Yao Wen-yuan Research Articles

Reading Politics in Calligraphy

This article examines the 1965 debate over the authenticity of Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Lanting Collection” (Lanting ji xu). It argues that the seemingly academic debate in fact provided an opportunity for Mao Zedong and his associates to launch the Cultural Revolution. Although the Lanting Debate eventually failed its political mission, it created a false polyphony that encouraged intellectuals to engage in the subsequent debate over Yao Wenyuan’s class-struggle reading of Wu Han’s play, The Dismissal of Hai Rui, that marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The failed Lanting Debate thus contributed to the onset of the Cultural Revolution in its indirect and unique way and demonstrated the vulnerability and complexity of the revolutionary scholarship during the 1960s.

Toward a Theory of Cultural Revolution

Before his complex involvement in the events of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan emerged as a central figure in wide-ranging theoretical debates around questions of beauty under the aegis of the Aesthetics Debate of the 1950s and ’60s. This debate provided the conditions for a series of engagements on the part of Chinese and Soviet aesthetic theorists with the conceptual vocabulary of the “early Marx,” preceding the more famous embrace of humanist Marxist discourse in the 1980s. This article proposes to take Yao seriously as a theorist of an anti-humanist proletarian aesthetics, whose thought seeks to pose the relations between labor and aesthetics in terms strictly opposed to the philosophical figure of the human that emerged in the thought of more prominent figures such as Li Zehou. It does so by tracing Yao’s conception of aesthetics as a site of class struggle at the level of sensorial experience, in terms that suspended any attempt to articulate a universalist aesthetic according to humanist tropes of creative labor. The depth of Yao’s aesthetics not only demonstrates the theoretical underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution, but so too does it underscore the persistence of the problems of humanism and anti-humanism in engagements with Marxist thought.

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Huaiyin Li (review)

Reviewed by: Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Huaiyin Li Paul G. Pickowicz Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing by Huaiyin Li. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 338. $52.00. Reading Huaiyin Li’s interesting and innovative book, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing, caused me to recall my first visit with the famous Harvard-trained historian Zhou Yiliang. It was July 6, 1971, and I was on a day-long visit to Beijing University. Though Zhou’s father was a prominent capitalist before the revolution, Zhou joined the Communist Party in 1956. He was dying to serve the new revolutionary regime. But when his “ revisionist” sponsor, top culture czar Zhou Yang, fell from power in an initial phase of the Cultural Revolution, so too did Zhou Yiliang. When I met him a few years later in July 1971, he had just returned from [End Page 167] a multi-year term of “reeducation through labor” and was once again dying to serve the latest incarnation of Mao’s revolution. I took extensive notes on his detailed briefing on the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution at Beida, comments that focused on what Zhou clearly viewed as the righteous rebellion of militant Red Guards and the dastardly efforts of such arch counterrevolutionaries as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to suppress the new revolutionary upsurge. His lively account was fascinating. During a break in the action, Zhou asked me about the topic of my doctoral dissertation-in-progress. “My goodness,” I thought, “he wants me to say a word about my own research. There’s no way he’ll miss its relevance!” So I told him I was working on a study of the revolutionary martyr Qu Qiubai, the top leader of the Communist Party for a time in the late 1920s, and (more famously) China’s leading Marxist literary critic in the early 1930s. But Zhou said absolutely nothing. He simply stared at me with a frozen face. I was so disappointed. Qu was executed by the Nationalists in 1935. But now, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, rampaging Red Guards regarded him as a detestable renegade. My topic was politically incorrect. I saw Zhou Yiliang one more time. A few days later, on July 19, he was present (along with others) when I met Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People. During a four-hour discussion the Premier mentioned Zhou Yiliang by name and fondly noted that they shared the same surname. It appeared the two men were on good terms. Zhou Yiliang must have felt that his political situation was now secure. But there were two other fast-rising political leaders at that meeting: Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, later identified as members of the odious Gang of Four. They, too, had plans for Zhou Yiliang. By 1973 they had recruited him into the notorious Liangxiao writing group. Yet again, Zhou was dying to serve. Part of his job was to write historical essays that were intended as sharp attacks on Premier Zhou Enlai himself. Not surprisingly, after the Gang of Four fell in 1976, Zhou Yiliang was arrested and served two more years in prison, this time as an agent of the Jiang Qing clique of villainous, counterrevolutionary demons. Upon his release, he asserted that the Gang of Four had deceived him. Once more (and quite predictably) he was dying to serve. This time, the glorious cause was Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations project. Some observers insisted that people like historian Zhou Yiliang never had a choice: he had to search his soul each time and sincerely embrace [End Page 168] every new political vision that came along. Others were more skeptical: he had no principles, blew with the breeze, believed in nothing, and was a blatant opportunist—a sycophant. Above all, he was dying to serve political leaders who held power or were on the rise. Why is this tale worth telling? Because the Zhou Yiliang story intersects in many revealing ways with the macro-analysis contained in Huaiyin Li’s exciting book, a must read for scholars...

Organized criticism of Einstein and relativity in China, 1949–1989

ABSTRACT: Albert Einstein's unique high status in China made him an easy target of political attacks and maneuvers during the Cultural Revolution. The criticism began with a middle-school teacher's attack on general relativity and developed into organized campaigns after gaining support from two powerful, radical Party propagandists, Chen Boda and Yao Wenyuan. While Chen supported the criticism out of political ambition and cultural prejudice, Yao exploited it to attack his political rival Zhou Enlai and maintain absolute control of Chinese science by orthodox Marxist ideology. The criticism largely ended after both radical leaders fell from power, but not before it did serious damage to Chinese science and education. This article explores the rise, development, and consequences of the criticism, which first appeared in the Soviet Union and stemmed from ideological insistence on the dominance of dialectical materialism in all scientific studies. Marxist doctrines became the basis of scientific investigations and theoretical research in basic sciences nearly vanished in China. The article also describes the efforts of Chinese scientists at damage control and their occasional achievements against the critics' expectation.

China's Coup of October 1976

On the evening of October 6, 1976, less than one month after the death of the Chinese supreme leader Chairman Mao Zedong, the so-called Gang of Four Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen -all members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), were arrested on the orders of the First Vice-Chairman of the CCP Central Committee (CC), Hua Guofeng, in the heart of communist power, Zhongnanhai. Although it was Hua who, in the name of the CC, read out the decision to detain them for their alleged crimes in plotting to usurp power, it was Ye Jianying, Vice-Chairman of both the CCP CC and its Military Affairs Commission (MAC), who had planned and executed the operation, which, against some odds, proceeded without incident. On October 20, two weeks after the arrest of the four central leaders, the Politburo established a special case group of Politburo members to investigate the alleged crimes of the Gang (Wang Hongmo, 1989: 22).' The first set of inner-Party documents compiled by the special case group was released on December 10, 1976 (Zhonggong yanjiu zazhishe, 1977: sec. 5), the second set (a collection of materials concerning the backgrounds and careers of the Four) was compiled in 1977, and the third set of documents appeared on September 23, 1977 (Issues & Studies, 1978-1979). In July 1977, at the 3rd plenum of the 11th CC, the Gang was expelled from the Party, and over three years

IV: Rehabilitation [1979

In May 1966 the journal Red Flag carried Criticizing the ‘Three Family Village,’ a great poisonous weed which the alien class element Yao Wenyuan dished out in Shanghai's Literary Gazette and Liberation Daily. If we say that Yao Wenyuan's Criticizing the New Historical Play ‘Hai Rui Dismissed From Office’ was a counterrevolutionary signal for the usurpation of party and state power, then Criticizing the ‘Three Family Village’ was a counterrevolutionary mobilization call for creating chaos throughout the nation. This group of bourgeois careerists, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, thought that the day the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began would be just the time for them to usurp party and state power. On the one hand, they vehemently created counterrevolutionary public opinion, and, on the other hand, they usurped the leadership of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in a planned and systematic manner. The sum total of criminal activities of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four in usurping...

The Cultural Revolution Revisited: Dissonance Reduction or Power Maximization

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began with the publication of Yao Wenyuan's article, “Comment on the new historical play ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’,” which alluded to Chairman Mao's summary dismissal of Defence Minister Peng Dehuai six years earlier. The article first appeared in the 10 November 1965 issue of the ShanghaiWen Hui Dailyunder Chairman Mao's personal direction through the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. The curious unrolling of the Cultural Revolution during the subsequent three years through the consolidating Ninth Party Congress in the spring of 1969, exhibited three essential characteristics: first of all, an unprecedented increase in proselytizing for the Thought of Mao Zedong; secondly, an unprecedented leftist purging of the majority of the Politburo and Central Committee leadership; and finally, an unprecedented infusion of outside youth and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army to fill the vacated leadership posts.

China and the International Division of Labour

In his,1977 letter of resignation to the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association, Charles Bettleheirn expressed his apprehensions for the future of socialism in China since the arrest of the four leaders who played a central role in the course of the Cultural Revolution and who, with the exception of Jiang Qing, enjoyed the confidence of Mao Tsetung .... My doubts [Bettelheim's] with regard to the political consequences of these events are all the more serious since two of the arrested leaders, Yao Wenyuan and Chang Chunqiao, have made an important - even though incomplete - contribution to the analysis of the class basis of capitalist restoration in China.

Recent Developments in Sino-Japanese Relations

Research Article| July 01 1980 Recent Developments in Sino-Japanese Relations Shinkichi Eto Shinkichi Eto Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1951) 20 (7): 726–743. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643925 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Shinkichi Eto; Recent Developments in Sino-Japanese Relations. Far Eastern Survey 4 April 1951; 20 (7): 726–743. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2643925 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1980 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Notes on Publishing in China 1976 to 1979

Chinese publishers declare that following ten years of cultural revolution China was suffering from a severe 'book drought' (shuhuang) at the end of 1976. Now, four years later, the State Publishing Bureau has realized that providing reading material for the world's largest literate population is not merely a matter of politics, but also requires vast numbers of trained editors, huge printing presses, a steady supply of paper and an efficient distribution network. Although the main cities are now well on the way to satisfying the diverse tastes of their readers, country areas are rarely supplied with firstrelease books and in many cases have to be satisfied with old stocks. It is still fashionable to see the Cultural Revolution period (1966-76) as having been a cultural void. Officially, apart from a few months in 1975 when Deng and the three Hus were in power, the Cultural Revolution was uproductive and even highly damaging. Nevertheless, the 'drought conditions' now so readily bemoaned by even the most enthusiastic supporters of the then publishing policies were not as absolute or as devastating as suggested. Apart from the millions of copies of Mao's Selected Works printed in the late 60s, the political movements that occupied the country's interest from 1973-6 did demand the printing of numerous classicial works covering literature, philosophy and history. Apart from a spate of short story collections during the anti-Deng campaign of 1976, however, books of a more contemporary interest were few. A popular joke of the time saw the situation in the following way, Why are there only thirty novels printed every year? Because Yao Wenyuan can't read any faster. The fear of the Gang of Four's new 'literarary prisons' was so great that nearly all publishing houses sought high-level approval before printing a book.

Hold on to Scientific Experimentation in Psychology

Like all reactionaries in history, both at home and abroad, the "Gang of Four" are a sworn enemy of science. Being fearful of science, they tried to strangle it. It is precisely because of the gang's frenzied sabotage that psychological studies in our country suffered severe damage. Yao Wenyuan, the alien-class element and literary prostitute, repeatedly laid his vicious hands on psychological studies. Resorting to his habitual despicable tricks of indiscriminately slapping political labels and coming down with the big stick upon others, he wantonly lashed out at psychology. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan (publishing a sinister article in Guangming ribao under the assumed name of Ge Mingren), (1) by quoting out of context and amputating the contents of an experimental study which we conducted on the development of children's capability of abstract generalization, took the lead in launching an attack against the "direction" and "method" of our psychological studies. Slandering psychological studies as "metaphysics," "idealism," and "antiscientific," he uttered the nonsense that such studies bear "no theoretic significance and scientific value" at all. Later he dished out a so-called "Letter of Suggestion," which labeled the entire discipline as "bourgeois psychology" and thereupon mounted a white-terror campaign of encirclement and suppression against psychological studies and the broad masses of psychological workers. As a result of this white-terror campaign, many well-known psychologists suffered unrighted wrongs and were brutally persecuted. Studies and teaching of psychology were stopped for more than ten years, and the damage was disastrous. As regards the serious crimes committed by the "Gang of Four," especially by the reactionary literary prostitute Yao Wenyuan, in devastating and strangling psychological pursuits, we must make a thorough expose and settle accounts with them.

The Ideology and Personality of the Radical Left in the People's Republic of China

The context, ideology, and personality of four Chinese Commuist leftists (Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Ch'ing, Chang Ch'ung-ch'iao, and Yao Wen-yuan) are analyzed in depth. Three contextual factors that gave rise to the leftists are: alienation of Mao from the Communist Party, anxiety of a group of middle-level propagandists about the post-Mao era, and disaffection of the public. The ideology of the leftists warns about the danger of bourgeois restoration and calls upon China to return to the spirit of the revolutionary time before 1949. The personality pattern of Mao, Chiang, Chang, and Yao is analyzed and the radicalism of each is seen as a combination of personal need and social molding.

WAS the Revolution of 1911 the Struggle Between Confucians and Legalists?

Everybody knows that the Revolution of 1911 was an anti-imperialist and antifeudal democratic revolution led by the revolutionary and democratic group of the bourgeoisie in the period of the old democratic revolution in China. The leader of that revolution was Sun Yat-sen, and the guiding ideology was his old Three People's Principles. It is well known that Chairman Mao has made a series of scientific appraisals of these facts, but the newspapers and magazines controlled by the anti-Party clique of Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing and Yao Wen-yuan openly oppose Chairman Mao's scientific appraisals, betraying the fundamental principles of Marxism, distorting the Revolution of 1911 as a struggle between Confucians and Legalists, and replacing Sun Yat-sen as the standard-bearer of the revolution with Chang T'ai-yen, who played first an active and then a devastating role in the revolution. All this is part of the clique's attack on the Party in order to usurp the Party, seize power, restore capitalism and fabricate the "history" of the struggle between the Confucians and the Legalists.

Behind Chiang Ch'ing's "Utmost Dislike of Folk Songs"

anti-Party clique of Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing, and Yao Wen-yuan did not start to hate the Party and the Chairman Mao today. Nine years ago, Chiang Ch'ing attacked obliquely The East Is Red, which is criminal evidence of her opposition to Chairman Mao.

Would Money in a Socialist Economy Inevitably Breed a Bourgeoisie?

In early February 1975, in scheming to distort and revise Chairman Mao's directives on theoretical issues in order to meet the political needs of the counterrevolutionary conspiracy of the "gang of four," Yao Wenyuan, a villainous illiterate in Marxism-Leninism who is skillful in fabricating counterrevolutionary literature, exclaimed: "Dühring's economic commune is interesting. Engels rejected it on the grounds that commune exchange was still based on equal price and that it was still capitalistic. Commodities can turn into money, and money can be stored, leading to disparities in wealth, usury and different social classes."

In the Final Analysis, Who "Has Violated Even Formal Logic"?

With a vaulting ambition to usurp Party power, the "Gang of Four" has audaciously opposed Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Lacking truth in their allegations, they have been compelled to invoke sophistry. Their sophistry runs counter to materialist dialectics and even formal logic. Alien class element Yao Wen-yuan used to accuse others of "violating even formal logic," but it is the "Gang of Four" that ignores the definiteness and distinctiveness of thinking, says black is white, and tramples on formal logic.

Refutation Of The "Stinking Number Nine" Theory Of The "Gang Of Four"

The gang of four — Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing and Yao Wen-yuan — have created great chaos by confusing the relations between ourselves and the enemy, obliterating the differences between the two kinds of contradiction, wrecking Chairman Mao's policy of uniting with, educating and reforming intellectuals, calling intellectuals the stinking number nine, smothering the revolutionary initiative of the broad masses of intellectuals, and destroying the ranks of revolutionary intellectuals.

Editor's Introduction

In this issue, two of the articles on the economic development and foreign trade of the People's Republic of China deserve special attention. One of these, "A Critique of Teng Hsiao-p'ing's Bourgeois Comprador Economic Ideology" by Kao Lu and Ch'ang Ko, represents the viewpoints of Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing, and Yao Wenyuan, the "gang of four." The other article, "Expose the Conspiracy of ‘the Gang of Four’ in Attacking Our Foreign Trade Policy" by Kuo Mao-yen, defends China's foreign trade policy under then Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Since the second article was carried in Hung-ch'i [Red Flag] in April 1977 after the removal of the "gang of four," it must have had the implicit approval of Chairman Hua Kuo-feng.

On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique

[ About a month after the long-awaited Fourth NPC met in January, Mao Tse-tung is reported to have launched a new campaign, this one for the study of Lenin's works, particularly his theory of dictatorship of the proletariat. Politburo member Yao Wen-yuan published a long article in the March issue of RED FLAG which seems to set the guidlines of the campaign. Then in the April issue of the same journal Deputy Premier Chang Chun-chiao published an article which seems to question the whole campaign. Below we reproduce both these articles.—Editor]

On Inheritance of Ethics and on Language

In the past, Comrade Wu Han published three articles exclusively on the topic of ethics, in which he systematically expounded his views on ethics. He has also applied such views to his evaluation of historical figures which he has written about in recent years. He uncritically inherited bourgeois ethics and disseminated such ethics, through The Dismissal of Hai in the present society. Recently, Comrade Wu Han wrote Self-Criticism on The Dismissal of Hai Jui, in which he cited much material to stir up a debate with Comrade Yao Wen-yuan. At the same time, he admitted that his play, The Dismissal of Hai did have many shortcomings and errors in the evaluation of historical figures. However, he still asserted: Such good deeds are in conformity with the long-range interests of the feudal ruling classes as well as the immediate interests of the broad masses of oppressed, exploited people…and are worthy of commemoration. He also said: I am sometimes alert to the question of the critical inheritance...