People’s Daily editor whose Evening Chats at Yanshan were read as satire of the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution’s first victim
In 1966 his Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes from Three-Family Village were condemned as “anti-party poisonous weeds”, making him a nationwide target; he took his own life at home on 18 May 1966 and was rehabilitated in February 1979.
A historian and journalist from Fujian, he ran newspapers in the Jin-Cha-Ji base during the war with Japan and edited the first Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Editor and then director of People’s Daily from 1949, he was rebuked by Mao in 1957 for running a “scholars’ paper” and stepped down. As a Beijing party secretary he wrote Evening Chats at Yanshan for the Beijing Evening News in 1961–1962 and, with Wu Han and Liao Mosha, Notes from Three-Family Village; in 1966 these were condemned as “anti-party poisonous weeds”, opening the Cultural Revolution, and he killed himself that May. He was rehabilitated in 1979.
Also known as: Teng T’o · Ma Nancun
Activities and affiliations
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1930–1966
Ideology and propaganda
- Journalism in the anti-Japanese base areas1937–1948
- Secretary, Beijing CCP Secretariat1958–1966Political and party leadership
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People’s Republic of China state institutionsEditor-in-Chief and Director of the People's DailyMain
Ideology and propaganda
Career Timeline
- 1930–1966CCP member
- 1937–1948Journalism in the anti-Japanese base areas
- 1949–1958Editor-in-chief and director of People’s Daily
- 1958–1966Secretary, Beijing CCP Secretariat
- 1961–1964Wrote Yanshan Night Talks and Three Family Village Notes
- 1966Died by suicide during persecution at the start of the Cultural Revolution
Related historical events
- 1937–1945The war with Japan and the second united frontNewspaper maker in the Jin-Cha-Ji baseDuring the war with Japan, he made newspapers in the Jin-Cha-Ji base.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionAuthor of Evening Chats at Yanshan, the first suicideKilled himself in May 1966 after the “Three-Family Village” attack.
The 1966 public campaign and his isolation
In April 1966 the Beijing party committee relayed the centre's directive to criticize Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notes from Three-Family Village publicly. On 16 April the Beijing Daily and the Beijing Evening News devoted three full pages and banner black headlines to naming Deng Tuo for the first time; from that day he was removed from his posts and confined to his home.
On 8 May the Liberation Army Daily published an article signed "Gao Ju", "Open fire on the anti-party, anti-socialist black line", identifying Deng Tuo as someone who "beat the drum for a bourgeois restoration". Articles attacking him by Yao Wenyuan, Qi Benyu and others followed on 10, 14 and 16 May, denouncing him as a "ringleader of the anti-party, anti-socialist" forces and asserting: "Who is Deng Tuo? It has now been established that he is a renegade."
As the criticism escalated, his family was forced to break with him. His children would not enter his room when they came home, would not speak a word to him, and no longer called him "father". Once the papers branded him a renegade, Deng Tuo "understood as a veteran party member the essential difference between 'renegade' and 'anti-party'", and that a renegade label left no possibility of recovery.
On 17 May he began writing his testament and told his wife to take the children and "live apart for a while". In letters to Peng Zhen and Liu Ren he spent considerable space analysing the background and shortcomings of his Evening Chats and Notes from Three-Family Village, striving to demonstrate that he was not "anti-party, anti-socialism, anti-Mao Zedong Thought". On 18 May 1966, after leaving a final note, he killed himself with sleeping pills at his Beijing home.
Even after his death the municipal committee sent people to search the house again, and under party regulations took away his letters, photographs and works. His death was required to be kept strictly secret; his wife Ding Yilan could only tell the children that their father was hospitalised. It was two years later that the children learned of their father's death in society and asked their mother to confirm it, and only after requesting instructions from the Beijing party committee did Ding Yilan dare tell them the truth. In February 1979 the CCP rehabilitated him and restored his reputation, and on the afternoon of 6 September 1979 a memorial meeting chaired by Hu Yaobang was held at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.