Wu Han was the first victim of the Great Proletarian Revolution. On
December 8, 1965, Dr Li Zhisui, Mao Zedong's personal physician, came
to see his patient about the latter's barbiturate habit, and was handed
a pamphlet by Yao Wenyuan, future Gangster-of-Four, denouncing Wu Han's
hit play, Hai Rui Dismissed From Office. Wu Han was at this time Vice-
Mayor of Beijing. A professional historian, he was also "a professor
at Peking University and one of the country's leading Ming dynasty
historians."
The play dealt with an incident in 1565, when Hai Rui (1510-1587),
historically a utopian-reactionary screwball, of the type called an
Upright Official, whom what passed for Public Opinion at the time
allowed to speak Absolute Moral Truth to power and quite frequently
get away with it, called the Jiajing emperor (1521-1566) "vain, cruel,
selfish, suspicious, and foolish." (Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No
Consequence, p. 135) Hai Rui was indeed fired, after some delay condemned
to death, and even greater delay, released upon the death of the Jiajing
emperor in late 1566.
All politically aware Chinese, of whatever persuasion at that time and
since, with the exception of Wu Han himself, believed that the play alluded
to Mao's dismissal of Marshal Peng Tehuai as Defense Minister after the
Marshal had chewed him out to his face at the Anshan Conference in 1959
for the chaos of the Great Leap Forward, then compelled Mao to exercise
self-criticism in 1962 after the most lethal famine in human history. The
Marshal was, however, a serious statesman, who had no resemblance to the
historic Hai Rui.
Dr Li Zhisui continues, about Wu Han, in The Secret Life of Chairman
Mao, p. 441:
"Mao's longtime interest in Ming dynasty history had brought him into
early contact with Wu Han. After Mao's encouragement to study history,
I sometimes sat in on his chats with Wu Han. Mao had criticized an
earlier work of Wu's - a biography of Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang called
Beggar Turned Emperor - for its historical inaccuracies, its critique
of Zhu's role in the Red Turban Army, and its use of Zhu Yuanzhang to
criticize the modern-day Chiang Kai-shek. In a series of remarks that
would have been heresy had they come from anyone but Mao, the party
chairman defended Chiang's role in history - from his northern expedition
in 1926-27 to his refusal to succumb to political pressure from the United
States to his insistence on the indivisibility of China. Wu Han had
accepted Mao's criticisms, though, and his authorship of a play about
Hai Rui seemed to agree with Mao's own call to study the example of Hai
Rui. I could not understand why either Wu Han or the play were under
attack."
On the following page:
"Had he Wu Han not followed Mao's suggestion to change the name of
his biography of Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang from Beggar Turned
Emperor to The Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang? Had he not written Hai Rui
dismissed from office in answer to Mao's call to learn from Hai Rui?"
Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398, emperor 1368-1398) was the last peasant-born
ruler of China prior to Mao himself. What the foregoing appears to say
is that not only did Mao Zedong change the history of the fourteenth and
sixteenth centuries to conform to the political exigencies of the twentieth.
He changed the twentieth century in accordance with a delusional misunder-
standing of the fourteenth.
Wu Han's biography was published in 1949. At that time, Wu Han seems
to have believed that Zhu Yuanzhang began as a revolutionary guerrilla
fighter, but turned into a reactionary under the influence of his Confucian
brain trust. This is a position taken by John C. Dardess of the University
of Kansas in Confucianism and Autocracy, Columbia, 1983.
When the Mongol state collapsed with the fall of the Prime Minister,
Toghto, in 1355, followed immediately by the plunge of the paper currency
into hyperinflation, the former White Lotus prophet and overall leader of
the Red Turban rebels, Han Lin'er, proclaimed the Song dynasty (a name
with patriotic, ie, anti-Mongol, overtones) in the ancient capital of
Luoyang, in North China. His regime there lasted four years, 1355-1359,
till a pro-Mongol warlord expelled him. Meanwhile, Zhu Yuanzhang had
nominally recognized Han Lin'er, used his calendar, and after his fall,
kept him as a household pet till 1367. Acknowledging that Zhu Yuanzhang
was indeed gaining credit with reactionary Confucian absolutists, it is
also true that he was promising his ex-Red Turban soldiers "Land to the
tiller!" according to a 1990 article by Ray Huang in Ropp (Ed.), Chinese
Tradition. The possibility must be explored that Zhu Yuanzhang was able
to convince his followers of all persuasions that he believed equally in
irreconcilable and contradictory policies because he actually did.
After he came to power, Zhu Yuanzhang required all households to possess
a copy of his Grand Monitions. He made the four volumes of his thought
required reading in the schools. He introduced an "agrarian command
economy" (Elvin), prized "agrarian simplicity" (Ray Huang), practiced
commercial autarky (compare Maoist idealization of "by our own strength")
and, most conspicuously, conducted four waves of blood purges on the
based on fear of exaggerated or imaginary conspiracies. These claimed
100,000 lives out of a Chinese population one-tenth that under Mao Zedong.
I would like to raise this issue. Zhu Yuanzhang was the most important
single individual to affect the economic development of China after the
Bubonic Plague disaster from the 1330s to the 1350s (with the usual major
recurrences, as in Europe, as late as 1629). He was thus the most important
single individual affecting the later backwardness of China relative to
Europe. Mao clearly used him as a role model, but got his significance
for Chinese economic history wrong, by encouraging belief in the "sprouts
of capitalism" in the sixteenth century, under the late Ming. Neither
Chinese nor Europeans organized their Medieval or Early Modern historiography
in terms of an athletic event whose objective was to be first to cross the
finish line to capitalism. The study of history, notably that of China,
has been befouled by ideological smog reflecting anachronistic latter-day
concerns, where Chinese have been further confused when believing they were
"using the past to criticize the present." Zhu Yuanzhang, thus, has become
"a brief history of the future."
Daniel A. Foss