Lu Dingyi

Communist Party of China Maoism 1906–1996 ○ Natural causes

Propaganda chief who delivered the 1956 “hundred flowers, hundred schools” report, and one of the first targets of the Cultural Revolution

From Wuxi, Jiangsu, he joined the Communist Party in 1925 while studying electrical engineering at Nanyang and edited Red Star on the Long March. Chief editor of Liberation Daily in 1942 and head of the Central Propaganda Department from 1943, he set the principles of the party press. In April 1956 he proposed free debate in scholarship and the arts at a Politburo meeting, on 26 May he delivered the “hundred flowers, hundred schools” report at Huairen Hall, and at the Eighth Congress he became a Politburo alternate. Yet his department also led the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the criticism campaigns that followed. Vice-premier in 1959 and minister of culture in 1965, he was suspended at the enlarged Politburo meeting of May 1966 and held for thirteen years. Rehabilitated in 1979 as CPPCC vice-chairman, he then criticised one-man rule and the reduction of scholarship to class struggle.

Also known as: Lu Ting-yi