.