Hai Rui Dismissed from Office
해서파관
A Peking opera by the historian and deputy mayor of Beijing Wu Han. The honest Ming official Hai Rui is dismissed after restoring land seized from the people. Yao Wenyuan's 1965 attack on the play opened the way to the Cultural Revolution.
In depth
What is the story?
Hai Rui (1514-1587) was a Ming official jailed for telling the Jiajing Emperor hard truths. In Wu Han's opera he is an able magistrate. Fearless of the powerful Xu Jie, he reverses unjust verdicts and restores land to the people. For this he is dismissed, and the people honour him. The peasants appear as passive victims awaiting a saviour.
Was it Mao's own suggestion at first?
It was. With false output figures in the Great Leap Forward becoming a problem, Mao told officials at a Shanghai meeting in April 1959 to learn from Hai Rui, asking how many comrades had his courage. Wu Han, a Ming specialist, responded two months later with "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor". In July at the Lushan Conference Peng Dehuai wrote to Mao and was purged. Mao then said Hai Rui had "moved house" and that he liked the left-wing Hai Rui, and Wu Han too called Peng a "false Hai Rui".
The opera came afterwards, at the request of the star actor Ma Lianliang. Revised several times, it was finished around late 1960 to 1961 and was a great success. Mao is said to have given Wu a signed copy of his Selected Works and invited Ma to dinner.
How did it spark the Cultural Revolution?
On 10 November 1965 Shanghai's Wenhui Bao ran Yao Wenyuan's attack on the play. The restoration of land, it said, was a focus for a "bourgeois opposition" that wanted to demolish the people's communes and restore landlord rule. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao sponsored the article and Mao helped revise it; Jiang withheld it from other leaders for fear it would be stopped.
The party apparatus reacted at once. Peng Zhen, Beijing's mayor and head of cultural policy, kept other papers from reprinting it for three weeks and tried to confine the debate to scholarship. Wu Han wrote in self-criticism, "In a word, I forgot class struggle!", but the chronology in his article only highlighted the link to Lushan. In December 1965 Mao said, "Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui." The next year Peng Zhen's February Outline was revoked, and the May 16 Notification brought down him and the Beijing Party Committee.
Was it really about Peng Dehuai?
Politically aware readers could take the emperor as Mao, Hai Rui as Peng and the land verdicts as the Great Leap. Peng himself wrote "I want to be a Hai Rui!" in a 1962 letter asking to return to politics. But this was an interpretation critics offered after the first performance. Peng Zhen protested that Wu and Peng Dehuai had no organisational or personal ties, and Mao's own appeal had prompted Wu's writing on Hai Rui. That Wu meant the allegory is not confirmed by his own words.
Why Mao threw his full weight behind the dispute is also unclear from the record. Frederick Teiwes sees him weakening Liu Shaoqi through Peng Zhen and through Wu. Alessandro Russo notes that cultural officials defended Wu for months and that the criticism rose from intellectuals lower down.
Wu Han died in prison in 1969 and was rehabilitated in 1979.