Wu Han, Historian: Son of China's Times

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Asian Studies | History

This biography spotlights the life of key Chinese intellectual Wu Han, well known in China as a major twentieth-century historian and democratic political figure. World attention was drawn to Wu in the mid-1960s as the first of Mao Zedong’s targets in the Cultural Revolution. The biography locates Wu in the rapid changes in the social and political environment of his time, from the early years of the twentieth century until his death in prison in 1969. With Wu Han’s life as the focus, the narrative deals with the momentous changes in Chinese society and government during the past century. Mary G. Mazur bases the biographical account on extensive interviewing in China and penetrates a great deal deeper than the conventional conception of the shift from Nationalist to Communist regimes in the People’s Republic of China. The complex life of Wu Han is of interest to specialist and nonspecialist readers alike, both because of the broad relevance of the historical and political issues he and those around him confronted in the context of the times in China and because of the direct narrative biographical style revealing the conflicts and depth in the human situation. Mazur relates Wu Han’s life to the momentous changes and conflicts surging through Chinese society, with special emphasis on the complex role intellectuals have played during the course of change. Mary G. Mazur is an independent scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of Chicago.

For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.lexingtonbooks.com Cover photo: Statue of Wu Han by Zhang Dedi at Qinghua University in Beijing. Photo by Sha Luyin.

WU HAN, HISTORIAN

“Mary G. Mazur’s carefully researched biography of Wu Han is more than a study of an individual; it is really an intellectual biography of twentieth-century China itself—from Wu Han’s initial bookwormish avoidance of politics, to his politicization, to his increasing involvement in United Front activities, and, finally, his purge for writing ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.’ Wu Han, Historian will be widely read by anyone seeking an understanding of China’s revolutionary century.” —Joseph Fewsmith, Boston University

Mazur

“While it takes the form of an individual’s biography, this work treats the reader to a guided tour of Chinese history from the May Fourth Movement in the second decade of the twentieth century to the early post-Mao era in the 1980s. All along the way one sees the relationships among individual intellectuals, institutions, movements, and political events. Ideas, beliefs, and attitudes are contextualized in a rich fabric of personal relationships and changing locales and environments. For anyone who knows anything about the works of Chinese society, this book offers innumerable rewarding insights into the way networking and personal politics worked in the middle decades of the twentieth century.” —Edward Farmer, University of Minnesota

Mary G. Mazur

WU HAN, HISTORIAN

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2456-7 ISBN-10: 0-7391-2456-0

Son of China’s Times

Wu Han, Historian

Wu Han, vice mayor of Beijing

Wu Han, Historian Son of China’s Times Mary G. Mazur

LEXINGTON BOOKS A di vis io n o f ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mazur, Mary Gale, 1931– Wu Han : historian son of China’s times / Mary G. Mazur. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2456-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2456-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3022-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3022-6 (electronic) 1. Wu, Han, 1909– 2. Historians—China—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Historian son of China’s times. DS734.9.W78M39 2009 951.0072’02—dc22 [B] 2008022050 Printed in the United States of America

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1

A “Rustic” Talent Awakens to His Times

15

2

Choosing His Own Road

45

3

Commitment to Ming History

73

4

Writing the “New History”

117

5

Waves from May Fourth

155

6

Social History for the Present

187

7

Wartime University: From History to Politics

231

8

Academics and Activism

269

9

Historian as Radical

305

10

Toward a New China: A Decision Made

337

11

Founding a New China: Changing a Life

369

12

The Last Chapter: From Politics to History

397

Appendix: List of Interviews

437

Bibliography

441

Index

491

About the Author

515 v

Illustrations

Wu Han, vice mayor of Beijing

Frontispiece

1.1

Wu family village of Kuzhutang, Zhejiang Province

17

1.2

Wu family home

33

5.1

Yuan Zhen at fifteen in 1922: Student revolutionary commemorating her forbidden haircut

167

1922 student rebels: Reading Society members at Hubei Women’s Normal School, expelled for planning to cut their hair

168

Wu Han, instructor in Qinghua University History Department, Beiping, 1934

188

7.1

Wu Han, professor at Yunnan University, 1938, in Kunming

236

7.2

Yuan Zhen and Wu Han wedding portrait, 1939, Kunming

242

8.1

Wu Han speaking to a Democratic Movement rally in Kunming, 1944

283

Yuan Zhen and Wu Han on the doorstep of their home on Qinghua University campus in Beiping, 1947

313

Wu speaking to memorial meeting for Wen Yiduo in Beiping, 1947, after Wen’s assassination

317

Yuan Zhen and Wu Han in Beiping at Qinghua University, 1948

331

5.2

6.1

9.1 9.2 9.3

vii

viii

10.1

Illustrations

Wu Han, blacklisted by the Guomindang, on the eve of fleeing Beiping for the CCP liberated zone in summer of 1948

342

Wu Han, Democratic League leader, speaking to a league meeting in Beijing, early 1950s

372

Wu Han and other members of the Democratic League with Zhou Enlai, October 1949: (l. to r.) Shen Zhiyuan, Wu Han, Zhou Enlai, Shen Junru, Chu Tunan, and Jian Bozan

374

11.3

Wu Han holding his adopted daughter, Xiaoyan, circa 1957

383

11.4

Yuan Zhen and Wu Han with their daughter, Xiaoyan, circa 1963

383

Wu Han, vice mayor of Beijing, on cultural mission to Egypt for the People’s Republic of China in 1958

389

Wu Han and the PRC cultural mission with Egyptian officials, 1958

389

Cultural Revolution, 1966, former vice mayor of Beijing, “Counterrevolutionary Revisionist Element Wu Han”

427

Memorial Service commemorating Wu Han’s rehabilitation and honoring Wu Han and Yuan Zhen, 1979

430

Up close photographs of Wu Han and Yuan Zhen at the memorial service, 1979

430

Li Xiannian shaking hands with Wu Zhang, Wu Han’s son, in condolence and commemoration of his father’s rehabilitation, 1979

431

11.1 11.2

11.5 11.6 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

Abbreviations

WORKS BY WU HAN CITED IN BIOGRAPHY CDL CTJ DSZJ DXJ HRBG LSJZ MTZ SJCZJ SSRW TQJ WC to HS WHJW WHSLJ WHSX1-4 WHWJ1-4 WHXJ WHZW XXJ ZGCS ZGXCS ZYZZ49 ZYZZ54 ZYZZ65

Chang duan lu, 1980 Chuntian ji, December 1961 Du shi zhaji, February 1956 Deng xia ji, September 1960 “Hai Rui baguan,” January 1961 Lishi de jingzi, May 1946 Ming taizu, February 1944 Sanjiacun zhaji, 1979 Shishi yu renwu, July 1948 Tou qiang ji, September 1959 “Wu Chunhan zhi Hu Shi xin,” March 1930–May 1932 Wu Han jinian wenji, 1984 Wu Han shilun ji, 1987 Wu Han shixue lunzhu xuanji, vol. 1–4, 1984–1988 Wu Han wenji, vol. 1–4, 1988 Wu Han xuanji, 1988 Wu Han zawen xuan, 1979 Xuexi ji, February 1963 Zhongguo lishi changshu, vol. 1, July 1963 Zhongguo lishi xiaocongshu, vol. 1–, 1960 Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan, April 1949 Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan, 1954–1955, unpublished manuscript Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan, October 1965

ix

x

Abbreviations

NON–WU HAN WORKS BDCC BDRC BJMX79 BJMX84 BJRB CB CQ DMB ECCP ECMM FBIS GMRB JAS RMRB SCMM SCMP SW TTF WHHHR WHJNWJ WHXS WHZ WHZZSX

Biographical Dictionary of Communist China Biographical Dictionary of Republican China Beijing mengxun, 1979 Beijing mengxun, 1984 Beijing ribao Current Background China Quarterly Dictionary of Ming Biography Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period Extracts from China Mainland Magazines Foreign Broadcast Information Service, China Report Guangming ribao Journal of the Association of Asian Studies Renmin ribao Selections from China Mainland Magazines Survey of China Mainland Press Selected Works of Mao Zedong “Ts’iang T’ingfu” (Jiang Tingfu), Columbia University Wu Han he “Hai Rui baguan,” 1979 Wu Han jinian wenji, 1984 Wu Han de xuexu shengya, 1984 Wu Han zhuan, 1984 Wu Han zizhuan shuxin wenji, 1993

OTHER ABBREVIATIONS CCP CYL DL DYL GMD PCC PRC SYL

Chinese Communist Party Communist Youth League Democratic League Democratic Youth League Guomindang (Nationalist Party) Political Consultative Conference People’s Republic of China Socialist Youth League

Acknowledgments

T

here are many people I want to thank for support and encouragement of my work on this biography of Wu Han. First, there are several who have encouraged me to publish the full biography to make available the life story of Wu that has been shared with me by those who knew him during his lifetime. Theodore Farmer, Timothy Cheek, and Joseph Fewsmith have my deep-felt appreciation for encouraging me to publish the finished manuscript. An earlier version, in fact my Ph.D. dissertation, that took the narrative of this man’s life to the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China was published in China, in translation, under my Chinese name, Ma Zimei in 1996. After revision and adding sections on the years until his death in 1969, now I am able to publish Wu’s whole life story. To acknowledge the many people who have helped me with the research for the biography I begin with two who inspired me to take up the work on it in the early 1980s, soon after Wu Han had been rehabilitated in 1978–1979: together He Fang, the daughter of Dr. He Mu—Zhou Enlai’s physician in the 1940s, and Deng Yun, Deng Tuo’s eldest son, encouraged me to write of Wu Han. Both had been sent to the countryside themselves during the Cultural Revolution and their families had suffered during those ten years. Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Liao Mosha were the authors of the renowned Three Family Village column published in the early 1960s. Deng Yun introduced me to his mother, Ding Yilan, who introduced me to Wu Han’s family and to several very important political figures. To my advisors, teachers, and friends at the University of Chicago: Guy Alitto, David T. Roy, and Prasenjit Duara go my deep appreciation for their support and guidance on this research project that was to become far more than the dissertation it began as. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

The support of a grant in 1985–1986 from the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China and an extension of the grant in 1987, made possible the research and intensive interviewing in China necessary for the study. Without the research supported by this grant the nature of the biography would have been limited to an intellectual biography dependent on published texts rather than a full biography of a whole life. To some very special people who have taken an interest in my research, encouraging and helping me along the way, I want to express particular thanks. Timothy Cheek, Deng Tuo’s biographer, has shared his experiences, listened to my problems, and encouraged my efforts. My friend and colleague, Sha Luyin of Beijing University, has counseled and assisted me in learning and understanding much about the people and the events in China during this tumultuous period. Luyin has been my assistant through many interviews and helped to open many doors for my research. Su Shuangbi, historian, biographer of Wu Han, journalist, and prominent editor, and his wife, Wang Hongzhi, historian and editor, have helped me with discussions and answers to my questions and with documentary material and introductions. Su has encouraged my biography project in many ways, despite knowing that our viewpoints differed at times. Hou Renzhi, leading historical geographer, and his wife Zhang Weiying, at Beijing University, have opened many doors and introduced me to many people I would have had no way to meet. To all of the people I have interviewed, listed in the interview list at the end of the book, I express my deep appreciation for their time and thoughts, their memories and confidences, and the materials they shared. I am especially indebted to members of Wu Han’s and Yuan Zhen’s families: Wu Puyue, Song Ruji, Wu Xuan, Ye Meiying, Wu Puxing, Yuan Fuzhi, Yuan Xizhi, Rong Zhaozu, Wu Zhang, Song Dian, and others. Through my contacts with these people Wu Han lived for me. Many others have helped and encouraged me at various times in the project, only a few of whom can be listed, including Tang Xiaofeng, Song Shengnian, Bu Liping, Zhou Hao, Lin Mianzong, Deng Zhuang, Jin Yijian, Li Anbei, Che Wei, Wu Yanhong, and especially the late Professor Xu Daling and Professors Wang Tianyou of Beijing University and Liu Guisheng of Qinghua University. Among China studies circles I particularly wish to express appreciation for the encouragement, guidance, and helpful critiques of John Israel, Fred Teiwes, and Hon Tze-ki. My teachers Guy Alitto, Philip Kuhn, David Roy, Tang Tsou, Susan Mann, and William Parish at the University of Chicago saw that I was well grounded in modern China studies and aroused my interest in many issues in social history. Pingti Ho, my teacher of Ming-Qing history, imparted his enthusiasm for early Chinese history and for the MingQing period as well as his admiration for his teacher, Wu Han, and Wu’s

Acknowledgments

xiii

contribution to historical studies. All of these scholars have been models for me to follow. The many libraries I have appreciated being available to use for my research include the East Asian Library at the University of Chicago, Stanford University Hoover Library, Harvard-Yenching Library and the Fairbanks Center Library at Harvard University, University of Toronto Library, Columbia University Starr Library, Library of Congress Oriental Collection, and the New York City Public Library. In China, the collections at Beijing University Library and the Beijing National Library were helpful, and in Hong Kong the Universities Research Center Library was a very pleasant place to work. I would particularly like to thank the two who were the curators at the University of Chicago East Asian Library while I was working on the project, James Cheng and Tailai Ma, for their assistance. The last shall be first—to my husband, Robert, captive audience, technical advisor on computers, helpful editor, loyal and patient fan with plenty of opportunity to practice his skills, from the bottom of my heart I express my appreciation. To my three children, Amy, Dan, and Steven, all with their own very special careers—for their understanding and support I send heartfelt “thank yous.” My deep appreciation goes to all who have helped with this project as well as to those, especially in China, who must remain nameless. My thanks for the special opportunity to explore in depth this man’s intensely fascinating and significant life lived in one of the key periods in the history of China, the twentieth century. Without the assistance and encouragement of all of these people this biography of Wu Han’s life would never have been completed. However, only I can take the responsibility for the errors.

Introduction

O

ne cold day in early December 1965, a young woman hurried along dusty Changan street on the west side of the Imperial Palace in Beijing, the capital city of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), past the low gray brick walls broken only by the closed doors of the red painted gates. As she walked she shivered, thinking with foreboding of her uncle, Wu Han, and her aunt, Yuan Zhen, and wondering what she would find in the courtyard house behind the gate. She had stood a long time on the crowded, rattling bus all the way from Qinghua University outside the city, where she was in her last year of study for her degree in chemistry. Exams were in a few weeks but now she stole a few hours from her studies to make the journey into the city. She had come often to her uncle’s home on weekends during her years at school so it seemed almost like her usual trip. It was like home because it had actually been her home for many years. That day she was on a special mission. From the Beijing newspapers and talk at the university she realized her uncle was having very serious problems. Political pressure like this was an unfamiliar situation for him, although in the past years there had been times when her father and her younger uncle had been under great pressure from criticism. This uncle whom she was hurrying to see was someone very special in her life. In the last few days she had been shocked when she read the paper with the article by Yao Wenyuan criticizing “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,” the opera Wu Han had written. Although at first Yao’s essay seemed to be opening an academic debate, she sensed this was no ordinary debate. Her uncle had been in academic debates before but this had quite a different ring to it. She worried that it might become a serious political crisis for him. That an official of her uncle’s high rank and connections would suddenly become the subject 1

2

Introduction

of such a critical article, written by a young author of lower rank, signaled something very serious was going on.1

FIRST FOCAL POINT OF THE LOOMING STORM The Cultural Revolution storm that consumed China for ten years in the 1960s and early 1970s began in late 1965 with an attack on Wu Han, a leading intellectual and eminent historian of the Ming dynasty who was the vice mayor of Beijing responsible for education and cultural affairs in the national capital. Beginning first in Shanghai, then moving to the capital city Beijing, the storm erupted within months to consume the entire country in a great political, social cataclysm. During the last months of 1965 signs indicating unsettled political weather ahead had become stronger, although at the time no one understood what the signs portended. Even decades later in 2001 a book by a well known mainland journalist and editor about the newspaper column Three Family Village cowritten by Wu Han in the early 1960s could only be published in Hong Kong but not inside China because it was viewed as critical of Mao Zedong. Effects from the past continue to influence the internal Chinese political scene today, even as momentous changes are moving China toward a more open society.2 It is from this historic attack on Wu in November and December 1965 that the beginning of the Cultural Revolution has been dated in China. The role intellectuals take in politics and in public space has been a controversial issue for countless years and continues to stir discussion today in China. For example in March 2001, the China Morning Post of Hong Kong reported that Liu Ji, a senior advisor of President Jiang Zemin had called for political reforms that would bring intellectuals into the core membership of the Communist Party.3 In the 1989 Tiananmen Incident the part played by intellectuals in the demonstrations became a central issue, evidenced in the central government and Communist Party documents collected in The Tiananmen Papers, first published in the United States in 20014 and only later in Chinese in Hong Kong. Now in twenty-first-century China censorship of the Internet is being called the Great Firewall by web users. This biography of Wu Han (1909–1969) is not about the Cultural Revolution or its genesis. It is about the man and his life from his early years in Bitter Bamboo Pond Village in the province of Zhejiang in central China to his last years lived in the context of the people and circumstances surrounding him. An essential part of this narrative is the living tapestry of intellectuals and politics intertwined in the civil society of the times. As the past is part of the present and leads to the future, this man’s life is directly related to, is part of the course of events in civil society with the contradictions and changes underway in China in these years. During the early 1960s, and even in the late 1950s, in the PRC the political climate of the party-state had begun

Introduction

3

to move toward the radical left, away from the more centrist atmosphere of the first decade of the PRC. At the beginning of the shift, Wu Han seemed beyond and immune to the effects of the changing atmosphere because of his favored position. However, by 1965 he began to be seriously affected by the leftward shift. By the end of the year an article viciously attacking some of Wu’s writing by a young radical member of Mao Zedong’s wife’s circle had appeared first in Shanghai and been reprinted immediately in the Beijing newspapers.5 Readers instantly recognized as they read the newspapers that this attack on a high official could not have been published without approval from the highest central level. In the next months the atmosphere of criticism directed at Wu Han and others associated with him became intense. His family and friends stood by helplessly, finding that they became targets also, especially if they did not rush to denounce him. The memories of these weeks vividly expressed by his niece, then a university student, who visited her uncle and aunt in late 1965 and the first days of 1966 are woven into the closing pages of the last chapter of the biography. Knowing she was seeing him and had lived in their home previously, the student leaders demanded she expose Wu. They pressed her to say the newspapers were right, although everyone already knew what the papers said. They wanted to know what he had said before the article had published the accusations about his ideas, what had he done? She was expected to tell something, more than what was already in the newspaper, constantly followed everywhere and unceasingly told, “Think, think.” “Write it down. Write something new! You must ‘draw the line’!” This meant they were insisting she tell how he was bad and in that way separate herself from him. This went on day after day without end. Different people would take turns following her and accompanying her everywhere, never leaving her alone.6 In the months and years that followed the winter of 1966, Wu Han’s entire family, including his wife Yuan Zhen and the two children, his brother and sisters and their spouses and children, Yuan Zhen’s family, distant relatives in his native village in Zhejiang, academic associates, friends and acquaintances of a lifetime, and many others in ever-widening circles across China, were drawn into the Cultural Revolution meat grinder for the sole reason of association with him. The destructive process and its effect on his family and associates outlasted his life and took on a reality and driving force of its own.7

THE QUESTIONS OF A LIFE How then did this man come to this point in late 1965, the subject of powerful attack by as yet unknown forces? How did he become the focal point that became the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution of the People’s Republic

4

Introduction

of China? With his niece sitting beside him, as he sat in his study with his wife leafing through Mao’s writings, looking at Mao’s letter to him, and recalling the intimacy and trust that had been granted him by the highest level at the center, what was he thinking? This we can never know with certainty. Nonetheless, with the aid of written texts and living texts of human memory we can recover a sense of this man’s life. By tracing how he came through the sixty years of his life to his death in prison in 1969, three years after his niece’s last visit, we can gain an understanding of him and of some of the aspects of China’s tortuous course in the twentieth and now in the twenty-first century. In the kaleidoscope of the multiple contexts of Wu’s life lies a sense of the disjunctures and interconnections in his life and thought. Through the life of this man the place intellectuals have occupied and their role in the polity in this transitional twentieth-century era from the end of the Qing dynasty through the establishment of the party-state of the People’s Republic can be explored.8 In the wrenching changes of the twentieth century, continuing even now in the present, how the past, present, and future fit and do not fit together has concerned many in China, particularly those engaged in the construction of a sovereign space for their people and culture and in ensuring a sovereign state that will repel intrusive external power and continue to occupy its due place in the world. Among those concerned with how the past should be understood in the construction of China’s present was this historian, Wu Chunhan known best simply as Wu Han. His was a name millions across China came to recognize suddenly in 1966 as someone to be despised and feared, an enemy of the Communist Party and the country, said to be bent on overthrowing the ruling power of the party-state led by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Although Wu could not have comprehended the extended scope of what was happening, he had been cast as the initial focal point of a vicious attack that came to erupt into a larger than life, tenyear long calamity for all in the country, the Great Cultural Revolution. In fact, during his life span this man, a well known and outspoken scholar, had been involved in many issues in the complex events of the changing times. With the exception of Ming period specialists and those interested in Ming history, until 1966 Wu was little known by Westerners who studied China. In the English language literature dealing with Wu Han, it was the attack on him at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that thrust him into view outside of China.9 With the explosion of the Cultural Revolution those who studied China were eager to understand the significance of the attack on the intellectual identified as the author of the so-called traitorous opera “Hai Rui Dismissed” (Hai Rui baguan) since the opera had been the focus of criticism at the frontal edge of the Cultural Revolution storm.10 With the assumption that the attack was the result of a dissident’s criticism, the perception of the play outside of China as similar in aim to that of Soviet Union dissident writing of the era was enough to convince many credulous China watchers that

Introduction

5

its author must perforce be a democratic dissident criticizing Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. In the rush of the first Western analyses on the beginning of the Cultural Revolution Wu was viewed as having come into existence as the author of the opera, “Hai Rui Dismissed.” He was dealt with as an epiphenomenon of the Cultural Revolution, seemingly lacking any significant previous existence. These studies, preoccupied with the problem of the 1965–1966 accusations against Wu as part of the genesis of the Cultural Revolution itself, depended for their sources on the textual materials published in the People’s Republic by Communist Party organs at the opening of the Cultural Revolution during the investigations created to frame Wu by the radical left party-state regime.11

MYTHS AND THE NARRATIVE In previous treatments of Wu Han, beginning in China even while he was still alive with the initial attack by Yao Wenyuan in November 1965, he has been mythologized. This manner of thinking of him continued in the West to satisfy needs that differed according to the myth creators needs in the present of their own times. This phenomenon of myth construction has taken place in other world situations in other eras and, indeed, we see it today, in our own civil society.12 In Beijing in 1985, when I bicycled to Qinghua University I walked around the site of the striking “Han ting” pavilion memorializing Wu Han on an island park in a peaceful lagoon in a setting originally created for the Qing dynasty imperial princes. In the pavilion was an inscription by Deng Xiaoping to Wu’s memory. It was evident here that Wu Han had become a transcendent, heroic figure in the post-Mao official version or myth. He seemed to have been transformed into something more than the realistic, warmhearted middle-aged professor represented in the stone statue carved by the sculptor Zhang Dedi, standing nearby on the island (and pictured on the cover of this book). Certainly a man very different from the traitorous black figure of the Cultural Revolution, who was said to have aimed at undermining the state. Walking about the memorial site I realized the existence of these myths adds complexity to the biographer’s quest for the historical man. Later, I learned that the initiative for the pavilion had been conceived among Qinghua University faculty and graduates who wanted a shrine honoring their former academic colleague who had been destroyed by Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution. It was their intention that the memorial to Wu would signify their cry, the cry of his fellow academics against the terrible injustices done to Wu Han and to many, many intellectuals in those dark days. Deng Xiaoping, who had often played cards with Wu Han before the Cultural Revolution, had been happy to write the inscription in the Han ting pavilion for his friend.

6

Introduction

The mythologizing of Wu Han has taken a number of versions.13 The first, created while the real man still lived, is the myth depicting him as a “poisonous weed.” This myth, appearing in the press first in late November 1965 from the pen of Yao Wenyuan, is now known, through work published in the late 1990s in China, to have been instigated by Mao Zedong in the early fall of 1965,14 before the Yao piece was published in the Shanghai and Beijing newspapers. Constructed as a traitor to the country, foe of Mao and the Communist Party, in this myth Mao re-created Wu Han for his own purpose to precipitate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The next version of the Wu Han myth, created in Western countries and stimulated by knowledge of the first version, relied for sources on the writings and reports that created the first myth, that is, the material generated in China and published before and during the Cultural Revolution. It is, in fact, the mirror image of the “poisonous weed” myth. In the Western created myth Wu stands as the heroic liberal dissenter who used the written word to attack obliquely through metaphor and suggestion by “pointing at the mulberry to revile the ash,” what could not be attacked directly, namely Mao and the Communist Party.15 In the West there was a certain idealistic political flavor to this myth that satisfied the need of Western scholars and political commentators of the 1960s and 1970s to find democratic, liberal dissenters in every Communist totalitarian state. It goes along with the assumption, still alive today, that when the autocratic state is gone autocracy will have vanished. In a third, not-so-noble version of the myth he has been perceived as an intellectual who “sold out,” as the loyal toady of the Communist Party who forfeited his intellectual freedom to gain prominent position in the PRC. This version has been expressed in Taiwan, in the United States, and in the People’s Republic.16 The fourth version of the Wu Han myth is the official People’s Republic version of post-Mao, Dengist rehabilitation, the antithesis of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution version. Wu is here the martyred historian who remained loyal to the party, commemorated by the Han Ting pavilion at Qinghua University and by numerous books, articles, and publications; the figure raised in the 1980s and 1990s as a symbolic model hero intellectual. Because he was dead, this model could be manipulated to serve the needs of the powerful and of the nation as heroic models have been used in China and elsewhere for hundreds, even thousands, of years. The brilliant loyal scholar, Wu Han, was held up for young and old as a model for the proper utilization of talent during modernization in post-Mao China. Actually, in life Wu was a loyal scholar who had risen to success and fame from poor beginnings, qualification enough for hero status, but the generalization and the model created a more idealized image than the man with all of his complexities and contradictions.17

Introduction

7

Even in the 1990s in China the re-creation of Wu Han as the moral exemplar figure continued as his image was used to serve the needs of the leaders of the 1990s. However, by this time there was a significant difference—the elite leadership was more diverse. An eleven-part dramatic television series called simply “Wu Han” was created under the auspices of the Democratic League, the minor democratic political party of intellectuals Wu had belonged to. The series was broadcast on national TV only after a struggle with the state television station over the time of day it would be aired.18 Great effort had been made by the TV station management to keep the series out of prime time despite the Democratic League’s efforts to have it shown when the maximum number of people could view it. In advance the Beijing Daily announced that in the film Wu “will be portrayed as faithful to the Party, of lofty moral courage and without resentment or regret.” The newspaper said that “From a patriotic scholar experiencing endless frustrations, who cared about the people and the nation, he matured into a Communist Party member who contributed his whole life’s energy to the Communist cause.” Lest the point of the heroic moral example be missed, “his path throughout life is the path sought by the advanced intellectuals in China.”19 The immortal myth was transformed in this way through the faux realism of TV docu-drama into a tale of dramatic art much as opera composers or storytellers for centuries have sung the paeans of Tang and Song heroes, creating narrative tales of fiction and art as well as history. In this instance, the Wu story carries, doubtless intentionally, an ambiguous double-edged message that portrays the Communist Party’s need to claim intellectuals, even those destroyed in its name, as the party’s legitimators at the same time that it depicts Wu as a practicing member of the centrist Democratic League. Although sponsored by the Democratic League, the film’s promotion of Wu Han as symbolic model was, at the same time, in keeping with the central government policy on model heroes that had been announced in the People’s Daily following the Democratic Movement demonstrations of spring 1989 and the June Fourth Incident, when model heroes, an ancient method of moral teaching often used by Wu Han himself, were being reemphasized by the party. An editorial on revolutionary heroes in Renmin ribao 28 September 1989, on the eve of National Day, read: The times need their own heroes. . . . Every country in the world, whatever system it adopts, requires its own heroic figures to serve its own ideology, cultural thinking and economic base. Ours is a socialist country and we should increasingly commend our model laborers and publicize socialism and revolutionary heroism . . . what we have in mind when we speak of revolutionary heroism, is a fearless spirit, a scientific attitude, and a belief in finding truth from facts.20

The need for heroic figures is present in most cultures and mythologizing has often been the way to find them. Ironically, the Wu Han myth came

8

Introduction

ready-made by the Cultural Revolution “to serve (the country’s) ideology, cultural thinking and economic base.” The mythmakers who made these judgments had little interest in searching out understanding of the actual person who lived, but rather focused on the use that could be made of the myth within their own world as they understood it. Paul Cohen has pointed out in History in Three Keys about the Boxer, that mythmakers’ purpose is “to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present,” that is the mythmaker’s present. 21

THE BIOGRAPHER’S TASK With these myths abounding what then of the historical man, the “actual person who lived,” and the task of the biographer? The biographer who undertakes to study and write “a life” must distinguish the relationship of the constructed myths and the historical evidence of the life of the person in the way that historians and archeologists study the remains of the past. Those in China who personally knew Wu well also have had to contend with the phenomenon of these created constructions of the man. When I have talked with them they sometimes have spoken in terms of inability to reconcile their memories of Wu with either the demonized or the heroic figure created by powerful agents. Sometimes they simply have wondered aloud what became of the person they knew, as though he had been overwritten by forces larger than life. The biographer’s interpretation of the subject depends on what is understood as the purpose of biography and how we conceive of the nature of history. When the lives of people are seen as germane to understanding the stream of events and change, particularly when the times are filled with tension among coexistent, yet contradictory factors as in twentieth- and twenty-first-century China, then contextualized studies of complex figures such as Wu are especially relevant to comprehending the complexity of those times, as well as understanding the fully dimensioned life of the individual person. In this biographical study the effort has been to examine events through as many original sources of all types as possible with the aim of understanding the man in his present. Reconstruction of the historical man is the aim, even though in the end the complete reality of a life is unknowable. Paul Veyne, who writes about the dilemmas of myth and history, sees the historian going on in spite of the impossibility of knowing the real facts. He says “each fact . . . plays a different role, or rather changes from one conjuncture to another. Its role and identity are only circumstantial.”22 While historians must question myths, Veyne thinks none “denies the historicity forming the basis of any legend.”23 He calls this historicity the “true kernel.”

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9

In his writing of history Wu Han looked for the true kernels of historicity himself. He once wrote about what he called the “firm, white heart” of the bamboo in the historian’s quest, left after the outer layers were peeled away.24 The core of the historian’s project for him was to find the network of contextual relationships, the nexus in the relationships of factors and the circumstances surrounding them. He wrote: The defect in what people generally accept as old style histories is that they isolate the people, events, things, and places separately and manage to disconnect the historical material with the result that when the readers have read the history, because they can’t get a complete view of the historical changes they don’t have a deep understanding of the culture and civilization inherited from the past and leading to the future.25

What Wu wrote here, ironically (and presciently), describes the way those who wish to understand the past, in writing his life, must sort through and question, deconstruct, the events and the source materials from the past and thus participate in the process of writing history and of understanding how the past informs the present, despite our ultimate inability to recapture the past itself.

BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES FOR WU’S LIFE IN HIS TIMES If the source materials for the first works that brought historical attention to Wu in the 1960s and early 1970s were constructed and invented political investigation reports and Cultural Revolution polemics fed into the PRC Party controlled newspapers, what then were the sources that would furnish the basis for a biographical narrative that situated the man as he had lived in the context of his times? Obviously, all biographies are shaped distinctively by the sources the biographer uses to create the narrative of the life. For Wu Han the narrative of his life could not be written as though he dangled as an intellect in midair, disconnected from real life circumstances of family, friends, politics, and society. Nor could his works, researched and written in particular time and space, be dealt with as separated from the circumstances in which they were written. The need was to search out relevant sources beyond his own writings that would make it possible to find and understand the contextual issues of concern in his life that motivated him to learn and be involved in the contemporary environment. As I began to seek out materials that would lead me into Wu’s world and beyond his own abundant writings, essays by authors in the PRC world recalling and eulogizing colleagues and associates began to appear as the political climate opened significantly in the 1980s. This was the opening that

10

Introduction

followed the Third Enlarged Central Committee Plenary Session of the Eleventh Congress of the Communist Party in 1978, the meeting that opened the way to rehabilitation and recovery from the ten years of political mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. The outpouring of articles and collections, spurred by the need to commemorate, to reminisce and relive, and to set straight the record about wronged friends, colleagues, and family members offered an abundance of rich, often subjective sources. However, it seemed that to be limited to written texts separated from the cultural and physical site of the subject’s life without talking with people who had known him and people who had experienced the same events, would make it difficult to understand and savor the scope of his life and the circumstances of the stream if events in which he lived and coped. When I began the project in the mid-1980s fortunately there were still many people alive who had known Wu Han, even from his youth. These included those such as Qian Jiaju, Fei Xiaotong, Yang Jiang, Qian Zhongshu, Rong Zhaozu, and Zhang Youyu, among many others, as well as many family members, to mention only a few of the people interviewed. By gathering oral material in interviews, many of the particulars and the nexus of conflicting themes and strains of ideas and human relationships in these decades could be unearthed to flesh out the biographical narrative. Through many oral history interviews with people who had known him in diverse circumstances, and through being allowed to glimpse some in the networks that had composed the circumstantial matrix in which he had lived, I was able to become familiar with the fabric of his life. In the course of this research, I conducted about 120 interviews of more than 80 individuals and several groups.26 The interview sites were in Beijing and in Kunming, Chengdu, Anyang, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Jinhua, and Yiwu County in Zhejiang Province, in Hong Kong, and at several locations in the United States. I was able to visit Wu’s home village of Kuzhutang in central Zhejiang twice, where I walked in the muddy lanes, visited his childhood home and those of his relatives, and talked with villagers who had known him, absorbing the little-changed atmosphere of the place where he had grown up. The buildings of the middle school he attended in Jinhua were still open to visit. Among the people I spoke with were fellow villagers many of whom were extended family members who had known him and his nuclear family. There were even two of his childhood playmates as well as some who had been interrogated in the Cultural Revolution investigations of him. I was able to travel to Yunnan Province in southwestern China and visit the homes where he and Yuan Zhen had lived in Kunming and the countryside outside the city, to walk through the Yunnan University campus and visit the remaining Southwest Associated University buildings. In Beijing I found the house they had lived in on the Qinghua University campus. I walked through his courtyard house on Beichang Street in central Beijing just west of the Imperial Palace where he and his family lived while

Introduction

11

he was vice mayor. It was here where his niece last visited him during the first days of the attack in 1965. Among my interviewees were close family members, schoolmates and college friends, superiors, friends from different periods of his life, academic colleagues, former students, bureaucratic colleagues, fellow Democratic League members and political activists, and Communist Party comrades and high level party officials.

THEMES IN WU HAN’S LIFE IN HIS TIMES In reality Wu Han’s life, from before May Fourth to the Cultural Revolution, spanned one of the most seminal periods in China’s history. Searching out Wu’s place in the flow of events in the course of the changing decades of the twentieth century has yielded a sense of the multiple dimensions and contradictions of life in China in the post–May Fourth decades of the 1920s and 1930s and in the years of war of the late 1930s and 1940s that led to the founding and opening years of the PRC in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the themes that run through Wu’s life narrative are the historical, the political, and the theme of tension. The historical theme played out in Wu’s commitment to history as fact and as a mode of thought and his consciousness of the cultural past and present of China’s civilization and identity. Specifically, in Wu Han’s life and thought it was manifested in his practice of history, in his values, and as a scholar and teacher. The political theme was manifest in the complex reciprocal relation of intellectuals and the state, both in Wu’s life and for the broad society. On one side was the idealized moral role of intellectuals as autonomous elite leaders in the society and the polity and on the other the parallel relation of the state to the intelligentsia as individuals and as a group. This two-sided relationship is manifested even today in the critical question of the nature of the relationship of past and present thought and values to the changing nature of the state and the political culture of China. It was present in the role of intellectuals in the political culture of the United Front during the 1940s and in the issue of their role within the redefining Front in the changing polity of the late 1940s and early 1950s as Communist Party power grew to complete control of the political arena. Now, it is present in contemporary China as intellectuals continue to encourage and seek space for independent, free expression in civil society. The theme of tension between autonomous individual life and responsibility to the group in the form of family, profession, party, and nation runs through his life from the early years until his death in prison. This conflict—manifested in tension between the conflicting premises of individual and society—appeared in many ways in Wu’s lifetime, for instance tension between Wu’s responsibility to his family on the one hand and on

12

Introduction

the other hand pursuit of his profession and devotion to the woman he loved; it appeared in tension between his lifelong commitment to independent historical scholarship and his later emerging political commitment. It was ultimately manifested in conflict between his loyalty to the historical Chinese civil society and loyalty to the Communist nation-state. To write the biography of Wu Han, I have drawn on an abundance of sources that have led me into the complexity and contradictions in the life of a living person in the context of his immediate times. He was not in any way a simple intellectual fulfilling an abstract, stereotyped role. I hope the reader will come away from reading the book with a sense of this complex man in the changing circumstances of his times, a person who studied China’s past, who lived intensely committed to the values he had developed in the course of his own life. A man who unwittingly became a living figure in history himself, enmeshed in world-shaking political controversy in that history.

NOTES 1. The last chapter of the biography tells of the days and months that followed in Wu’s life. These were the opening days of the wrenching course in the national scene that led to Mao’s proclamation of the Cultural Revolution. 2. This trendsetting book, Wenge diyi yuanan: Sanjia cun wenziyu shimo [The First Case of Injustice in the Cultural Revolution: The Whole Story of the Three Family Village Literary Inquisition], by Su Shuangbi was published in 2000. For discussions of this changing political situation in civil society see the symposium on The Nature of Chinese Politics Today in China Journal 45 (January 2001). 3. “Top Advisor Calls for Major CCP Reform,” in China Morning Post, 13 March 2001, China News Digest. 4. Zhang Liang (2001). 5. This article attacking Wu was: Yao Wenyuan, “Ping xin bian lishi ju ‘Hai rui baguan’” [Criticism of the new historical play “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office”] Beijing ribao, 29 November 1965; Jiefang jun bao (Beijing), 29 November 1965; Renmin ribao (Beijing), 30 November 1965; originally published in Shanghai Wenhui bao, 10 November 1965. 6. Interview 160. 7. His daughter, Wu Xiaoyan, was imprisoned in 1976, seven years after his death and committed suicide soon after on 23 September. Interviews 132 and 146. 8. See Cheek (1997). 9. See Pusey (1969); Kwok (1972); Ansley (1971); Goldman (1981); Li Youning (1973). Fisher (1979) takes a balanced position based on later sources, not influenced by Cultural Revolution generated material. 10. For the play, Wu Han, “Hai Rui baguan” (1961). For the attack on Wu, Yao (1965). At a meeting in Hangzhou, 20–22 December 1965, Mao told other party members that Yao Wenyuan’s essay, although good, had not hit the vital spot about Wu Han, which was the crucial point that the dismissal of the official (baguan) in the play stood allegorically for the dismissal of Peng Dehuai. Lieberthal and Dickson (1989),

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174–75, lists sources for this conversation of Mao’s at the Hangzhou conference. For these events see also Gao and Yan (1986), 11. 11. An example of these articles published in the PRC: Zhejiang ribao, 2, 18, 21 May 1966 and Renmin ribao, 20, 22 May, 1966. The methods used in the investigations were described to this author by people in Wu’s village in Interview 60. 12. On myth and history see Veyne (1988); McNeill (1986), 1–10. 13. For the initial development of this idea see Mazur, “Studying Wu Han” (1990a). 14. This appears in the chronicle written on the spot by Kang Sheng, 1965.9 to 1966.5—The Great Events of the Struggle of the Two Lines on the Cultural Battle Line, quoted in Su Shuangbi (1997), 28–37. See also Gao and Yan (1986), 3–17. 15. For example: Moody (1977); Goldman (1981); Lin Chen (1987); Wagner (1989). 16. For an example from Taiwan see: Chen Mushan, “Zhonggong dui Ming shi zhuanjia Wu Han pidou” [The Communist Party’s denunciation of the Ming historian, Wu Han], 55–62. A suggestion of the influence of this version of the myth is reflected in John Israel’s forward to Hamrin and Cheek (1986). 17. Su Shuangbi (1984) was very interested in creating Wu Han as the model fitting the requirements of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but the same author in a new version of the biography, augmented with new material and written in a much freer environment writes of a three-dimensional person who does not fit any particular model. The new version by the same title is Wu Han zhuan, published in 1998. 18. Television film series, Wu Han, in eleven parts, jointly produced by Beijing Minzhu tongmeng shiwei, Beijing dianshi meishu zhongxin, and Beijing dianshitai (Beijing Municipal Committee of the Democratic League, Beijing Television Art Center, and Television Beijing) directed by Lin Zifeng, written by Song Yan and Xu Yan. The league people tried hard to have it aired in a popular time slot. 19. Beijing Daily, 11 October 1989. 20. “Revolutionary Heroes” (1989). 21. Cohen (1997), 213, discusses the demythologizing process and compares history writing and mythologizing. See Paul Veyne’s work on myths also: Veyne (1988). 22. Veyne (1988), 37. 23. Veyne (1988), 51. 24. Wu Han, “Taiping tianguo shi congkao xu” [preface to Research Notes on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom], in Luo Ergang (1943). 25. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi” [Li Jihuang translation of Takakuwa Komakichi A History of Chinese Culture] (1934), 435. 26. A list of people interviewed is appended.

1

R A “Rustic” Talent Awakens to His Times

If the son doesn’t study, this is not proper If the youth doesn’t study, what will he be when he is old? When the jade is not carved, it cannot become an implement When a man does not study, he will not know righteousness. —from Three Character Classic

I

n the early 1960s Wu Han wrote in a widely read newspaper column that the primer, the Three Character Classic “is a good book. It’s a pity for the last several decades no one has paid attention to it.”1 In his criticism of Wu in May 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong attacked Wu’s essay deploring the neglect of the ancient primer that taught social values as it was used to teach children to read. Committed to the importance of literacy and education, Wu had written: “This good book—was the reading material for popularized knowledge in olden times.”2 To emphasize he had quoted the classic: When education is neglected, one’s nature will change When the Way is taught, study it so that it will be transmitted to you.3

At the same time he was advocating the ancient primer for teaching knowledge and values, as vice mayor of Beijing, he was administering educational reform policy and, as historian, encouraging historical writing for popular audiences. He called the Three Character Classic a “pocket encyclopedia” or a “miniature general history” for ordinary readers.4 Wu knew the Classic by heart, having learned it at his father’s knee as a very young boy. Many times 15

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he had stood beside his father to recite lines from the primer as a village lad in Bitter Bamboo Pond Village (Kuzhutang). By the time Wu graduated from Qinghua National University in Beiping5 in 1934, at twenty-five already widely respected as a historian, he had been abruptly plunged into life as head of his family of mother, two sisters, and brother by his father’s death. Although as a young historian he was well beyond the swirling political currents of Republican China, nonetheless he was loyally conscious of his country. More immediate in his life, was the beginning of a love relationship with a young woman student. Yuan Zhen was one of the first women admitted to Qinghua. Among the students she was well known and liked for her beauty and her radical political convictions. Like many of the intelligentsia of his generation born just after the turn of the century Wu’s family was rural gentry, in his case a poor rural elite family in central Zhejiang. This heritage shaped his environment and opportunities and provided the background for his ideas as a historian.

BORN INTO THE WORLD OF VILLAGE AND FAMILY Life began for Wu Chunhan 11 August 1909, in a small village in Zhejiang, a coastal and uplands province south of the Yangtze River and Shanghai. The houses of Bitter Bamboo Pond crowd together today, as they have for hundreds of years, in a tight knot amid flat paddy fields and low-lying hills. The village, on the far western edge of Yiwu County, lies about a mile off the road connecting the county town of Yiwu to the prefectural seat of Jinhua. A muddy lane from the small market town of Wudian on the main road winds south through the fields across a narrow stone bridge and passes around a grass-covered, rocky hill to reach the village. At the top of the hill stands a small pavilion with a monument beside it to commemorate the deaths of the local men who lost their lives in guerrilla fighting against raiding Japanese troops in 1944. Almost every surname inscribed on the monument is Wu. Around the hill the road continues to the edge of the cluster of white, two storied houses. Even today almost all of the families who live here are of the Wu clan. Through narrow alleys and lanes crowded on either side by white walls within hand’s reach, villagers move about their daily life. At the ends of the lanes, in the paddy fields beyond, people squat and bend tending the crops. The hum of children studying their lessons behind the open windows of the elementary school and the low voices of villagers busily at work on home industry manufacturing fills the air. In the center of the village stands the building that used to be the Wu clan temple where the ancestral tablets were arranged. During the spring festival when Chunhan was a small boy people went there every morning to pay their respect to the ancestors.

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The village school was also in the temple. In later years, as a young village teacher himself Wu Chunhan taught in the school in the temple. In the village in 1909 a young woman, Jiang Sanying, daughter of a poor peasant, bore her eldest son, to be named Chunhan. The child’s father, Wu Binyu, was a young county scholar and teacher, the youngest of five brothers and the only literate son of a hardworking peasant farmer. Life was not easy for the village people in Wu’s childhood. Because the land was prone to water logging their crops often failed. The tax burden was heavy. Signs of devastation still remained from more than forty years before when the region was fought over in battles between Li Shixian, a Taiping king with headquarters in Jinhua and the Qing armies sent to suppress the Taiping Rebellion.6 Yiwu County with its gently rolling hills and flatlands mixed with mountainous areas was linked with Jinhua, the prefectural capital some thirty miles to the southwest, principally by river transport. Even though Yiwu lay less than a hundred miles south of the provincial capital Hangzhou, the railroad did not come into the area until 1931 when the Jiangsu-Hangzhou line was completed. Although proud of its ancient history dating back to the Song dynasty, the county had not benefited from the thriving late Qing commerce of the Yangtze Delta to the north. Even in the first decades of the twentieth century, located in a remote part of the “inner periphery” of the Lower Yangtze region beyond the core, Yiwu County remained a backwater. Wu’s family village of Kuzhutang lay at the county border, not quite halfway between Yiwu City and Jinhua City, too far for all but the hardiest to walk to either county town and back in a day. Thus it was distant from even its own county town where the local gentry met to talk in the teahouses and conduct their affairs. In the first years of the twentieth century this remote backwater was touched very little by the spreading waves of modern thought and economic activity that stirred China’s urban areas.

Figure 1.1. Wu family village of Kuzhutang, Zhejiang Province

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Chapter 1

FATHER: FROM COMMONER TO GENTRY Wu Han’s father, the youngest son of a peasant and firecracker manufacturer, had set out in the last years of the Qing period to take the first step up the ladder of the examination-appointment system determined to enter the world of the rural gentry. But no sooner had he passed the lowest examination than the whole examination system was abolished and with it the main traditional avenue of social mobility. With neither an influential and wealthy clan nor connections to the upper elite to open the way to the regional and provincial level of politics, Wu Binyu had nothing to rely on but his own efforts and whatever local influence he could muster.7 At the time, as reforms in the final years of the Qing led to the institutionalization of local self-government, many of the county gentry in Zhejiang found positions in the local and regional bureaus and offices that were being organized. When Chunhan was only two years old, after the 1911 Revolution, his father, Wu Binyu, went to study at the new Zhejiang Police Academy at Hangzhou, one of the first established for police training in China. His wife was left in the village to struggle by on the meager income from the land left after he paid his expenses at the academy. Those were difficult years for Chunhan’s mother.8 In the transition from the Qing dynastic government, as part of the Republican government’s new pattern for a limited form of self-government, county police bureaus manned by local elites were set up under the county magistrates to administer police work. After graduation from the police academy Wu Binyu was appointed in succession to several of these submagistrate posts in four different rural counties in Zhejiang over the years from 1912 to 1921.9 Local disorder was pandemic in Zhejiang as throughout China in this time of political disintegration. Some of these areas he served in were remote, poor, bandit-infested counties. Under the county magistrate, it was his responsibility as submagistrate to see that order was maintained in his jurisdiction, to enforce government regulations, and even to supervise the collection of taxes. His duties included interrogation, extraction of confessions through torture, report writing, and making legal judgments. Over the next ten years the family accompanied Wu Binyu to some of his posts. But among Yiwu gentry Wu Binyu was only a “small potato.” He had no long-term, solid basis at the county level as a member of a powerful local lineage. His brothers were simple commoners, his wife of peasant stock. He had neither served in his own county as an official under Qing rule, nor during the self-government stage. Nor were his landholdings in the county large. What local power he achieved was solely the result of his own selfmade informal status and influence within the Yiwu border area. According to Wu Binyu’s later words to his children, as a Confucian scholar his submagistrate official control duties were the antithesis of what he thought his role in life should be. Furthermore, in the 1920s many of the

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police assistants he supervised had developed a reputation for corruption because of the abuses and extortion many practiced.10 To this man whose life ambition had been shaped to the scholar’s mold the role of a lowly police official was filled with unpleasant tension and even humiliation. Then in 1921 an unexpected catastrophe fell on him. When his son Chunhan was twelve, Wu Binyu was suddenly dismissed from his post because he had refused to accept a bribe from a high official after punishing the official’s son for some offense he was caught in. Thus ended Wu Binyu’s formal public career. In the rapid political changes in Zhejiang, lacking influence beyond his own locale, he was unable to survive in the political currents of the militarist provincial government.11 During his career as an official Wu Binyu had purchased five or six acres of good land, a substantial landholding for a local gentryman. After returning to the village, he built a large two-storied house with an open courtyard and open balconies onto the courtyard, located across the lane from their little old house that had burned. Since his becoming an official, the family had enjoyed plenty to eat and clothes to wear. He was able to buy books for his library and now had time to read and study history, time for calligraphy and to chat with friends who came to the house. Although this rural gentryman hadn’t mastered all the nuances of the role of a Republican control official and his brothers living in the village were still farmers, he was very much at home with the Confucian way of maintaining order in village society through elite reputation and mediation. Chunhan’s father became famous in the surrounding area as a mediator, sought after, in the words of a villager, as a “fair, just, and impartial” Confucian scholar who dealt out solutions and judgments for the disputes and problems of his fellow villagers. But there was another, darker aspect to Wu Binyu’s life that emerged as Chunhan grew older. The loss of his father’s post, the only formal position of any real stature which he had ever held, and one he had worked hard to achieve, left a lasting effect on him that became more evident as he grew older. While he had been a police magistrate a great deal was going on in Zhejiang politics. In the Jinhua prefectural area where Yiwu County was located, the prefectural elite had joined a coalition of elites to represent the interests of the peripheral areas in Zhejiang. Isolated from the shifts in regional elite power in the province, Wu Binyu was left behind in the backwater border area unable to develop connections or resources for improving his or his family’s situation.12

MOTHER: HARDWORKING PEASANT Wu Chunhan’s mother, Jiang Sanying, was the only child of a poor landless fisherman. Almost illiterate, she was a hardworking farm woman who, even

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Chapter 1

in the later years of life after her son had become a nationally famous university professor, worked in her fields when necessity demanded. She was famous throughout the area as a fine weaver, the traditional mark of a virtuous peasant woman. With vivid recollections of her carefulness with money and fussiness about housekeeping, villagers told of how people were sometimes afraid to go to the house because she was so particular. She would call out as someone entered the door from the muddy alley, “keep the house dry, watch your feet.” When the rent came due on the acre and a half of land a village family rented from the Wu family, Wu’s mother always insisted they pay every bit even though they might be short a small amount. Jiang Sanying bore Wu Binyu ten children, five sons and five daughters, but only two sons and two daughters lived into adulthood. Chunhan, born in 1909, was the eldest living son. The next child to live was Chunxi, a son, born in 1914. Puyue was the oldest daughter born in 1917 when her father was a police magistrate in Shipu, on the coast of Zhejiang. A little sister, Puxing, seventeen years Chunhan’s junior, was born in 1926.13

VILLAGE BOYHOOD Wu Han’s early childhood, before his father became an official, was spent in the two small rooms of his family’s little whitewashed two-story house, built by some past generation of Wus. The house was sandwiched in, wall to wall with the other houses lining the narrow lane. These were the rooms which Binyu, known in the family as Lao Wu (Old Five) since he was the youngest of five brothers, had received in the family division. When Wu was born all of the five brothers still lived in Kuzhutang with their own families, some along the same narrow lane as Lao Wu’s family. In those years there were no more than 150 families in the village, almost all surnamed Wu. In the nineteenth century this branch of the Wu clan had moved to the village from the market town of Wudian less than a mile to the north. All but one of Chunhan’s uncles were farmers; one, Lao Er, was a small merchant. “It was a poor family, each son worked very hard” in the words of his cousin, Lao Er’s son.14 By the 1920s when Chunhan was in middle school in Jinhua, Wu Binyu’s household had become one of the families of highest social position in the village and their new house was thought to be the grandest house in the village. As a little boy Chunhan played often with his cousins from the other houses on the lane. Even at six he had liked to imagine himself as a teacher. His little friend Wu Liancheng took the part of his pupil who he carefully coached in writing characters. But play and reality merged—for it actually was from his playmate Chunhan that Liancheng, two years older, learned to write. Since there was little paper for the boys to use they often carried their writing brushes and ink to the courtyard to draw the characters on the

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sides of the farm baskets piled there. Chunhan taught his friend what his father had taught him, beginning with the ancient primer, the Three Character Classic. Years later when he wrote his essays in the newspaper column Notes from a Three Family Village he drew on those memories from his early childhood. He and his friend studied some of the other classics his father taught him like the Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and the Mencius.15 When his father was away from the village Chunhan’s mother was nearby, watching the boys while she spun yarn. When they weren’t in the courtyard playing at being young scholars they often went off with Wu’s brother and sister to fish and play in a boat on the village pond.16 When his father was at home local scholars and friends came often to see him. Chunhan would play quietly in the dirt of the courtyard at the open side of the main room, listening while the men ate and talked around the table. His mother often prepared a meal for the guests. As she carried the dishes to the table she would murmur politely that she had nothing to serve, as a good wife should. One evening while enjoying the food and talk, one of the guests asked Wu Binyu about his son playing near the table. Wu called Chunhan over and the guests talked with the little boy. Having heard their friend tell about teaching his son to write poems and of their composing poetry together, the guests asked the small boy if he would compose a poem for them. Barely able to see over the edge of the table, Chunhan stood on tiptoe and looked around the table at the food and the famous wine from far away Xinghua. Mindful of the contradictions in his mother’s polite talk about the delicious dishes she had so carefully prepared for the meal and his father’s love of the fine local wine from nearby Jinhua, he also thought of his own preference for playing with his village cousins whose fathers worked the fields. With a little smile he mischievously spoke the lines of poetry as they formed in his head: On the table are no good dishes, but the market has good things. When drinking there is no need to drink Xinghua village wine. Everyone says studying books is good, But I say the farmer is better than I.17

TIME FOR SCHOOL AT NOURISHING VIRTUE When his small son reached seven in 1916, the time to begin formal education, Wu Binyu carefully chose a primary school of fine reputation a few miles from the village. Fu Village Nourishing Virtue County Primary School had been founded by a wealthy landlord, Fu Yanlong, to help the local people and to enhance his reputation. The school’s founder invited a man of uncommon vision and concern for people to be the head teacher. This man, Yang Zhibing, a gentryman and xiucai from the local market town,

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was Chunhan’s father friend. Wu Binyu wanted the best possible education for his son. Admiring Yang’s reputation as a scholar and teacher Chunhan’s father decided that his emphasis on history and literature was the education he wanted for his son. There were some three hundred students at the school, both boys and girls, from the six counties in Jinhua Prefecture. Boys and girls attending classes together was very unusual and modern in the 1910s and 1920s. These three hundred students, selected by examination, were taught history, mathematics, geography, Chinese language, and literature by ten teachers. Later, Wu Han’s younger brother Chunxi and older little sister Puyue also studied at the school. When Chunhan started his father asked Yang Zhibing to watch over his son and supervise his behavior and studies since his duties as a police magistrate took him away from home for long periods of time.18 The school was only a short walk beyond the village of Fantianjiang where his mother’s family lived, so when he started school he was already familiar with the path from his house. He had often visited his grandmother and if he stayed overnight when he visited her, he slept in the Jiang family home with his cousin, Jiang Haicheng (later famous as the poet, Ai Qing), who also was a student at Nourishing Virtue School.19 Since it was a boarding school, Chunhan generally stayed at the school during the week and returned the two miles to his own village on Saturday afternoon for the one-day holiday each week. The social position and income of an official such as Wu Binyu would ordinarily have ensured that his small son would ride a horse or be carried in a sedan chair to school and back each week, but his father would not give him the money to pay the cost. Instead, for moral training he gave his son a bamboo carrying pole for his bundles and sandals to teach him to work hard and endure hardship, not to grow accustomed to a soft life. The adults in the Yiwu village families liked talking about local history. They often told the children treasured stories about the past, especially stories of the heroes Luo Binwang, Zong Zi, and Qi Jiguang.20 In the Yiwu market town teahouses the favorite storyteller’s tales were about Zong Zi, famous for resisting the Jin foreign invaders. These long stories were told in installments over many days in the chanting style of the quyi tales, richly embroidered by the storyteller. In Wudian village near their village was a teahouse where the children often stood outside looking in the open windows and doors to hear the storyteller inside, especially in the summer. A wandering, blind storyteller often came to the teahouses in this part of Yiwu County to chant the tales of the past heroes.21 These stories nurtured a vivid awareness of history in the listeners as storytellers had for centuries. Historically considered part of Eastern Zhejiang known as Zhedong, Yiwu and Jinhua had long been famous as part of the Zhedong cradle of historians and literati and the storytellers certainly helped to reinforce this tradition.22

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FATHER AND SON From Chunhan’s early childhood his father had constantly stressed that he must study. His expectations for his son were high. A stern man, the father was strict with all of the four children in the family but especially with Chunhan. As the eldest son, he was expected to be the leader and eventually the family head. The boy both loved and feared his father; sometimes one, sometimes the other emotion dominated. From earliest childhood he was taught to kneel in front of his father when he was being instructed or reciting his lessons, as the sons of stern scholars had for centuries. Wu Binyu was much sterner than other fathers in the neighborhood. As the boy grew and entered primary school, when his father was home on leave he was beaten for the slightest fault. Wishing his son to bring him face, the father would not let even the smallest slip in behavior pass, nor any mistake in his studies, yet he was enormously proud of his little son’s achievements.23 The young boy had little chance to learn about modern thought from his Confucian father who knew little about modern life, isolated as he was from progressive currents of reform thought by the climate of the local politics in which he was immersed. His reading was in classical literature and history; he wrote very little other than composing poems. When Chunhan was in elementary school he started to read his father’s books, among them Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi). At school his teacher, Yang Zhibing, encouraged him to read the classics and especially historical literature, lending him books from his own library. A lasting bond developed between student and teacher that reached far beyond Chunhan’s five years at the Nourishing Virtue School. Later, as a university student, far away in Beiping, Chunhan corresponded with his teacher Yang back in Yiwu.24 Chunhan read constantly. In his father’s library was a set of the Yu pi tong jian from the Qianlong period which Wu Binyu had inherited from previous generations simply because he was the only son in his generation who could read. In the Wu family this was a very special possession; when he was eleven his father had set Chunhan to study this history.25 When Chunhan could not find the books he wanted in his father’s limited collection he would walk to his father’s friends homes to ask if he could borrow their books. Once someone would not allow him to take a rare book away so he stood outside the gate until he was finished reading, then handed it back through the gate and went home. Sometimes even such a bookworm gave his parents reason to worry. There were times when he didn’t study, in class occasionally his thoughts wandered off to daydream. One spring festival he went gambling with other village children with the New Year gift money they had been given and lost his money. For this, he received a beating. His parents did not want

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him to act like ordinary boys. He was expected to study hard, not waste time playing games with village boys. Frustrated with his own life as a minor official, Wu Han’s father told his children he wanted them to be scholars, not officials. To him the only possibilities for advancement were these two traditional goals of the upwardly mobile country gentry. This aspiration for his son weighed heavily on his mind because he so detested the years he had spent as an official. He constantly held out to Chunhan the goal of the scholar. The name of his study, “Wu xuan,” meaning “the study of the strong and upright” or “my study,” was derived from the characters wu meaning the wutong tree, a very beautiful, straight, and strong tree which implies the idea of moral and upright, and xuan meaning studio or study. After the manner of past scholars his study had thread bound books on history and literature arranged in a glassed bookcase reaching from floor to ceiling. He loved these books and carefully introduced his son to them. Although a landowner of peasant blood, he had no knowledge or interest in cultivating the land himself and did not expect his children to take any responsibility for tilling the soil. Yet despite his emphasis on the scholarly life his hopes for his son lacked a vision of the world that modern education might open to him. In the reality of the 1910s and 1920s, Wu Han’s father’s own world had first been shaken by the collapse of the official examination/bureaucratic appointment system and then later by the loss of his official police post. On the surface, when he returned to live in the village, he seemed to thrive as one of the local gentry. Sedan chairs often arrived at his door, local people curried favor with him to insure help with their relationships with the police and ultimately the county magistrate. The more he was sought after the more his informal position of high respect in the area was reinforced and the further his reputation spread beyond the village. Nonetheless, in spite of his status locally, difficulties began to plague Chunhan’s father. When he was upset he often spent the whole day drinking. At first he tried to supervise the hired laborer farming his land but, not knowing anything about agriculture he wasn’t successful. After this he rented the land to others who knew how to farm. After returning home he had decided to put the rest of his savings into a business rather than buy more land. A friend joined with him in partnership to open a general store in the nearby market town of Wudian. But since he had no idea about running a business, the store didn’t do well. When things began to get rougher he took to smoking opium and, as time went on, his behavior changed. His talk of the corruption and disorder in public life became bitter and he became more dispirited.26

MIDDLE SCHOOL AND FRIENDSHIP IN JINHUA After five years at Yang Zhibing’s primary school the young Wu finished in July 1921 and took the entrance examination for the provincial middle

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school in Jinhua City. Number Seven Provincial Middle School, commonly referred to as Diqi zhong (Number Seven Middle) was one of only seven key secondary schools in the whole province.27 Middle school in Jinhua was a big step away from the village world of family, cousins, and Nourishing Virtue Primary School. Chunhan lived at the school and seldom returned home. On almost the first day he met another boy who would become a lifelong friend. The two immediately found a common bond: they were both born in August 1909, making them the two youngest in their class. This new friend Qian Jiaju was from neighboring Wuyi County in Jinhua Prefecture. Qian would later become a well-known liberal democratic intellectual and economist in the 1940s and 1950s and then much later took an active role in the post-Mao reforms and the events of 1989 in Beijing. At school the two boys’ friendship flourished immediately as though they had always been friends; in no time they had sealed their bond of friendship with the pledge of sworn brothers. The boys were together constantly until Qian was forced to transfer to the Jinhua Normal School because he had no way to pay the Diqi zhong tuition.28 The Number Seven Provincial Middle School was in the old part of Jinhua city on the bluff high above the Wu River that ran through the town. The school was steeped in the flavor of history as it occupied a compound of historic buildings from past eras, including some very large halls of traditional timber frame construction supporting graceful curved tile roofs with great overhanging eaves. These halls had been the palace of the Taipings where several hundred people gathered for war councils when Li Xiucheng and his younger brother Li Shixian occupied central Zhejiang during the Taiping Rebellion in 1861–1865. Just beside the Taiping palaces, in the same compound the school occupied was a courtyard of buildings constructed in the Five Dynasties period a thousand years earlier. And at the edge of the large compound on the brink of the bluff overlooking the river stood the even older Eight Songs Pavilion, built in the Southern and Northern Dynasties (A.D. 420–581) period. It was in this pavilion that later in the Southern Song in the twelfth century the woman poet Li Qingzhao stopped to rest and compose poetry on her flight to the south.29 These ancient buildings the students lived and studied in wrapped them with a sense of history and continuity with the past. In the 1920s, the middle school classes were in the Taiping Palace. The Taiping murals on the walls that have been cleaned and revealed today, were covered by layers of whitewash and completely hidden from view in the same way the Taiping rebels’ history had been obliterated and buried by the Qing rulers along with the rebels themselves. Even so when Wu attended the school, as a result of research on the palace by Fang Hao, the school director and a historian himself, the Taiping history of the building was known to the students.30 Many of the students knew the Taipings had been very strong throughout the area through the stories repeated again and again in their families, but they could only realize the monumental

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size of the building from the outside appearance because the inside was divided into classrooms. By 1910, the prefectural middle school, founded earlier on the basis of the Qing-era Academy during the Dowager Empress Cixi’s educational reforms, had become a provincial school. By the time Wu attended the school in the 1920s the curriculum of the modern middle school included German, French, English, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences, and physical education, as well as the traditional subjects. Chunhan chose the liberal arts curriculum.31 Chunhan and his friend Qian Jiaju had a great deal in common that set them apart from their fellow students and strengthened the bond between them. Both were very young and intelligent and came from poor villages in outlying counties. In Qian Jiaju’s words they both relied on their natural talents and “didn’t take listening in class conscientiously.” Since early childhood Wu had been considered a prodigy because he read very quickly and had a prodigious memory. However, he was weak in math because he didn’t like it and refused to study it seriously. The two friends began to read many books, often secretly taking them to their desks in the classroom and holding the textbook in such a way as to disguise their own books, even droning aloud in the singsong voice of the other students practicing their lessons aloud. To the teacher it looked like they were studying when in fact, they were reading novels on the sly.32 In Jinhua there was a bookstore where the boys could buy novels cheaply. The books were badly printed with small characters. Reading the print strained the eyes, but, undaunted, they eagerly read what could be bought. There were old favorites such as Shui hu (Water Margins), Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and Jingu qiguan (Wonders Old and New), and also books new to them like Fengshen yanyi (The Investiture of the Gods) and Yesou puyan (A Rustic’s Idle Talk). In 1921, reading the old novels openly was still not done casually in country towns like Jinhua. It was only just becoming possible to read novels without raising eyebrows since they had for so long been considered inappropriate, vulgar reading material by those who presumed to high culture. The bookstore in Jinhua was locally thought to be daring and “cosmopolitan” merely by selling the novels openly. The students who bought, read, and talked about the books were affirming their determination to know and use baihua, the commoner’s language, and to be a part of the Cultural Revolution that language reform was creating.33

A RUSTIC’S AWAKENING WITH BOOKS: BOSOM COMPANIONS AND RULER’S CONFIDANT Chunhan’s favorite was the scholar novel, A Rustic’s Idle Talk (Yesou puyan), which he read with great enthusiasm their first year in middle school, according to his friend Qian Jiaju, the hero is Wen Suchen. Qian recalled many

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years later it had been obvious Chunhan admired Wen very much. The two boys discussed the book at great length. Wen represented a sort of model for Chunhan, a model he wanted to emulate. To his friend, looking back on Wu’s life later, it seemed Wu had actually become like this man during his own life.34 The affinity between the young Wu and the hero of the novel can be sensed even in the first pages. Wen Suchen is asked as a very little boy by his father if it is his ambition in life to be rich and noble and the child answers that rather he likes to study. He is asked if he wants to be first in the examinations and his answer is that he wants to be a sage.35 In the essence of Wen Suchen’s relationships with women can be seen what years later actually became Wu Han’s relationship with the woman he loved, a love well known by many of Wu’s friends and associates. For Wen Suchen, though the hero’s relationship to the women in his life has a sexual dimension, the true basis of his relationships is bosom or spiritual companionship between the man and the women he loves. To signify the women Suchen loved the author uses the word zhiji, meaning bosom companion, an appellation that came to fit Wu Han and Yuan Zhen perfectly in later years. The women Wen seeks are all intellectually brilliant. In his relationships denial of sexual drive plays a key role. In the life of Chinese males this kind of relationship with women generally is related to the Daoist notion of selfdenial to insure conservation of male vitality. The novel’s hero finds supreme satisfaction in relationships with women based on respect and care for the women, not on physical gratification.36 For both of the young boys who were reading the novel the meaning of Wen Suchen as model seemed to come through the clearest in the central idea of morality. According to Keith McMahon “The central message of Yesou puyan is the call for the restoration of a pure Confucianism . . . [the author does this] by showing the decadence of society and chaos of government, and by creating a hero who uses both vast learning and great martial and moral strength to correct social wrongs.”37 Wu found strong reinforcement in the Yesou puyan for himself as an idealistic young scholar living in the turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, even a call for an amalgam of learning and moral action merged with a unique sort of male/female friendship that seemed suited to the crisis of the times, the need to save society and the nation. These ideas became very meaningful to both Wu Chunhan and Qian Jiaju in their lives in the coming years. Alone, the hero won out over all evil and all obstacles and attained the position of advisor and confidant to the emperor. In middle school what more powerful model could a young boy follow, striking out on his own in a world of rapid social and political change! After a year together Chunhan and his friend were separated when Qian Jiaju had to transfer to the Jinhua normal school for lack of money to pay the school tuition. Although they were separated Wu continued to buy books whenever he could find a little money. The boy’s reading interest began to extend to works like Liang Qichao’s collected works, the Yin bing shi wenji, which introduced him to reform thinking. He also began to buy and read

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seriously in the histories of dynastic China such as the Shiji, Qian Han shu, Hou Han shu, and San guo yanyi.38 In spite of his serious interest in history, during the next few years Chunhan’s casual attitude toward school and his love of drinking, mahjong, and gambling got him into considerable trouble. He often left the school surreptitiously, staying away late at night after the school gate was locked to drink and gamble. When he returned he had to climb over the wall to get back to his room. Sometimes he got caught. Each time he received a demerit, a xiaoguo (“small mistake”). Three “small mistakes” made a “big mistake.” According to the rules, after three “big mistakes” the student was dismissed from the school. Chunhan collected seventeen or eighteen “small mistakes” and would have been dismissed, but his father’s status in Yiwu County saved him. The principal relented and let him stay.39 Wu didn’t put on airs at school as some of the boys did, but dressed simply in a long light blue gown. His socks were always ragged and worn on both the bottom and the top, leading his classmates to think he was poor. He stayed at school the whole term, only returning the distance to Kuzhutang for winter vacation and the New Year and for spring vacation at the Qing Ming festival, but each summer he spent at home. 40 His father was extremely displeased with Chunhan’s notoriety at school making father-son relations more strained than ever. During these years at middle school, away from his father and his home, he began to develop a strong sense of self and to value his independence more and more. His differences with his father were not so much over fundamental values as about the tight, harsh control and demands his father made. Unfortunately, not compelled to work at what he wasn’t good at, he developed a habit of ignoring a subject if it was of no interest to him. In particular, his brilliance in history and literature, heavily valued by the culture and his teachers, helped to mask deficiencies in mathematics, which he hated. This was to become a serious handicap years later when he took the examinations for admittance to university.

FROM MAY FOURTH TO MAY THIRTIETH: SURROUNDED BY SPROUTS OF REVOLUTION Wu entered middle school just two years after the 1919 May Fourth Incident. At the school the influence of the May Fourth Movement was very important. The teachers had all been educated in classical Chinese; they wrote in it and taught it. The students at the school had spontaneously organized a May Fourth student association, called the Vernacular Literature Research Association (Baihua wen yanjiu hui) the year after the incident to reform the language they were using. They were deeply influenced by articles in New Youth (Xin qingnian) published originally in 1917 by Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. In 1920 these articles had been discussed with intense interest by the students

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before Wu Han entered. Excited by the articles and the spreading waves of the May Fourth Movement they started to use the vernacular (baihua) in their writing without waiting for their teachers’ encouragement (which they did get over time). As they began using baihua it became the fashion among the Number Seven students. Using it gave them a sense of student control and autonomy that carried over into the eruption of reform and revolutionary thinking that soon appeared in Jinhua and across the country.41 By the time Chunhan arrived at the school in the fall of 1921 the students were already completely committed to language reform and immersed in the reality of spontaneous student action. This brought forcefully into Wu’s life real possibilities for study and action. But although many of the students became involved in organizing in the school, while Chunhan was there he was mostly involved in studying and reading and his occasional transgressions and scrapes with school authorities. In the spring of 1925, the year he graduated, the May Thirtieth Incident erupted in Shanghai and the spreading ripples quickly reached Jinhua and the school.42 Earlier that year a Socialist Youth League (SYL) had been organized among the Jinhua students with Wu’s friend, Qian Jiaju, by then a student at the Jinhua Normal School, as one of the leaders. When the Shanghai incident erupted in May, an Association to Support the May Thirtieth Movement was immediately organized at Number Seven Middle School by the SYL.43 Two progressive Jinhua students, who had been studying at Shanghai University where Communist influence was surging, returned home after the university was closed in Shanghai 4 June by the International Settlement police. They brought news of the violence and tense situation in Shanghai and the spreading student anti-imperialist demonstrations and strikes. In Jinhua this created a sense of the immediacy of the national crisis that was beginning to expand outward from Shanghai over many parts of China.44 A large meeting was called in downtown Jinhua where the two students returning from Shanghai told the audience what had happened in the city to cause the eruption. Their stories of British and Japanese treatment of the Chinese incensed the listeners and anti-British and anti-Japanese feeling ran high. A demonstration and parade erupted spontaneously. The crowd broke into a tobacco shop selling British cigarettes, grabbed the cigarettes, and raced outside where they burned them in front of the large crowd. This agitation strengthened the student movement in Jinhua. Within a few months, an underground Chinese Communist Party (CCP) group was formally organized with about ten members, including middle school students, as an outgrowth of the May Thirtieth Association already organized. Wu’s school friend Qian again was a leader of both the Communist Party and Nationalist Party in Jinhua under the United Front policy. However, soon after graduating Qian left the Jinhua area for Beiping to study at Peking University.45 Despite all the student political agitation in Jinhua, Wu Chunhan remained on the sidelines. At graduation he was facing a new phase in his own life and having difficulty deciding on the course he wanted to follow.

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Qian Jiaju, whose father had deserted his mother, with far fewer family resources than Wu at this point, simply took off for Beijing to find some way to enter the University. Still with strong ties to his family and home, Wu was not as decisive and tried to work out a path that fitted him and his family. Despite the friction with his father, Chunhan had not yet come to the point in his attitude toward his family where he was ready to simply leave and manage without them. After all he was still the eldest son. In July 1925, after graduation from middle school Chunhan returned to Bitter Bamboo Pond Village to his family without a set plan but with hopes for the future.

DREAMS FOR THE FUTURE AND PRESENT REALITY The immediate problem on Chunhan’s mind was his desire to go to an advanced school to continue his studies. He even dreamed of going to Beijing to study at Peking or Qinghua University. He had heard that there were many famous scholars teaching at these schools.46 When he went home to the village during school holidays, he often walked to the house of his old teacher Yang Zhibing to talk with him and borrow books. Yang took special interest in Chunhan. He could never forget how astonished he had been one day in class as he explained in an essay, “Ji Shi Erlang wen,” by the Tang dynasty Confucian literatus, Han Yu (786–824) to the literature class. The students were all bent over their books (probably Guwen guanzhi), paying complete attention to the essay and listening carefully to him except for Chunhan who hadn’t even opened the book, but only sat watching Yang. Since it seemed that the boy was not paying attention, Yang thought to teach him a lesson. He demanded that Chunhan stand and repeat the contents of Han Yu’s essay to the class and waited to hear the boy struggle. Chunhan stood and without hesitation eloquently repeated the two thousand-character essay about loyalty with deep understanding, to his teacher’s utter astonishment.47 During the last year of middle school in Jinhua, Chunhan had talked about his hope of going away to an advanced school with Yang. Yang Zhibing was convinced that this talented student should have the chance for higher study but he knew that Wu Binyu was having a hard time financially. Nevertheless, Yang felt it would be a shame if Chunhan could not study further and repeatedly told the father that he must send his son away for more study.48 However, school fees for higher education were very costly for poor country gentry incomes. Even at Jinhua middle school the fees had been very high, each term costing twenty-eight silver yuan. A year’s tuition represented one-third of the family’s annual income from the land.49 Each term Chunhan entered school his father had to sell rice to provide the silver to pay the school fee. When even middle school at Jinhua had been difficult to manage, it seemed impossible to his father that he could find the money to pay the fees for a higher school.

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In these years it wasn’t only school fees that were difficult for Wu’s father. Taxes and surcharges on the taxes became heavier and heavier for all of the small and middle sized landowners because of the exactions of the Zhejiang warlord government. Sun Chuanfang, a Beiyang militarist from the north, had expanded his power in the lower Yangtze and drawn five provinces, including Zhejiang, into the United Provinces. In the more and more chaotic social and economic conditions it was the small local landlords like Wu Binyu who bore the tax burden.50 To make matters worse, his general store in the market town of Wudian was faced with debts because of poor management. In this difficult situation his eldest son’s education became dispensable. His father decided to keep him at home to assist the family because sending his son to a higher school was beyond the family means. Contributing to Binyu’s difficulty was his own conflict and distress over missed opportunity and lack of success in his own life. This embittered him and limited his vision for his son, perhaps even pushed him into his increased use of opium. His decision not to support or even encourage Chunhan’s desire for further modern education, did nothing to heal the growing rift between father and son. From the son’s point of view, all of the influences on him, including his father’s encouragement, had pushed him toward becoming a scholar up to that point. His family’s expectations of him as the eldest son, the family head of the next generation and the best hope to provide for the family’s welfare, weighed heavily on him. The father’s pride in his son’s talent and his deep interest in bookish learning, especially history, which he had transmitted to his son; the instruction and guidance of his teacher and mentor Yang Zhibing; the thrust of the language reform movement and May Fourth cultural reform that he had experienced in middle school in Jinhua, all of this pushed him toward an academic role in the new world taking shape. Chunhan’s own natural talent with words and ideas and his exceptional memory only reinforced these influences. There were many new factors in play in the world emerging in the postexamination system era in which young people were preparing to live. One of the most important was that the locus of economic and cultural activity had continued to shift away from rural areas and concentrate in urban areas, particularly in the coastal region. Young people who wanted a place among the emerging new “intellectuals” (zhishi fenzi) and who wanted to participate in contemporary discourse about Chinese culture and history recognized that they must go into the urban areas to a modern university. No longer was it possible to remain at home in the country and through private study and reading fulfill the motivation for value by becoming a learned scholar as had happened in the past and even in Chunhan’s father’s world. The urbanization trend was a very strong, unrelenting factor in the complex social and economic changes that affected the dynamics of the gentry-elite structure. In the evolution of the traditional scholar into the twentieth-century intellectual, the line separating Wu Binyu and his son and their generational worlds was abrupt.

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However, Wu’s father had little understanding of this. At Wu Binyu’s insistence, after graduation Chunhan took the village teacher’s job at the primary school in the village. This was the village school financed by the Wu clan for village children. Ironically, it was the same school that Wu Binyu had decided in better days was inadequate for his son. Nonetheless, now his father insisted Chunhan must teach there and, undoubtedly as a clan leader arranged the job for him. He was still very young, just sixteen. As the only teacher, he taught Chinese literature, arithmetic, general knowledge, singing and physical education. The only equipment was a few broken tables and chairs and a blackboard. For seating most of the children carried their own low stools from home each day. There were no library books, no newspapers or magazines, no physical education equipment. In fact, sometimes the school met in the great hall of the ancestral temple in the center of the village and sometimes in three smaller rooms across from the temple on the other side of the lumber and manure piled courtyard, depending on the whim of the local gentryman who was currently shouldering the duty of school principal. None of the rooms was really suitable for teaching, too dark and often noisy due to the chattering of villagers lounging in the temple courtyard outside the schoolroom door.51 Drawing on his own experience, Wu Han later wrote vividly about the frustrations of trying to teach in the school: of those invited to take the job most used it as a springboard, no way could they become stupid in this place. As soon as they had a relatively better situation they immediately left and were not reluctant to go. They could not speak of staying a school year, even a school term or a month. Because of this, the school often had the problem of no master, often many of the village children lost out on their studies.52

The only positive part for the young teacher was that once the farming busy season began the children all went off to help their parents in the fields and he could study what he wanted. Chunhan endured the village school in Kuzhutang for a half year and then went to teach at the Wudian higher elementary rural school nearby. The principal of the Wudian school was a young clansman named Wu Bizhang (better known as Wu Zhang in Yiwu County) and a close friend of Chunhan’s.53 There he lasted for only a term before refusing to continue.

RADICAL FRIENDS AND THE NORTHERN EXPEDITION After he had returned from Jinhua to live at home in the summer of 1925, his friends often came to the house to talk and drink. Chunhan loved to talk, especially over wine with his friends. While they drank, they com-

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Figure 1.2. Wu family home

posed poems, talked of the fighting in the South, and cursed Warlord Sun Chuanfang’s army.54 Following May Thirtieth and the demonstrations in Jinhua, nationalistic talk was on the lips of students everywhere. Wu and his friends didn’t stop at criticizing the warlord. They decided to do something themselves. Their plan was to go south to Guangzhou (Canton) and enter the Nationalist’s Whampoa Military Academy. For Wu Han it made a lot of sense. It would be a way out of his intolerable teaching job, a way to get away from his father and join in some of the exciting, important new action that was stirring in the country. Planned by Sun Yatsen and led by Chiang Kaishek, Whampoa was to provide the nucleus of the army that the Nationalist and Communist Parties were organizing under the United Front in Guangdong. People who lived in the Yiwu-Jinhua area were hearing a lot about the military thrusts pushing out of Guangdong.55 Throughout south and central China, the successes of the revolutionary army commanded by cadets from the Whampoa Military Academy were attracting secondary school graduates and university students who wanted to go to Canton to be trained as the new soldiers for the salvation of the nation.56 To join in opposing warlordism and to support the cause of national salvation offered a way out of Bitter Bamboo Pond Village to a restless, idealistic young man. But for all of his talk, the plan came to naught. Wu’s father would not permit it and without help he had no money for transportation.57 The next summer on 9 July 1926 the Guomindang (GMD) Northern Expedition was launched from Canton under the Nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. For some time the Nationalists had been planning an

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expedition north from Guangdong to the national capital at Beijing to wipe out the warlords and unify China under their control. After the success of the Expedition campaign in Hunan, from his new base at Nanchang to the southwest of Zhejiang, Chiang Kai-shek turned the armies against the warlord Sun Chuanfang. The eastern urban areas, especially Shanghai, were the targets, the coveted prize, but to get there the Northern Expedition army had to cross Zhejiang from the southwest to the north. Yiwu was directly on that route. For the Wu family and Bitter Bamboo Pond, the war came to them.58 A decisive battle in the Northern Expedition Zhejiang campaign was won at Jinhua by the Revolutionary Army in February 1927 after a bloody fight. From there a two-pronged attack was launched northward toward Hangzhou, the provincial capital, with Shanghai as the goal. The eastern arm of the attacking army moved right through Yiwu County on February 1, pursuing the warlord soldiers retreating on foot. That very evening triumphant revolutionary soldiers entered Yiwu City.59 In the outlying Wudian-Kuzhutang area, the Wu family and Chunhan and his friends heard of these events through the local word-of-mouth news network. The route the retreating warlord soldiers took lay only a few li to the south of the village. In Yiwu and Jinhua the local people welcomed the soldiers with water and food as the hated warlord army was driven out and exploded firecrackers to celebrate and encourage the victorious soldiers.60 Among Chunhan’s friends who came to the house during these months, Wu Zhang of Wudian, was older and more leftist. He had graduated from the same Jinhua school as Chunhan and then gone away to Xiamen on the coast in 1922. Too poor to pay for advanced schooling, he supported himself writing new poetry and essays under a penname, before he returned to teach in the Wudian Jiaoshan Higher Elementary School. At night he taught a class for illiterate adults. After the United Front Northern Expedition swept through Yiwu, Wu Zhang secretly joined the Communist Party in Yiwu even before there was a formal party branch in the county. A year later in 1928, he used the Wudian school he was teaching at as a front to carry out revolutionary education for the local youth. He also mobilized the peasants to organize a Peasants Association.61 By that time Chunhan had left the village. Another good friend of Chunhan’s, Jiang Shan, taught school in the local area and also joined the Communist Party a year later, in 1928. When Feng Xuefeng, the poet and also a Communist Party member, returned to his hometown of Yiwu in 1928 to take refuge after the Guomindang purge of Communists began, Jiang Shan was a member of the same Yiwu Communist Party branch with Feng.62 Jiang had been a friend of Chunhan’s at middle school and even before in elementary school. The two shared their interest in history and old texts. Later in Beiping when Wu was a university student and Jiang a refugee from the Nationalist secret police Wu sheltered him and enlisted him to help with his research by searching the book stalls for old books about the Zhejiang scholars.63

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It was with these friends that Chunhan talked of going off to Canton in the south to join the United Front Nationalist Army, in the months before the Northern Expedition surged northward. He knew his friends were sympathetic to the left-wing Guomindang’s cause and the revolutionary army activities. At that time radicalism among patriotic young people was a vague catchall of ideas about socialism mixed with bitter opposition to warlord domination. Often when they all sat around drinking and talking at Wu’s home, his father would listen and join in. He enjoyed the talk, sometimes contributing bitterly to their criticisms of the Zhejiang warlord government. But Binyu’s unceasing criticism of warlordism and corruption came from his Confucian morality and support of local and provincial leaders as a member of the local gentry rather than from active support for a modern ideological position or a vision of future social and political reforms in China. The ties between Chunhan and his drinking companions were strong. Their radicalism was fundamentally nationalism and patriotism, which he shared. But the choices he would make in the next years led him on a path that followed the pursuit of learning and only much later led to political activism. Although his Yiwu friends were on the verge of becoming revolutionaries, they only reached the point of activism in the Yiwu Communist Party in late 1927 and 1928, after the Guomindang had turned to the right, expelled the left, and Wu was gone from Yiwu. Although their paths separated in the next years, the friends continued their friendship and Chunhan helped both Jiang Shan and Wu Zhang later when they suffered political persecution by the Nationalist Party.64

ARRANGED MARRIAGE AND OPEN REBELLION The issue of marriage became the final straw that forced Chunhan to a decision. Long before, following traditional ideas of the family head’s responsibility, his father and mother had begun to plan for their eldest son’s marriage. As the eldest son, he was expected to carry the family line into the next generation and care for the parents in their old age, even carry on the responsibility for worship of the ancestors. It was expected he would take his father’s place in the village leadership and in the Wu clan. Alarmed at his son’s wild gambling and drinking habits at school, the father had decided that no time should be wasted in arranging for him to marry and settle down. An advantageous marriage for the eldest son would be an asset to the family and help to shore up the family position and future at a time when this was sorely needed. Wu Binyu had a good friend named Chen, a landlord considered to be rich and learned who had a marriageable daughter. This would be a good match for both families. The girl’s father and mother quickly approved the match without reservation and, unbeknownst to Chunhan, a relative performed the services of matchmaker to seal the arrangement.

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Since the families were close friends the father frequently came to the house with his daughter. The girl was not only very beautiful and intelligent, she had attended the modern Jinhua Girl’s Middle School. What better match could there be for Chunhan? They were the same age and had been in the same year at school. However, when she came to the house Chunhan, engrossed in his reading, generally had ignored her. This marriage was an important part of the father’s strategy for the family and for his son’s life, in that order. Since there was no money for tuition, his son would not be going on to study at a university. Chunhan would teach in a local elementary school, as the father had in his own youth. His son’s learning would bring grace and prestige to the whole family. The marriage would bring into the family a beautiful, intelligent daughter-in-law who would bring a fine dowry and a prestigious relationship with a well-to-do local gentry family. There would be children to carry on the Wu family name. His son would settle down and be a pillar in his xiao kang zhi jia (comfortably well-off small family) that was the ideal of traditional families, especially commoners. The critical flaw in the plan was that the son, never consulted, absolutely did not agree. How could he have, consumed as he was not only with the thought of going to university and but with the growing idea of making his own decisions about his life? Although arranged marriages were customary, when Chunhan discovered that his marriage had been arranged the fatherson relationship instantly became very tense. In the past, with the exception of his wild behavior at school, he had obeyed his father dutifully, in spite of his growing resentment over the way his father treated him. Now he bluntly refused the marriage, telling his father in sharp language “I want to pursue my studies. I don’t want a beautiful girl!”65 He refused to see the girl and participate in any occasions where she was present. The result was a complete impasse between son and father. Although in political affairs the two had never openly disagreed, the tension over Chunhan’s refusal of the arranged marriage rapidly festered and grew, blocking all communication. For the Wu family relations with the Chen family became difficult and embarrassing. The family’s welfare was at stake in this advantageous match. Unable to persuade his son to accept the marriage, one summer evening, a few months after the Northern Expedition had passed through Yiwu, the situation came to a head. One of the daughters remembered painfully years later the evening their father, with his head full of thoughts of a father’s authority and enraged at the loss of face from his son’s audacious disobedient disrespect of his commands, erupted in anger, beating Chunhan savagely, all the while shouting and cursing at him.66 Late that evening in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, it was discovered that Chunhan was nowhere to be found. Outside it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. There was water standing everywhere. The streams were full; even the paths were like rivers of water. The family

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searched everywhere for him in the dark. Late into the night the mother waited at the door for her son but still he had not returned. They slowly realized he was really gone. He had “left without saying good-by and was out of the family.”67 This act of running away—of leaving, in that time and place, was very unusual. He didn’t have a piece of cash, not even a cent with him. The next day the family waited anxiously for Chunhan to come back. The father was very quiet. He had nothing to say, only sitting with his head bowed. To the other family members it seemed that he clearly recognized he had gone too far. By this time they had begun to realize that Chunhan had probably run away but they couldn’t be sure because of the floodwater everywhere. Their mother stood weeping by the door, hoping and watching for her son to come home. After a few days, a letter came from Yiwu City, saying that “since there is no money for study, I am going to Tiantai now to become a monk.” There was a famous, learned monk at the Buddhist monastery of Tiantai with whom Chunhan wanted to study.68 The monastery was the seat of the ancient Tiantai Buddhist sect, to the east of Yiwu over the mountains perhaps seventy miles away on the top of Tiantai Mountain.

OFF TO SCHOOL IN HANGZHOU Before he could leave Yiwu City to go to Tiantai to study at the monastery he met some friends who told him about a school in Hangzhou that he might be able to enter and urged him to try. This was Zhijiang University in Hangzhou. They even gave him enough money for the trip to get started. He set off at once and as soon as reaching Hangzhou took the school’s examination with the result that he was admitted to the university preparatory school without delay.69 Zhijiang was the Chinese name of the college, which Westerners knew as Hangzhou Christian College, a small four-year college of higher learning, with a preparatory school attached to it, operated by the American Presbyterian Board of Missions. As soon as the family found out where Chunhan was, they sent food to Hangzhou for him. Unfortunately, tuition at all missionary schools in China, both secondary and university level, was very high in the 1920s, compared to public supported universities and middle schools. By 1927 Zhijiang tuition was about 50 yuan a year for the preparatory school and 100 yuan (Mexican silver dollars) for the college students. His mother, realizing Chunhan’s determination and knowing his ability, made a decision of her own to help him stay at the school. She sold her jewelry and sent the money to him for his fees. This jewelry was her dowry, which she had brought from her family when she was married. It represented the total wealth of her own family. Wu’s mother was very fond of her eldest son. To Jiang Sanying his education in modern schools was worth the sacrifice.70

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Wu Chunhan entered Zhijiang just at the time the school was dealing with the turmoil following the Northern Expedition. The winter of the previous school year, soon after marching through Yiwu, the National Revolutionary Army had taken the city of Hangzhou on 18 February, after a “night of terror” in which the retreating troops of warlord Sun Chuanfang burned and looted the city.71 This was little more than two weeks after the Nationalist army had passed through Yiwu. When the revolutionary army had reached Hangzhou, people welcomed the soldiers with open arms as in Jinhua-Yiwu. The Nationalist troops and organizers spread antiforeignism everywhere as a part of their educational propaganda. Since Zhijiang University was operated by foreign missionaries the teachers at the school had been frightened that it might be in danger after hearing of the earlier savage attack on westerners in Nanjing by the revolutionary soldiers. On 27 March 1927 the decision had been to evacuate the college. As soon as possible it reopened for the spring term but with a much reduced student body of 90 students out of the 247 registered in the fall.72 While the violence of the fighting and the antiforeignism alarmed the college teachers and some of the students and their families, it didn’t deter Chunhan from entering. Perhaps because he had few choices in his pursuit of education, and also certainly because he had already seen the armies going through Yiwu and been sympathetic to them, he did not shy away from the situation at Hangzhou and Zhijiang. For him Zhijiang University could not have been a more different experience than Tiantai Buddhist monastery he had briefly thought of searching out a short time before. High on the banks of the Qiantang River about six miles out of the city of Hangzhou near the Six Harmonies Pagoda, the main purpose of Zhijiang was to train Chinese Christian students for the clergy. Under normal conditions the student body was predominately Christian.73 The teachers in the college were mostly Americans with a few native Chinese teachers. In the preparatory school the classes were mainly in Chinese with English language classes to prepare students for the college. Almost no Chinese literature and Chinese history was taught.74 Apart from the threatening situation of the Northern Expedition, the foreign operated school had been going through a period of crisis in regard to its legal standing. There was a question of its registration with the Education Ministry of the new Nationalist government. Along with the idea of political unification, under the banner of nationalism that was the hallmark of the Northern Expedition, a major theme spread by the Expedition and United Front political workers among the people was the need to make all education China centered and Chinese controlled. The fact that some of the earliest modern education in China had been provided by missionary schools sponsored and operated by foreign religious groups for the purposes of spreading foreign religion, that is, Christianity, had long rankled many Chinese, even many people otherwise in favor of

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modernization and Western influence. A principal reason for their criticism was that these schools neglected the study of Chinese culture and literature and instead planned their curricula to imbue students with culture and religion from foreign lands. Even in the early 1920s a movement to “Restore Educational Rights” had begun to return control over Christian schools to the Chinese and to insure that the Christian schools were in accord with the national purposes of China. Following the Guomindang purge of the Communists in 1927–1928 and the end of the United Front, this surge of nationalist consciousness and the drive for national salvation continued unabated. Attention focused even more on ridding China of foreign influence and control. This put schools like Zhijiang University and its preparatory school more and more in the line of direct criticism.75 For thousands of years for the Chinese people, education had been a centrally important value. To assume control of standards for all schools and universities to ensure they were wholly controlled by Chinese and reflective of Chinese culture was a major policy goal of the new Nationalist government and the Nationalist Party. Education was an “instrument of China’s salvation,” the best way to create a “nationally conscious citizen.”76 Thus, when the new government was consolidating its power and instituting its new policies, Zhijiang University, along with all other Western operated educational institutions, was expected to conform to the new governmental standards. However, ever since 1917 the American leadership of the school had ignored requirements by the Republican government to register with the Ministry of Education and even now it had no intention of conforming to the law. In the spring of 1927 just before Wu entered the school, the Nationalist government’s newly installed minister of education, Cai Yuanpei, the highly respected modernist scholar and educator who had formerly been chancellor of National Peking University, had issued strict new regulations for the registration of all schools. A critical requirement was laid down: the head of each school, including all foreign run schools, must now be Chinese. All religious courses must be elective and attendance at religious services voluntary. The Zhijiang school tried the following year, without avail, to pressure the Zhejiang provincial commissioner of education, Jiang Monlin, to exempt their school from those requirements. It was finally forced to close its doors at the end of the spring term in 1928, until the American managers agreed to conform to the government registration requirement.77 In the fall of 1927, unregistered, the college had persisted in opening but with a much-reduced enrollment of only 110 students in both levels. A larger proportion of non-Christian students than ever before, among them Wu, enrolled for the fall term. At the time many of these students were thought by the school staff to be under political control according to Clarence Day, head of the English department. After the decisive rift between the Nationalist and the Communist Party following the Shanghai Massacre, trouble was deliberately fomented among the students in the school by the school

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Nationalist (Guomindang) Party Committee during the fall term to get the suspected Communist students in trouble and removed. What part Wu took in this internal school situation is unknown, although it is doubtful that he was actively involved, uninterested as he was in political activity during these years. However, with only a combined total of 110 students in the preparatory school and college he must have been surrounded by the affair, if not involved himself. Because of the problem of financial support for the school, and the unresolved issue of school registration, the students knew there was little likelihood that it would reopen in the fall of 1928. In the spring of 1928, after graduation 25 June, Wu was among those students making plans to find another school. Zhijiang had been a steppingstone; now he was bound for Shanghai. This time his choice was not a missionary school but a modern university completely under Chinese control in every aspect. The school he found in Shanghai, China College, Zhongguo gongxue, was currently undergoing rejuvenation under the direction of Hu Shi, one of the most widely known and respected figures in the Chinese Cultural Renaissance. Later Chunhan’s younger brother’s wife, who knew him well having grown up in the neighboring town of Wudian as the daughter of one of his father’s closest friends and his business partner in the general store, recalled this time in Chunhan’s life: After his year at Hangzhou he got no more money from the family. The family then had no way to control him. He liked it this way. Wu Chunhan was more independent than his younger brother. He always opposed his father. Because his father had arranged the marriage for him he refused to participate . . . Chunhan had a spirit of rebellion. If his father beat him he simply left. He had his own opinion, his own ideas, and he chose his own road.78

His act of running away from home was a watershed in Wu Han’s life. Except for short visits after that, he did not go back to village China. Never again was his relationship with his father the same. He would not become the rural Confucian gentry-scholar son his father wanted, but what he would become was still in formation. The implications of this juncture in his life went far beyond the break in his relationship with his parental home. He was searching for his own road and identity for the future.

NOTES 1. Quote selected by Wu Han from the Three Character Classic in his essay “Tan San zi jing” published under the penname Wu Nanxing in the column San jiacun zhaji [Notes from a Three Family Village], Frontline 1 (1962). 2. Wu Han, “Tan San zi jing.”

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3. Wu Han, “Tan San zi jing.” 4. Mazur, “Autonomous or Not?” (1999). 5. Beijing, meaning Northern Capital, was the name of the capital city of the Qing dynasty and the Republican period but when the Nationalist Party established its government in 1928 it moved the capital south to Nanjing (Nanking), meaning Southern Capital, and renamed the northern city Peiping (Beiping is the presently used spelling) meaning Northern Peace. This is the city today known as Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China. In English in the past it was called Peking. 6. Yiwu xianzhi, 455; Pan Yiping (1984), 147. Li and Zhu (1979), 164. 7. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Jiaoshan Wu shi zongpu, as quoted in Zhejiang ribao, 18 May 1966. Interviews 47, 48, 112, 124, 128, 134; WHZ, 3–5, 347. 8. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao.” 9. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Wu Binyu, “Fujun xingshu,” in Jiaoshan Wu shi zongpu; Interviews 49, 134. 10. Interview 49; Schoppa (1982), 99, for the reputation of the police magistrates. 11. Ch’i (1976); Schoppa (1982); Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Interviews 49, 134 for this section. 12. Schoppa (1982), 170–79, 184. 13. Interviews 49, 47, 112, 128, 134; WHZ, 5. 14. Interviews 124, 134. 15. Interviews 60, 49, 134. For Wu Han, “Tan San zi jing,” see SJCZJ, 19–22. 16. Interview 60. 17. The poem, preserved by his parents, was made available to me by his sister, Wu Puyue, in 1985. 18. Interview 35. 19. Interview 47. 20. Interview 120. For local Yiwu significance of these heroes see Yiwu xianzhi (1987): Luo Binwang (A.D. 619–687), an early Tang poet from Yiwu, 639–41; Zong Zi (A.D. 1059–1128), the heroic general from Yiwu who opposed the Jin invading army, 641–42; Qi Jiguang (A.D. 1528–1588), the Ming general who recruited men from Yiwu for his troops, the “Yiwu bing,” in 1561, because of their fighting spirit, to resist the Japanese pirates, 3. 21. In Interview 120 a fellow historian, a native of a small village near Kuzhutang in Yiwu County, who knew Wu Han well told of the childhood influences which led him to love history. Interview 124 tells of Wu’s visit to the village in 1946, when he invited a storyteller to his family home for a celebration. 22. He Bingsong (1933); Dardess (1983). 23. Interviews 47, 134. 24. WHZZSX, 52–63. These letters are referred to here as “Wu Han to Yang Zhibing.” 25. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Wu Puyue (1984), 226; WHZ, 3n1. Interview 50. 26. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Interviews 49, 58, 133, 134. 27. Interview 30; Rankin (1986), 217–19. 28. Interview 30. 29. Interviews 17, 105; author’s visits March 1986 and May 1987. 30. Interview 35 and Interview 105 with the Wangfu director. By 1929, Fang Hao had written an essay on the Taipings’ use of the Shi Wangfu.

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31. Zhejiang Shengli Jinhua zhong xuexiao youlu (1925); Interview 16. “Jinhua diyi zhongxue” (n.d., n.p). 32. Interview 30; Qian Jiaju (1984), 63. 33. Hu Shi (1982), 156–68. 34. Interview 30. Yesou puyan was by Xia Jingqu (1705–1787). Lu Xun (1959), 300–304. McMahon (1988), 32–55. In Interview 30 with Wu’s longtime friend, Qian Jiaju, Qian’s observation about Wu’s life paralleling Wen Suchen’s stemmed from the hero’s relation to the society in which he lived. 35. Xia Jingqu, Yesou puyan (1982), 3. 36. McMahon (1988), 48–50. 37. McMahon (1988), 33. 38. WHZ, 9; Wu Puyue (1984), 229. 39. Interview 30. 40. Interview 16. 41. This spontaneity was recalled and revisited in my interviews at the middle school and with Qian Jiaju. The articles were Hu Shi (1917) and Chen Duxiu (1917). Hu Shi (1963), 53–57, describes the nationwide phenomenon of student conversion to baihua as the written language in 1920–1921. In 1922, following the outburst of student enthusiasm the Ministry of Education ordered textbooks printed in the vernacular for all elementary and secondary schools. Hu says that by 1922 the adoption of baihua had been accomplished. According to my interviews at the school that is exactly what happened at No. 7 in Jinhua. 42. Known in Chinese as the Wusa can’an, the May Thirtieth Incident was a culmination of events that had been building since a February 1925 workers’ strike in a Japanese cotton-weaving mill in Shanghai. British police fired into a student demonstration on 30 May, killing eleven Chinese and injuring several dozens, precipitating the eruption of anti-imperialist, anti-foreign demonstrations. The strikes and boycotts, which spread outward from Shanghai, radicalized and mobilized many students. One of the most important results of this agitation was the sudden growth of the Communist Party. See Chang Kuo-t’ao, The Rise, vol. 1 (1972), 422–44. 43. Interview 16. The Chinese name of the group is Shehui zhuyi qingnian tuan. 44. Interview 16. For Shanghai University see Chang Kuo-t’ao (1972), 297. 45. Interview 16. Qian Jiaju (1986), 18–21; Chang Kuo-t’ao (1972), 128. This Jinhua underground party group parallels activity in Yiwu xian. By the end of 1926, there were thirteen party members in Yiwu County, according to Yiwu xianzhi, 347. Also “Jinhua diyi zhong.” 46. Wu Puyue (1984), 230. 47. Wu Puyue (1984), 227; Han Yu, “Ji shi Erlang wen” [In memory of Shilang]. In Guwen guanzhi, juan 8, 44 (1966), 8, 44. 48. Wu Puyue (1984), 230. 49. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao.” 50. Shen bao, 26 January, 24 June, 21 September 1926, in Jordan (1976b), 133–34. 51. Wu Han, “Zhen kong de xiangcun”; interviews 50, 128. 52. Wu Han, “Zhen kong de xiangcun.” 53. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; “Wu Zhang” biography in Yiwu xianzhi, 661; Interview 50. 54. Wu Han, “Ji diba dadui”; Yiwu xianzhi, 661; Interviews 47, 58, 120.

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55. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao.” For army recruiting, Jordan (1976a), 16–17; Landis (1976), 74–78. 56. Hu Shi (1963), 101; Landis (1976), 76; Jordan (1976a), 16–18. 57. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao.” 58. Beifa zhan shi (1959); Jordan (1976a); Eastman (1974); Sheridan (1975), 164–65; Isaacs (1951). 59. For the Jinhua-Lanxi campaign Beifa zhan shi (1959), 615–31, esp. 626. Jordan (1976a), 103. New York Times, 24 December 1927, 4. For the battle in Yiwu, Yiwu xianzhi, 7, 456. 60. Interview 16; Jordan (1976a), 104. 61. Yiwu xianzhi, 661. 62. Yiwu xianzhi, 8; Interview 58. 63. Interview 120. Jiang was a kinsman of Wu’s through his mother. 64. Interviews 50, 58, and 120. 65. Interviews 50, 58; Wu Puyue (1984), 231. 66. Interview 58; Wu Puyue (1984), 231. 67. Interview 50; Wu Puyue (1984), 231. 68. Interview 50. Tiantai monastery was the seat of one of the earliest Buddhist sects in China, a syncretist and distinctively Chinese sect, which appealed largely to the literate class. 69. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao”; Interview 50; Wu Puyue (1984), 231. The province of Zhejiang was, and still is, sometimes known as Zhijiang. 70. Clarence Burton Day, Hangchow University, A Brief History (1955), 40, says in 1918 Zhijiang college students’ tuition was 90 yuan yearly (1955). Ka-che Yip (1976), 97, reports annual tuition for students at government universities was 45 yuan, half as much as the private school. Interview 50; Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao.” 71. Day (1955), 59. 72. Isaacs (1951), on the popular support shown for the Northern Expedition; Day (1955), 58–59. 73. From 1920 to 1925, 72 percent of the students were Christians; Day (1955), 61. 74. Lutz (1971), 70–71. 75. Lutz (1971), 232, 255–70; Day (1955), 60. 76. Lutz (1971), 208. 77. Day (1955), 63–64. The parent board of governors of the school in the United States remained intransigent in its refusal to conform to the Chinese law requiring registration and, with the school leadership’s encouragement, an all American delegation, including a U.S. congressman, was sent to pressure Jiang Mon-lin without success. 78. Interview 58.

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or a young country student from the Zhejiang countryside with his appetite for modern education whetted by a year at a missionary school, the Shanghai universities and their intellectual vigor beckoned enticingly. Wu had heard of China College (Zhongguo gongxue) before he decided to venture into the big city. No doubt people at Hangzhou Zhijiang had talked about the school. As the biggest city in China, Shanghai was the focal point of the entire Yangtze Valley and the largest treaty port linking China with Europe and America. It was both the country’s manufacturing center and commercial hub, and a center of political and cultural activities. In education, the city vied only with the old capital city of Beiping (Beijing) in the north. The extraterritorial status of the foreign concessions in Shanghai provided a haven from Chinese political control that made the city a political sanctuary and publishing center for reformers and radicals. The newspapers and magazines published in Shanghai circulated far into the country’s interior linking the provinces with the national political arena. In Jinhua, and even in the Yiwu backwater, Chunhan and his friends eagerly read the newspapers and magazines from the coast. More than a year before Wu’s arrival in the city, Shanghai had been the focal point of the fierce Guomindang purge of the Communists from the two party United Front as the Northern Expedition politics veered sharply to the right. This violent, bloody purge directed by Chiang Kai-shek had destroyed the Front and left Shanghai reeling in a state of shock.1 By midsummer 1928 when Wu came to the city from Hangzhou, even though both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party had depended heavily on student activism during the preceding years of revolutionary activity, on Shanghai campuses

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there was mounting disillusionment with the Nationalist Party leadership. At the same time many middle-aged educators, once student demonstrators themselves, were becoming alarmed at the destabilizing effect the student involvement in political movements was having on the educational process. One of these, Cai Yuanpei, the minister of higher education in the Nationalist regime, held that if students were not isolated from national politics their education and the country’s future would be disrupted.2 In spite of Northern Expedition victories and the new Nationalist regime installed in its capital, Nanjing, the area of China under the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) rule was still limited. Beijing, the national capital of the Republic since 1911, had only been brought under the control of Guomindang forces a month or two before Chunhan arrived in Shanghai.3 In 1928 as Chunhan started school, national control and unification still remained but a distant objective of the Nationalist Party.

ENTERING CHINA COLLEGE In Zhejiang among people who cared about education China College4 had been known since the early 1900s, even before the collapse of the Qing dynasty, as a revolutionary school with famous alumni and professors, as well as low tuition for students. In the early years, the students came from almost every province in China and after graduation returned to their home provinces, spreading the school’s reputation.5 Having heard of China College by its reputation, Wu and another student from Yiwu, Gao Shenfu, both decided to take the school’s entrance exams.6 The school was established in 1905 by students returning from Japan to protest Japanese government policies in China. With this indigenous Chinese raison d’etre it was a center of radical activity and interest in democracy from the beginning. The first Chinese-founded private university in China, it was consistently administered by Chinese educators and teachers and retained a wholly Chinese administration, University policies were consistently Chinese during its existence when many other schools were dominated by Westerners.7 In 1928 in the increasingly political atmosphere of nationalism the completely Chinese character of the school had an important beneficial effect. Because China College was controlled by Chinese, it was not subject to the pressure of the Nationalist government campaign to reassert Chinese identity and control of the nation’s education so it was left alone by the government. Although Wu’s first school, Zhijiang University, had temporarily been forced to close, at China College there was no problem because its identity was wholly Chinese. Wu knew at China College he would be able to satisfy his intense interest in history and the Chinese classics far better than at the Western missionary-run school.

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The two students from Yiwu were especially attracted to China College by the possibility of studying at the feet of some of the distinguished professors who taught the literature and history courses such as Gao Yihan, Zheng Zhenduo, Yang Lianggong, Wang Yong, and Ma Junwu. But most of all the news that the famous scholar Hu Shi had just become president of Zhonggong, as students nicknamed the school, attracted them.8 Just a few months before Chunhan decided to apply for admission, Hu Shi, who had only recently returned from a trip to Europe and America, had been appointed president. It seems, however, it was with great reluctance that Hu took the appointment for he had confided in his diary the day he accepted the position, “I put a pair of handcuffs on myself today. This was certainly not a wise decision and as I think about it, I regret it very much.” Hu’s doubts about the job stemmed from the difficulties of the situation at China College and also from his own yearning to be back at prestigious Beijing University.9 In fact, Hu Shi had studied at the Shanghai college himself for three years before the 1911 Revolution and had joined the student political agitation in favor of democracy in the school by writing for the student newspaper. The students wanted democratization of their education and demanded control not only of their own affairs but also control of school affairs. They even demanded a voice in the hiring of teachers. Many were radical revolutionaries, members of the Tongmeng hui, Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary alliance.10 At the time Wu Han entered in 1928 the board of trustees was trying to guide the school back to a stable state of affairs and raise its educational standards, after several years of unsettled conditions and political agitation when the school had lacked a strong president.11 To reach their goal the trustees had appealed to Hu Shi’s loyalty to his alma mater to lead the school in major restructuring of the curriculum in order to raise academic standards. When Chunhan arrived the college departments included Chinese literature, foreign language and literature, philosophy, mathematics, commerce, history, and sociology, and politics and economics. He entered the preparatory class the first summer. Zhonggong was located at the mouth of the Wusong River where the Huangpu and the Wusong rivers join to empty into the broad reaches of the Yangtze at the outer edge of Shanghai. It was the last stop on the train and far from the center of the city. When Hu Shi returned to be president there were over six hundred students, of whom fifty were girls. His first year, Chunhan lived in the “old dormitory,” on the second floor in a room with three other boys. From the windows of the room there was a view toward the open waters of the Yangtze with ocean-going ships and river junk traffic in the roadstead. Often the wind blew from the sea, cooling the land in warm weather and bringing a penetrating, raw dampness in winter.12 For this nineteen-year-old student from rural Zhejiang these years at China College were a crucial time of new encounters and redirection in his life. In

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Hangzhou, the school atmosphere at Zhijiang University had been set by the American missionaries who operated the school and taught the classes, and by the few Christianized Chinese teachers who had the lowest prestige of all the teachers in the school.13 In Shanghai, the atmosphere at China College was very different. The students were much farther away from their homes and generally more separated from family influence. Most had made a major commitment to come to cosmopolitan Shanghai for modern schooling. With the school administration and teachers all Chinese, among them many fine scholars bent on training youth to participate and lead in the modern Chinese world, there was not the isolation from the mainstream of Chinese culture that permeated Zhijiang University. During Hu Shi’s tenure he saw to it that teachers of many different viewpoints taught at China College to enrich the curriculum.14 Because of the straightened financial situation of the Wu family, money for school was a very real problem. Although the living and tuition cost at China College was low, Chunhan was barely able to manage to support himself in a simple living style. He wore the long blue cotton cloth gown and cotton shoes of a country scholar. As he became acquainted he occasionally wrote a short article for publication to collect the meager author’s fees to help with his expenses for a few days. From the beginning Wu worked diligently at his studies. His friend Gao remembered his reading very late in the evening every night. The short dusty-blue clad figure, wearing round eye glasses through which he took in everything, could be seen late in the day after class crossing the campus to his room in the dormitory facing toward the sea, carrying piles of books to study.15 By the end of the second term in the spring of 1929, he had made friends with another student from Yiwu, Liu Xiancai. Almost twenty years earlier, before the 1911 Revolution, Liu’s uncle had been a classmate of Chunhan’s father at the police academy in Hangzhou. Now this old school bond of their parents’ generation drew the two together. They agreed to share a room in the neighborhood, beyond the main gate, and usually ate their meals together at a little food shop on the street. Chunhan lived here in Wusong at No. 1 Nan Pan Jiazhai for the next year.16 With little money from their families for school fees and living, the two students often came up short when it was time to pay their bills. Twice at vacation time they couldn’t pay their food bill. With no other choice they pawned their quilts in lieu of payment at the little food shop. When they returned at the beginning of next term they redeemed the quilts with money from home. In fact, both years Wu was at China College, the money which he brought from home to pay for his school expenses was given to him by his mother from her savings, not from his father, Wu recalled years later.17 At China College, Wu led a cloistered life. Even though not far beyond the school walls the cosmopolitan life of Shanghai pulsed and within the school wall newspapers carried lively articles about current issues, Wu’s

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thoughts were only on his studies. Every day he carried home piles of books to the little room outside the campus gate and stayed up late into the night reading under the lamp. His roommate Liu, accustomed to the village habit of going to bed at nightfall, often awakened in the night to see Chunhan sitting in the darkened room in a pool of light from the single lamp pouring over his books spread out on the table. Wu devoted most of his time studying for the literature and history classes, which he loved. Among his friends he was known as a prodigy for his exceptionally good memory. They envied his ability to remember what he had read after seeing it only once. When he wasn’t in class he was busy studying all day long, reading and copying out note cards. Although drinking and gambling had gotten him into trouble in middle school, there was little beyond study that attracted him in the world of Shanghai. Because of his impoverished finances and rural background, mixing socially with students who were strangers and often far more urbanized than he seemed difficult at first. But he soon adapted and with so much to learn from his teachers and more mature now, he simply had no time for frivolous things.18

THE STUDENT AND CAO CAO Occasionally on a Sunday there was time to sit around and chat with friends. His roommate, Liu Xiancai, remembered one day when the talk turned to the military leaders Cao Cao and Liu Bei in the third century A.D. History of the Three Kingdoms.19 Naturally convivial, Chunhan loved to talk, especially about history and the figures in history. As he listened his roommate Liu said that Liu Bei was a fine person, modest and self-effacing, a man who treated people well and thought matters over carefully. Being a Liu himself Xiancai, as a loyal clansman, was upholding the banner of the “Liu” faction to win glory for his clan. Since Liu Bei was a well-known popular hero it never crossed his mind that his friend Chunhan would oppose his ideas. However, Chunhan took up the subject and suddenly, turning deadly serious, pointed out to his friend that Liu Bei was a hypocrite who curried favor from people at every opportunity, pursuing honor and high salary for himself. Proclaiming “he is not worthy of admiration,” he went on to say to a stunned Liu, “only Cao Cao was both able and learned, only he knew how to be both a minister in times of peace and a hero in times of trouble.” Wu said he thought evaluating him by using history is the right way.20 He told his friend that study of the historical evidence had led him to this conclusion about Cao Cao’s importance. In arguing on the basis of historical evidence for General Cao Cao, Wu was going counter to popular opinion, which held that Liu Bei, a descendant of the Han dynasty ruling family, was the best man. The era of the Three Kingdoms, A.D. 220–280, after the close of the Eastern Han,

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A.D. 25–220, had been a period of instability and regional warlord rivalry. They both realized it was an era that had many similarities to their own time. Actually, they were arguing by analogy about issues with current ramifications. The disunity of the 1920s warlord era was very much on Chunhan’s mind, having grown up in the warlord-dominated province of Zhejiang. One reason that Liu Bei had been favored by past orthodox thinking was that, of the two men, it was he who had the legitimate claim to the throne. This political legitimacy impressed people. Since Cao Cao was only the prime minister, he could not rightfully claim the throne. Another reason for Liu Bei’s popularity with young and old was his likable personality. Undaunted by either tradition or long-standing popular opinion, Chunhan took the position pragmatically that Cao Cao was the best ruler for China because, more than imperial lineage, it was important that the ruler be capable of ruling in times of peace, as well as being a heroic leader in times of trouble. In relying on what he had discovered in studying The History of the Three Kingdoms, rather than bowing to accepted orthodox wisdom, Wu’s critical, analytical young mind and unwillingness to bend or distort history to support purposes beyond history demonstrated habits of mind that became characteristic of his thinking across the years. At the same time he showed that he admired a strong, powerful leader who could rule effectively in disordered times. Chunhan’s mindset was influenced by pragmatic evidential research methodology (kaozheng) and by modern scientific questioning of received judgments. Indeed, both were principles Professor Hu Shi taught in his lectures at China College, Luo Ergang, Wu’s longtime friend, remembered from his own experience in Hu’s Zhonggong classes.21

HU SHI’S UNIVERSITY STUDENT After a year in the preparatory class, Chunhan entered the university proper in the fall of 1929 as a student in the Department of History and Sociology. Here at China College, Wu came under one of the most crucial influences in his life. His relationship with Hu Shi, who would become his respected teacher and mentor for the next years, was begun here listening to Hu’s lectures. Although still very young, his life as a historian began under the watchful eye of Hu Shi, even though later his independent bent and other influences carried him beyond Hu Shi’s interests. His most important course at the school was Hu’s Chinese Cultural History.22 His first direct contact with this man, Hu Shi, at thirty-nine renowned among intellectuals and students throughout China as a scholar and teacher, impressed Chunhan deeply. Hu was probably best known in China at that time for the revolutionary part he and Chen Duxiu had taken in promoting the nationwide introduction of the vernacular language (baihua) as the language for all writing, whether scholarly or in everyday life. Chunhan had

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learned about Hu’s leadership of language reform and the 1920s literary revolution at No. 7 Middle School in Jinhua. Hu’s articles in the magazine New Youth had stimulated the spontaneous nationwide adoption by school students of baihua as the written language just as Chunhan entered middle school in 1921.23 In Hu’s own words his “fame had exploded”24 across China. Even in the remotest counties the name of Hu Shi was closely associated in the minds of young students with the Cultural Revolution that emerged with the adoption of the vernacular as the written language. As leaders of this revolution in literacy and thus of democratic society, Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu became the fathers of the May Fourth Literary Renaissance. This was the man who became Wu Han’s teacher in 1930. However, despite Hu’s pledge that as a scholar he would remain aloof from active political participation and discussion, at China College while president his life became complicated by an issue unrelated to his teaching. In the public political discourse of the time Hu had been writing critically about the Guomindang and the late Sun Yatsen, founder of the ruling Nationalist Party.25 His outspoken criticism brought the wrath of the Guomindang down on him. Although he refrained from participating in demonstrations, he did actively engage with other intellectuals in literary and political discussions, especially in the New Crescent Society. At the same time, during his service as China College president he was also carrying on several scholarly projects of his own, among them his History of Vernacular Literature and a biography of Shen Hui, the Buddhist monk.26

THE EMERGENCE OF “CULTURAL HISTORY” A busy man, Hu came to the college one day each week to teach his twohour class in cultural history and attend to the administrative affairs of the school. His class met in the college auditorium because of the large number of students attending. After class the popular teacher’s office door was usually surrounded with eager students wanting him to read something or write recommendations for them.27 Hu always took great interest in encouraging his students. At Zhonggong, Hu’s Cultural History fulfilled the formal requirement in basic Chinese history, which had previously been fulfilled by Guoxue, National Studies, as in other schools. In university curricula in the years to come, this course in cultural history, wenhua shi, gradually was transformed into General Chinese History, Zhongguo tongshi. Wu’s first exposure to formal academic Chinese history in this Chinese cultural history course taught by Hu Shi was a major factor in his not stressing heavily nationalistic themes in his own teaching later when he taught. Hu Shi’s choice of cultural history, rather than national studies, guoxue, as the subject of this course demonstrates the new significance of the idea of

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culture, wenhua, in Chinese thought. For Wu Han, as for others who were becoming or thinking about becoming historians in the 1920s and 1930s, this continuing discourse on culture and history, in the broadest sense, was the framework of their thinking and studies on the Chinese past. To understand the currents shaping these young historians’ ideas about the past we need to look at how this new representation of history as cultural history developed. Why were these modern historians drawn to rethink the Chinese past as cultural history? In the Chinese language the term for “culture,” wenhua, was composed of the characters wen, meaning writing, language, civilization, and hua: to change, transform, influence; combined the two mean culture.28 With the two characters combined the idea of culture connoted the transformative nature of the written word and of its content. This brought the idea of change in the past into play in the historical discussion in a major way. The question of “culture” had already begun to emerge as a central issue in Chinese historical thought during the crisis following the failure of the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898 and the disastrous end of the Boxer Uprising (1900). With the abolition of the classical examination system in 1905 and change in the system of appointment to bureaucratic posts for degree holders, the Confucian academic-bureaucratic system of office holding undergirding the entire polity had abruptly ended. With this, the sociopolitical gestalt or pattern that had shaped the world of Chinese thought and the lives of the intelligentsia for centuries was broken and fragmented, without an integrated structure to orient or define it. Already questioned by the critical Han studies, the hanxue of the late Qing period, and shaken by Kang Youwei’s iconoclastic attacks in the New-Old Text and Confucius as a reformer controversy,29 the Chinese world of thought and politics was no longer a unity standing firmly on the bedrock of the classical neo-Confucian canon of the examination system. On the contrary, when the examinations ceased to structure the lives of the scholarly class, thought had been freed from political practice and in particular had been freed from the straight jacket of the classical canon as the prescribed basis of thought. With the loss of this institutional structure, it became evident that the classical heritage of thought was not bound to inherited institutions, but existed separately. The young Wu dealt firsthand with this seismic break and its effects in his own life as he had seen the disillusionment and breakdown in his father’s life and looked for a school to study at. In the breadth of society it became necessary for individuals and social groups to cope with the ideas and values in their heritage and their relevance to the contemporary situation. As the heritage of thought became detached from the political structure, it came to exist separately and be conceptualized as “culture”: as footprints or tracks from the past that were the heritage of a civilization with a transformative nature that encompassed change.30 In the world Wu was finding his way through with the writings of two well-known scholars, Liang Qichao and

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Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin), scholarly discussion about China’s history had begun to focus on the nature of society and the meaning of culture. For many years Liang and Zhang were at the center of the ongoing intellectual ferment in the seismic changes in the whole polity. It is intriguing that China was not alone in rethinking its past during this time period. In Europe there were strong new currents in historical thought and historiography, which came close to, were even paralleled by the currents in China. These ideas would be taken up in the United States also, especially by people at Columbia University. Particularly in Germany in the late nineteenth century, ideas about culture and its relationship to history had begun to ferment, perhaps fed by awareness of linguistic differences among neighboring peoples and of the lack of unity of the region.31 In Germany the maverick historian Karl Lamprecht, aiming to broaden the traditional political scope of history as epitomized in Otto von Ranke’s work into an inclusive conceptualization of the past, called his view of history “cultural history.”32 Lamprecht’s emphasis on collective or social psychology as the lens through which to view the past and its historical narrative came very close to new themes that were appearing in Chinese historical thought. In particular, Liang Qichao’s early concept of grouping (qun), with its implication that all of society must be considered to know the history of a particular era or people had similarities with Lamprecht’s view of the scope of history.33 Liang introduced this idea of “grouping,” the idea that people in groups or communities were fundamental to social and political interactions, in the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century during the same time the examination system was being abolished in China.34 As a young man Liang Qichao had studied with the iconoclastic scholar reform leader Kang Youwei. In his widely read writings over the next years, Liang addressed the crucial, nodal areas of the nature of society and polity over time and the questions of change and the relation of men, society, and nation. Early on in 1897 the young Liang had developed his fundamental theme of qun (groups), the formation of the people into groups and the key role of popular grouping in the transformation of the polity in the essay “Shuo qun.”35 He identified the critical issue as the transformation of the people and the country into a nation, which he was referring to as guojia qun, nation-group, even before he fled as an exile to Japan at the fall of the reform movement in 1898.36 As Liang’s ideas on transformation of the polity developed in the next years he gave key importance to the knowledge the group had of the historical past and to the writing of the past into history for the group. For Zhang Taiyan, both a classical scholar and a revolutionary, the core of the culture was in classical Confucianism. Zhang pointed to the centrality of the concept of lijiao in the distinctive nature of Chinese culture. The characters li and jiao together represent the idea of a body of social customs and cultural institutions and the teaching of social order.37 The immutable central

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principles of the jiao were always and continue to be loyalty (zhong), filiality (xiao), and the five bonds of subject-ruler, son-father, younger brother–older brother, wife-husband, friend-friend. These were the principles that structured the Chinese family and the national community. Famous for his strong stand against the Manchu dynasty, Zhang’s anti-Manchu radicalism at the turn of the century faded and disappeared with passing years as its chief raison d’être, the Manchu dynasty fell in 1911.38 Still he continued to write about his ideas on culture and the meaning of “China,” Zhonghua: The word Zhonghua is not only the country name of a geographical region, not only the name of a blood relationship but it is the name of one group’s culture. . . . The lijiao is the standard and there is nothing else that distinguishes relatives. If this standard were not met, then China would descend to being barbarians. . . . After a thousand years and the mixture of a multitude of nationalities, the name China remains the same. Therefore, if we consider culture we can understand why China is China.39

For Zhang in the new era, the significance lay in what China was. It was the lijiao that defined the nature of the Chinese culture and nation. 40 In its broadest dimension Zhang Taiyan thought that at the heart of the character of the Chinese culture lay a distinctive form of knowledge, social order, and intellectual tradition and that this cultural distinctiveness was defined by geographical environment, political practice, and ethnic character.41 These ideas of culture and national heritage were at the center of the “national learning,” guoxue, taught in the schools and discussed widely in the Republican period.42 These ideas about China’s culture and history at the center of the sense of mission that drove Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan were the same conception of history and value at the core of the climate of thought that shaped the young Wu’s student years and became an important factor powering his adult life. His effort to promote the incorporation of the principle of the “critical inheritance of traditional morality” in the ethic of the Communist times during the early 1960s of the People’s Republic was rooted in this early articulation of ideas about the historical constitution of the heart of Chinese culture, the nature of society, and cultural identity.43 This development of the broad concept of culture after the disappearance of the examination system was far more than an effort to merely preserve the classical heritage. The aim of participants in the discourse was to identify the nature and values of the society that were relevant to the present and future. In the beginning years some had spoken of “national essence” (guocui), after some years others began to talk about “national character” (guoxing), a more active conception. This ongoing discussion resulted in a sort of idealization of indigenous Chinese culture, assumed to have grown from roots in the people, in their long history, and in the motherland. A core part of the discussion was the growing expression of national identity and the need for such expression in the modern world China was participating in.44

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In the earlier years of the discourse the “people” (min) were often referred to, but the content of this idea of people was an abstraction symbolizing all Chinese, not the ordinary people in any locality. A characteristic of the early expression of ideas about culture was the assumption that cultural heritage was transmitted by scholar custodians, as it had been in the past. Since the notion lingered that the principal locus of culture was in the written record, historians in particular felt they had a special role in interpreting the culture of the past for the present and future. The contrast between this idea of agency through the custodianship of the intelligentsia versus the concept of the agency of the people as the basic participants in the society that came with modern thought, articulated in democratic, socialist, and Marxist thought is at the core of the changing climate of thought in China. This broadening of the meaning of culture came over a period of years. Hu Shi, in his History of Vernacular Literature and the historian and historical geographer Gu Jiegang, in his work on folklore and on ethnic nationalities and religion, as well as others like Zheng Zhenduo (all three of whom were to be mentors for Wu Han), all contributed to the expansion of the conception of the people’s culture. In the early 1920s, culture and the cultural heritage were still conceived of as well as within the custody of the scholar-elite as they contributed to the construction of China’s national identity. However, as time went by this scope broadened to include ordinary people.45 In this growth of the peoples’ conception of the Chinese nation and heightening national spirit that affected the reinterpretation of the national heritage the students and intellectuals all had a stake.46 For an example of the changing ideas Zhang Taiyan, teaching at Beijing University in 1913, had organized the Society for the Study of Chinese Culture (Guoxue hui) where he gave lectures. In his words posted on a signboard at the university, “The purpose of the Society is to enlighten the minds of the people and to promote the growth of a national spirit.”47 These ideas of Zhang’s about the heritage stirred the mind of the young historian Gu Jiegang as he listened to the lectures. However, Gu soon came to disagree with some of Zhang’s more extreme interpretations and went on to develop his own view of what “reorganizing” meant and what was salient in the national heritage. Two areas which Gu saw as essential components of Chinese culture were geography and folk custom, or in the construction of our times, space and ethnicity. That is, he saw a geographical and social breadth to culture—in fact, Gu Jiegang became a major agent in extending the view of the nature of culture in China.

HU SHI’S CULTURAL HISTORY In the cultural history course Wu Han took from Hu Shi at China College the stress was on the cultural conceptions in China’s past rather than on

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a strictly historicized past constructed on names and dates—as had been the framework of traditional history in China. Several years before, Hu had discussed culture and history and their relationship to the national identity48 in his “Manifesto for the Journal of National Studies.49 In this he emphasized insistently that Chinese history must be framed as cultural history in the new era: The mission of the study of Chinese culture is to make people understand the past cultural history of China; the method of study is to examine all past cultural history using a historic point of view; the purpose is to write a history of Chinese culture.50

For this cultural history, from the broad perspective of the entire society, he laid out ten topics for the study of China: peoples, language and literature, economy, politics, international communication, thought and scholarship, religion, art and literature, custom, and institutions. While Zhang Taiyan’s earlier notion of the cultural heritage had listed only geography (the location of ethnic peoples), political institutions, and literature, now Hu extended the scope of the heritage to include economic history, international relationships, religion, art and literature, and social customs. This conception of cultural history Hu taught was embodied in the Encyclopedia of Education, published in 1930 in Shanghai by Zhu Jingnong, an associate of Hu Shi’s. In the Encyclopedia’s entry on culture we can see the link between this vital emerging conception of culture in China that Hu Shi and others were using and the idea of culture that had been expressed in Karl Lamprecht’s work in Europe. Significantly, Hu Shi and several other Chinese students had been at Columbia University in New York when Lamprecht lectured there as a guest of James Harvey Robinson. The Encyclopedia’s definition of culture is far broader in scope than simply literature and art: the history of culture is “the purest and most perfect history in historical science.”51 The content of culture includes material conditions, intellectual behavior, material behavior, economic behavior, the social system, and the public institutions of humankind. Using psychology and sociology, the history of culture studies the various conditions, practices and systems of human beings; the object of the study is human beings within society, not human beings individually. This idea of man within society had been filtering into the discourse on history and culture in China ever since Liang Qichao had written about “New History” in 1902, placing the people, not the ruler at the center. This construction of culture at the core of historical conception by Chinese thinkers was deeply influenced by the thought of the New Historians around James Harvey Robinson at Columbia University in the United States.52 Several Chinese historians, including Hu Shi, had studied at Columbia and had been influenced by Robinson. For Hu Shi, his agents of change in society,

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that is the readers he was writing for, were these students, intellectuals in training. They could bring understanding of the past to the broad numbers of Chinese people. Ideology as such held no particular interest for him. It was the process of education and study that was the means to his goal. Hu Shi’s was not a history that started with specific recognized events or people and narrated them as traditional historians were wont to do. Nor was it a history that dwelt on China’s distinctive race as Zhang Taiyan had. Cultural history taught in Hu’s way looked first at the entire sweep of the culture of the society and found the significant factors in that broad picture. These were divided into specialized areas such as the history of economics, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and religion. Collections of historical materials were used for in-depth research in these areas. While Hu Shi’s general perspective was to bring out the international, universal aspects, in fact, in his teaching and in his own research he spent a great deal of time on distinctively Chinese issues, such as the Ming-Qing novels and Buddhist thinkers. Why spend so much time—so many words—considering the ideas of Hu and Zhang and the others? Because we can see with their example how Chinese thought was changing in this fertile period of the 1920s and 1930s of the twentieth century. The common features of Hu Shi’s and Zhang Taiyan’s ideas of culture influenced the young Wu Chunhan deeply. All of these historians were motivated by the desire to create a national consciousness based on the cultural heritage as the heart of the source of national identity. For them it was in history and the historical texts that the essence of cultural identity was found. Zhang Taiyan saw the need to read the classics as history. Hu Shi found in the Chinese record and literature the lode that, if systematically and scientifically mined, could provide the understanding of Chinese culture that would be the basis of China’s identity in its future relationships to the cosmopolitan world. This was powerful stuff that fed the minds of young historians in the discourse on national identity.

HU SHI ON THE FUTURE OF CHINA COLLEGE STUDENTS Wu was fortunate to attend China College while Hu Shi was there. He was a teacher who made a special effort to encourage talented students.53 But this meant that to gain entry to the inner circle Wu had to prove himself with his own work. Hu Shi expressed his concern about the path students would follow after graduation. In his president’s talk to the graduating students at the end of Chunhan’s first year he advocated that after they graduated, rather than following careers in business, the professions, science, or public service students should engage in “specialized scholarly research.” In stressing purely academic pursuits for college graduates and the possibility of their

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moving out into the world as academics to lead the practical resolution of the endless number of social or economic problems facing China, and by disparaging the necessity of earning a living in business, Hu Shi echoed the traditional scholar’s elite, literary value system and demonstrated his idea of intellectuals as the custodians of culture. This neotraditionalist vision of what constituted the application of knowledge for China’s modernization reinforced a decidedly narrow, elitist model for students. In this emphasis, he had moved away from the broader democratic implications of his early leadership in the vernacular language reform movement toward emphasis of more esoteric elite reform activities.54 In his graduation address to the students he quoted the Norwegian playwright Ibsen: “Your greatest responsibility is to cast the material that you are into an instrument.” He challenged the students to think of whether they would waste their time or “energetically be scholars.” The kind of “instrument” Hu promoted was poignantly underscored by his words: “when you have the determination to study a question, naturally you can do without food and clothes to buy books.”55 His message that meaning could best be found in a life of scholarship, books, and ideas left a lasting intellectualizing effect on Wu Chunhan and many of his other disciples. There were other ways that Hu’s guidance of students was less limiting. In his Manifesto in 1923, he had advocated a comparative method in the study of Chinese culture, to provide comparison with models from other parts of the world. “Now we study Chinese culture. We must break the attitude of closing the door and isolating ourselves and have the modesty to make comparisons in research.”56 He promoted the use of materials from European, American, and Japanese academic circles that scholars could use as mirrors to bring new methods to Chinese learning. Indeed, Hu Shi’s talk of mirrors to learn from hearkened back to the way the Chinese had long used their own history as a mirror from which to learn for the future. Now Hu was advocating historians learn new ideas from beyond Chinese borders that would help the investigation and writing of Chinese history. His promotion of research in the history of Chinese culture that extended the scope of subjects researched and used comparative research to interpret the materials of historical studies had certainly been absorbed by Wu Han as he chose economic history for his first major essay.57

FIRST STEPS: WRITING THE “NEW HISTORY” OF THE WESTERN HAN The topic Wu chose for his essay in Hu Shi’s Cultural History class was the “Economic Conditions of the Western Han.” He finished and handed it in the spring of 1930. Even though Hu resigned precipitously from his position at China College that same 3 May because of a conflict with the Guomindang,

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he read Wu Chunhan’s essay and praised it highly to his colleagues.58 In the summer Wu found a publisher who paid him a much needed 80 yuan book fee. Later Hu Shi contributed his calligraphy for the title page, a signal of honor for the young student.59 In choosing the economic situation of the Western Han period for his topic Wu focused on the unique significance of this period in the evolution of Chinese economic and political history. Wu had learned quickly at Hu Shi’s feet as can be seen in his broad cultural history perspective and careful evidential methodology in his research and analysis of the Han-era economy. But already the influence of a perspective broader than Hu’s can be seen in Wu Han’s essay. Although Hu Shi’s broad conception of cultural history included economic factors, he did not frame research issues from the social historian’s materialist point of view. Rather than placing the economic factors in center stage Hu used them to background the literary works he studied. In his historical view economics per se was not the dominant issue. Wu Han’s study was influenced by two other historical thinkers, Liang Qichao and Tao Xisheng—each quite different from the other. Wu identified his own work with the stream of the “New History” that Liang Qichao’s “New History” essay in 1902 had stimulated. There Liang had established the parameters for the new historiography he was promoting by identifying four problems in the previous writing of Chinese history.60 According to Liang, historians in the past had understood that there were dynasties but not that there was a country. They had written about powerful heroes but not about the masses of people. They had written about the past but had no concern for the present; they had failed to make the past a mirror for the present. They had understood the facts but not the ideas of the past. Liang challenged historians to write New History that would meet the needs of China in the present age. They must explain relationships and cause and effect of events, not merely record facts; they must investigate the experience of all of the people in groups and movements, and, in this age of Darwin’s influence, they must pay particular attention to evolutionary change. Liang’s goal was to create a broadly held consciousness of the political entity legitimated by the masses of people in society. This entity would come to be called a “nation” or guojia. It was in the direction of this Liangian New History objective that Chunhan focused his study of Western Han economic conditions: he aimed to write his history to provide a mirror for the present that would bring historical perspective to current economic and political issues.61 Pointing to the relevance of his subject for China in the present, he wrote of the Western Han period as the turning point in Chinese history when the pattern that had continued to the present had been set.62 Demonstrating a world historical consciousness, he saw China as a “unit in world history” and as a causative agent in events far beyond the boundaries of Chinese civilization. If the Western Han Emperor Wudi and his descendants some nine hundred years

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before had not driven the Turkic Xiongnu away from the Han sphere into lands to the West he asserted boldly, “half of the pages of European history would not have existed.” In 1929–1930 historical analysis of economic factors was still relatively uncommon. The New History character of Wu’s summary is striking: The Western Han dynasty was a bridge from the feudal system to the junxian system, from a mixed economy to a unified economy, from a nomadic life to a settled (agricultural) life. From the point of view of academic thought it was a bridge from the Hundred Schools to Confucianism, from the point of view of economic life a bridge from an agricultural, small craft and commercial economy to a unitary agricultural economy. The Western Han defined the scale of the pattern of the patriarchal society and established the position of the national economy.63

In this pathbreaking essay Wu traces the growth and decline of the Western Han economic situation from the founding of the Han in 206 B.C. to the death of the usurper, Wang Mang and the downfall of this Xin dynasty in A.D. 23. through a number of social history topics. His topics were: the finances of the Western Han, life of the common people, economic policies of the dynasty, the policy of equal production, landownership policy, labor service and taxation system, currency system, population problems, urban problems, and agricultural disasters. With a separate section for the common people and the conditions of their lives he not only establishes them as the basic sector of society but fulfills the New History inclusive aim of dealing with all levels of society, not merely the ruling elite. In fact, his conception of the “Western Han” doesn’t rest on the notion that it was a dynasty, but rather on the idea that the Western Han was a polity of many and varied facets ruled by a dynastic house which provided the political leadership. He ranked two men, Wang Mang, the usurper, and the Wudi emperor, as the most significant leaders of the Western Han, Wudi being “the great innovator of history,” and Wang Mang, “the great reformer.” “The influence of their innovation and reformation continues down to the present.”64 Emperor Wudi’s establishment of agriculture as the basis of all economic activity and the attendant de-emphasis of commerce became the fundamental policy that was to shape the future economic pattern of the Chinese polity. In Wu’s analysis Wang Mang’s attempted institutionalization of state land (wangtian) and the reform of private ownership during his usurpation, although unrealized, left a heritage in economic thought handed down even to the present time which laid the indigenous ground work for socialism in Chinese thought.65 The narrative identifies classes, even occasionally revealing Wu’s familiarity with simple Marxist terminology such as proletariat class (wuchan jieji) and petty bourgeoisie class (xiao zichan jieji). These terms were a part of the historical materialist vocabulary, which the New History was beginning to

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use. Wu’s essay was well within the stream of historical thought of the time. Socialism had been a subject of discussion, even an intellectual fad, among many intellectuals since the May Fourth Movement began in 1919.66 Even as long before as 1899 and 1900, Wang Mang’s attempted nationalization of the land, and prohibition of slavery during his usurpation of the Han had been discussed in the early discourse on socialism.67 In the post–May Fourth environment socialism was a subject on most students’ lips as well as part of the revolutionary political ideology of the Nationalist (Guomindang) revolution and later the Nationalist ruling party’s platform. Wu’s school friend, Qian Jiaju, had been involved in Jinhua in organizing students interested in socialism at the time when there was no real distinction made between socialism and communism. His Yiwu friends who came to his house to talk had joined the Communist Party soon after he left the village—undoubtedly there they had talked many times in their sessions at his house before he left about the ideas of socialism in the Nationalist as well as the Communist Party. The conditions of the local economic situation in rural areas like Yiwu, Chunhan’s home county, were part of the consciousness of many students from these areas who still had close ties and frequent contact with their native place.

BEGINNINGS OF A SOCIAL HISTORIAN As a young scholar studying at a modern urban university, Wu was joining the community of historians at a seminal point in time for the writing of China’s history. Historical thought after the critical period of the Northern Expedition (1926–1928) became quite different from the previous period from May Fourth up to the Expedition. Before the Expedition, the emphasis had been on the liberation of thought from the traditional curriculum but afterward historical interest, encouraged by factors such as Liang Qichao’s writings and the rising interest in Marxism, shifted toward political and social aspects of history. Apart from interest in Marxism and Leninism the broad interest in socialism and the application of historical materialism in Western historiography contributed substantially to the trend to frame historical studies as social history. This meant research on social history developed quickly after the Northern Expedition.68 The historian, Tao Xisheng, had a strong influence on Wu in these years with his interest in the broad dimensions of society. Tao, sometime history teacher at China College while Wu studied there, was one of the first historians to seriously use historical materialism in analysis of Chinese historical issues, beginning with his History of Chinese Feudal Society, published in 1929, the same year that Chunhan was writing on the Western Han economic situation. With this book Tao provoked the stormy debate known as the Debate on China’s Social History, studied by Arif Dirlik.69 The importance of Tao’s work lay in his ideological analysis, rather than a kaozheng, evidential

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research, type of study and analysis of historical materials. Tao challenged past historical interpretations with his innovative view that the role of commercial capital had conditioned China’s historical experience. He followed this work with specialized pieces, including a study on the economy of the Western Han that to a degree paralleled Wu Han’s Economic History of the Western Han.70 At this time Tao was a popular lecturer on Chinese social organization and the social relationship of the peasants and the literati-official class (shidaifu jieji) as well as the political relationship of the government to this literatiofficial and peasant relationship.71 Beyond the small group of relatively unknown Marxist writers (unknown except for Guo Moruo) in the social history controversy, many scholars were influenced at the time by Tao’s writings on social history, according to Gu Jiegang and Teng Ssu-yu both of whom also moved in the same intellectual environment.72 The emergence of Wu Han’s and Tao Xisheng’s works on the Western Han economy within a short time is intriguing. Since the completion of Wu’s long essay on the Western Han predates the publication of Tao’s work on the Han by several months and Tao says he wrote his piece in only four days,73 any influence on Wu from Tao’s thought would not have been from Tao’s writing on the Western Han but through his two works published before in 1929, or, even more likely, through Wu’s sitting in on Tao’s lectures at China College. While different in analysis, there is enough similarity in their approaches to the problem of the Western Han economy to suggest the possibility that Tao may have seen Wu’s essay before writing his work and may have “borrowed” some of the work, not an uncommon occurrence in Chinese scholarship. Since Wu submitted his essay to Hu Shi several months before Tao published his Western Han work and Hu Shi commended Wu’s essay to his colleagues, perhaps Tao read Wu’s essay in manuscript at the college after it was finished and handed in. Despite the coincidence in topic and title, Wu’s analysis differs substantially. He did not interest himself in the sort of historical materialist analysis that occupied Tao, nor in the issue of periodization. Instead Wu utilized a descriptive framework in which he applied a milder, broadened historical materialist framework. The basic historical issues Wu posed were directly related to a combination of social, political, and economic causes in China’s immediate situation. According to Wu, the economic weakness and poverty of the country and lack of political strength and unity could be traced to the straight jacket imposed on the society by the Confucian elite during the Western Han consolidation of the empire. On his part, Wu saw this as an evident parallel with the current dilemma China found herself in, coming out of the late Qing, whereas Tao Xisheng, following a typically Marxist concern for historical disjunctures and periodization, paid special attention to the feudal period preceding the Qin-Han and its disintegration in the Warring States period.74

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While Tao saw the role of commercial capital as the critical factor in the Western Han, Wu Han stressed the conflict between socioeconomic conditions and economic policy in the successive years of Han rule and found the fundamental reason for Han problems in political ideological causes with economic effects. He pointed out that the underdevelopment of the economy stemmed from the “poison of the traditional ideology of neo-Confucianism” which had been installed as the orthodox canon by Emperor Han Wudi. Wu Chunhan says: The people in power in that period became hereditary neo-Confucian autocrats. The only policy to promote agriculture was to put everyone to work to do farm work . . . they had never considered how to consolidate agricultural organizations, how to increase the production rate, how to protect the security of agricultural workers, how to improve tools and seeds to increase efficiency.75

In his view the Western Han “must bear their responsibility” for China’s historical overreliance on agriculture as the basis and the corollary policy of limiting commerce. Wu’s indictment of the scholars is powerful: “the social background of their lives then was purely that of parasites on the laborers.” Even the family and friends living in the scholar’s household receive condemnation, “like maggots living on a bone they become a parasitic attachment.”76 In this way, the economic burden of society is increased by decreasing the number of producers and increasing the consumers. For him the scholar class, the fountainhead of the neo-Confucian autocrats’ power, bore the brunt of the blame, a theme he would return to again and again in his writings in the next years and even in his later years in the People’s Republic. The problem then was social and political faults that weakened and limited the Chinese economy. Bringing this down to the present of the late 1920s he drives home the point that a “relationship can be seen between the latent power and the relationships of the present day scholar class, the nation’s political structure and the titles of positions and the origin of traditional thought two thousand years ago.”77 Ironically, this criticism of the power that remained in the hands of the modern intellectual class was a criticism of his own class. In critiquing Wang Mang, Tao Xisheng’s explanations for Wang’s failure are economic and social, while Wu’s are essentially social and political. Tao points to the contradictions in society in his argument: “Contradictions between the accumulation of commercial capital, private land annexation and the proletarian peasants were not resolved by Wang Mang’s social policy but were accelerated by it.” Tao, who had a much clearer idea of socialism than either Wu or Hu Shi, does not hold up Wang Mang as an example of a socialist. He thought Wang’s policies were fundamentally wrong-headed policies and alienated him from the people.78 On the contrary, for Wu the failure of Wang Mang’s reform policy did not rest with Wang but resulted from a failure in society, from the intellectuals’ conservative doctrines and

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the poor training they had given the masses of the people. For Wu the intellectuals had a central position of responsibility for society.79 He does not propose they forego that position of responsibility but implies they must follow a more selfless course and take responsibility for the broad society. Thus Wu Chunhan’s first work was completed in the context of several streams in historical thought. Hu Shi’s emphasis on evidential research and his thematic concerns as well as the cultural history framework were important. But in Wu’s choice of topic and in the breadth of the economic and political issues he raises about his topic, the young Wu goes beyond Hu Shi’s own area of scholarly research and conceptualization of his research problems which were mainly in the history of literature and philosophy. Other streams of ideas, particularly the social history themes of New History and historical materialism, are already at play as influences on Wu’s thought. Although Wu shared Hu Shi’s interest in Wang Mang as reformer, Hu’s attraction to Wang was closely related to Wang’s relationship to the work of his minister, Liu Xin, who had regained the Old Texts, a question of great interest to evidential research scholarship. In other words, the question of texts was an important stimulus of Hu Shi’s interest in Wang Mang. But this was not so with Wu Chunhan. His interest stemmed from attraction to broad issues of social history closer to the sort laid out by Liang Qichao in his New History. On the other hand, Wu does not impose ideological categories of analysis to create historical order as did the would-be Marxist historians engaged in the social history debate. Although he proposes that socialist/communist ideas about land distribution are appropriate for current-day problems when he mentions Lenin, Marx, and Sun Yatsen’s ideas on equalization of property,80 he does not pursue the idea to any conclusion about the Western Han. Instead he only regrets the early failed attempts at land reform. This is a young historian in touch with contemporary progressive ideas whose work is grounded in evidential research but not a student of issues relying on ideological constructs for his analytical framework. The questions which interested Wu were basically social history issues. Evidential research, kaozheng, for him was a tool to approach these issues, not an end in itself which it often became in Hu Shi’s reordering of the past.81 This first work by Wu prefigures many of the themes which would appear later in his writing: for example, keen interest in the relationship of basic economic issues with political power, the problem of autocratic power and its aggregation, the place of the intelligentsia in the polity, and the lives and economic conditions of commoners. Not the least important, the relationship of the historical past to the present.

ONLY THE BEGINNING: TEACHER AND STUDENT In the spring of 1930 as he attended Hu Shi’s last lectures in the Cultural History class, Wu’s admiration for his teacher grew. Hu’s lectures were exciting

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to Wu and his teacher’s encouragement of student scholarship inspired Wu to begin writing letters to him about his own research. Although at first the letters were left unanswered Hu Shi obviously valued them as he kept them permanently among his papers. Probably the professor was talking with Wu at the school when he came to campus. The letters radiate the fresh enthusiasm of a serious and eager young scholar deep in his research. From the first letter, written 19 March 1930 before Hu Shi resigned from Zhonggong, until the last letters, written in the spring of 1932 after a mature student-teacher friendship had developed, Chunhan is a completely serious student totally immersed in his research projects.82 In writing to his teacher, he was reaching out in the centuries-old customary student-teacher relationship. Letters written by younger people to senior scholars about their academic work had been a way of respectful communication among learned people and an important way the teacherstudent relationship was nourished in past times. Liang Qichao once wrote a very interesting account describing the way junior scholars who were involved in evidential research studies in eighteenth-century Qing communicated in letters with senior people to ask about academic questions and discuss their own work.83 Although by the twentieth century the world had changed in many ways, nevertheless, the student-teacher relationship and the dependency that went with it did not stop with the eighteenth-century scholars. Of course the need of scholars to exchange information and learn from more senior learned people, and the need to have a place in the hierarchy and to rise in that hierarchy remained even in the twentieth-century academic world. In the 1930s students writing this sort of letter to teachers were still part of the social world of Chinese scholarship. Reading the letters gives a sense of the student’s world. In his first letter to Hu Shi, Wu expressed his hope for help from his teacher apologetically, “I know very well that you are very busy but, other than you, I cannot think of any teacher who is better able to explain and guide in using the scientific method.” The reason he writes the letter is to discuss with Hu his current project on the Buddhist monk, Faxian, and his journey to India. He outlines the table of contents for his research on Faxian’s Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms (Faguo ji)84 and asks Hu for the loan of several Buddhist texts for his research and also for Hu’s opinion on the feasibility of publishing several texts. His fleeting plan in Yiwu to go to study at the Tiantai monastery with the scholar monks likely remained an unfulfilled dream that stimulated his interest in Buddhism. At this time, Hu Shi himself was deeply involved in Buddhist researches. The aspiring disciple, already attracted by Buddhist history, was trying to follow in the direction of his teacher’s footsteps, both in subject matter and methodology. Hu had only just returned to China in the spring of 1928 from a lengthy journey abroad to research Buddhist texts taken away from the Dunhuang caves in Western China to foreign lands. He was working on a

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biography of the monk, Shen Hui, who he considered to be the founder of Chan Buddhism.85 Considering Wu’s research projects, it is amazing that he had the time to attend class or sleep. From his first letter to Hu Shi it is striking that his two years at China College had been filled with research and absorption of new ideas about history and culture and about the scientific methodology that Hu Shi promoted. Wu not only was delving into old texts on the Western Han and working on the pilgrimage of the Monk Faxian, he was also looking into a Tang dynasty uprising of the Kunlun slaves in Guangzhou. The year before he had begun to compile an index of the place names in the South Seas kingdoms that were in ancient Chinese records such as the Twenty-four Histories, unofficial anecdotal historical writings, and Tang and Song short stories and biji.86 A feature of all of these projects was Wu’s use of modern evidential research methodology—the heart of Hu Shi’s variety of history in contrast to the broader brush of the New History of Liang Qichao and the West. At the same time the young student was also venturing into the problem of the authorship of the Ming novel Honglou meng which Hu Shi was studying at the time. This had attracted him while researching yet another intriguing inquiry that he had begun on the legendary Queen Mother of the West and the Kunlun Mountains. In a second letter three months after the first, Chunhan reported in the vein of a true disciple that he had found an article by the late Qing scholar, Liang Kongchen on the Honglou meng authorship which corroborated Hu Shi’s own work on the authorship of the novel.87 In the traditional scholarly world, when a serious student wanted to make his way he needed a master to follow who would help him. In the world of post–May Fourth, despite all of the iconoclastic rebellion of the May Fourth Movement, the social world of scholarship still worked the same way. Wu knew this and recognized that without a patron a poor young country scholar would remain forever at a distinct disadvantage. His first year at China College had been a decisive turning point that put him firmly on the path of commitment to serious historical research. Then the spring of 1930 suddenly became a time of great uncertainty at the college and for Hu Shi. This meant for Wu Han as well. Having only just found a teacher who truly inspired him, he was dismayed to learn of Hu Shi’s impending abrupt departure from China College because of his conflict with the Guomindang. Wu worried he might lose the opportunity to study with Hu Shi. Hu Shi left China College in May 1930 even before the spring term was over.88 For Wu, having actively pursued his goal to study history ever since his break with his family, it was natural to reach out and seek his teacher’s guidance more actively when he learned Hu would not be remaining at China College. Now that he stood at the edge of the circle of a man who might be able to help him get an education that would lead him to the sought-after historical knowledge and world of intellectuals he sought he

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could not let the chance slip out of reach. Shanghai’s worldly pleasures and excitement held no particular attraction for Wu, nor did the possibility of an education in business, commerce, or the professions. It was entrance to the privileged world of scholarship that beckoned him, particularly the world of historical learning.

HU SHI AND POLITICS—LEAVING CHINA COLLEGE Hu Shi’s own situation was difficult at this time. Despite having warned readers and students away from ideology and taking political positions for years, more often than he perhaps wanted to admit he had taken a political stance himself in his actions and writings. He had been out of the country at the moment of the Chiang Kai-shek coup in 1927, only arriving in Shanghai in May, a month after the Guomindang bloodletting in the city.89 When he returned he became alarmed at the harsh conservatism of the new Guomindang government and what he saw as their distortion of democratic concepts of government. Once aroused he had published bold political criticism of the ruling party and its government directed at the lack of a constitution for the new state. In the post–Northern Expedition period the Guomindang Party made vigorous moves to consolidate its position and to strengthen its own power against the political left. Since the party’s central principle was nationalism, it’s main ideological thrust was directed at unifying and strengthening the country. The objective was the end of imperialist power and regaining the sovereignty of the country. The Nationalist Party took the position that to accomplish this its leadership must be accepted without question in the struggle for liberation from semi-colonial enslavement to the imperial powers. There could be no dissent from the unity of the country under party authority and leadership. However, the curtailment of dissent did not sit well with many intellectuals. There were GMD sponsored campaigns against what they saw as radicalism in student groups. Press censorship became harsher. At the same time, the ministry of education moved to increase control over the liberal schools. Even though China College had escaped the earlier campaign requiring registration and control of foreign sponsored schools that had affected Zhijiang University, it was now, in 1930, subjected to Nationalist political pressure, due partly to the reputation of students and teachers for independence and in large part to Hu Shi’s direct and outspoken criticism of the Nationalists.90 Never a revolutionary, Hu’s purpose in writing was not to overthrow the Guomindang authority but to reform and enlighten it through criticism. Hu Shi had begun writing articles in 1929 boldly attacking the Guomindang politics, publishing them in Crescent Moon.91 He then gathered the essays together in 1930 with several by Luo Longji, Pan Guangdan, and other like-minded

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friends connected with Crescent Moon and published them in a volume titled Human Rights.92 In his open collision with the Nationalist Party over crucial political issues during 1929, Hu’s own long-standing opinions favoring democracy seemed to reach a high watermark. As time passed over the years of increasing Japanese pressure and aggression he would become more sympathetic to the Nationalist government’s problem of resisting Japan and strengthening the unity of the country. By the following spring the Nationalist Party’s desire to silence Hu Shi and see him out of China College and out of Shanghai was fulfilled when he succumbed to GMD pressure and resigned in midterm. In return for his resignation the school, it seems, was granted full official accreditation by the Ministry of Education.93 For Hu Shi his resignation seems to have been acceptable in spite of loyalty to his alma mater because of his conflicted wish from the beginning to not be at China College and the competing demands of research and publishing commitments and his administrative duties at the college, as well as his desire to be out of the eye of the political storm with the GMD. Actually Hu had never relished the burden of leading China College, preferring to be in Beiping rather than at the school in Shanghai. Within a few months he would be appointed the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Beijing University.94 After Hu Shi left, Wu Chunhan had to consider what steps to take for his own future. He knew that China College without his teacher was not where he wanted to be. With the new school leadership now controlled by the Guomindang and students expected to comply with the party control, Wu, as his teacher, found the mixing of Nationalist politics and education oppressive and undemocratic. He began to make plans for the next year. Friends, including Gu Jiegang who had been teaching at China College for a time, urged Wu Han to go north to Beiping to enter one of the universities in the city.

NOTES 1. Snow (1958), 15–27; Jordan (1976a), 123–26; Isaacs (1951), 130–85; Tien-wei Wu (1976), 149–59; Chang Kuo-t’ao (1972), 586–87. 2. Israel (1966), 23–24. 3. When Nanjing, meaning Southern Capital (known as Nanking in English), was designated as the national capital by the GMD Nationalist government the name of the city of Beijing, meaning Northern Capital, was changed to Beiping, Northern Peace. 4. China College is the English for Zhongguo gongxue. I have followed Yeh’s (1990) translation of the name of the school. Grieder (1970) translates it as China National Institute. Writings of people connected with the school refer to it as a daxue (university). 5. Interview 128; in Hu Shi xuanji (1966), originally published “Zhongguo gongxue xiaoshi” [A history of China National Institute] (1929); Liu Zhiying (1982); Grieder (1970, 1981); Yeh (1990), 92–93, 105–12.

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6. Ming Yi (1984). 7. For descriptions of the organization of the school see Hu Shi (1966), 1–10; Grieder (1981), 153–54. Yeh (1990) in her discussion of the school does not point out that the school was completely Chinese in its operation and always had been. For foreign managed schools see Lutz (1971). 8. Liu Xiancai (1984); Interview 45; Luo Ergang (1958); Xia Nai (1984), 50–51. 9. Hu Shi de riji (1985), April 26, 1928; Yang Lianggong (1980), 105. 10. Hu Shi (1966), 1–5; Hu Shi (1952); and Li Ao (1964). 11. Hu Shi (1966), 8-10. 12. Hu Shi (1966), 10; Ma Junwu, “Zhongguo gongxue,” in Liu Zhiying (1982), 15–16. Ming Yi (1984). 13. “Hangzhou Christian College President’s Report” of 1925–1926 and 1926–1927; and “Report of the Vice President for the Year 1927–28”; also Lutz (1971). 14. Luo Ergang (1989), 13. 15. Ming (1984); photographs viewed by this author in Yiwu. For photos of the campus Liu Zhiying (1982). 16. Liu Xiancai (1984); Wu Han, “Kunlun nu kao,” Xiandai xuesheng, in WHSLJ, 63. 17. Liu Xiancai (1984); Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 47; Interview 128. 18. Ming Yi (1984). Luo Ergang (1989), 12–18, esp. 14, mentions Wu Han and Wu Jiangxiong, the woman physicist, as two renowned scholars Hu Shi fostered at China College. 19. Chen Shou (233–97), Standard History of the Three Kingdoms [San guo zhi]. This is from Liu Xiancai (1984). 20. Liu Xiancai (1984). 21. Luo Ergang (1989). Luo was also a student of Hu’s at Zhonggong. For the evidential kaozheng discourse Elman (1984), especially 6, 42–46, 71–76. 22. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 47; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Hu Shi (1966), 10. Cultural history was Wenhua shi. 23. Qi Sihou (1949); Yu Yingshi (1984); Ku Chieh-kang (1931); Grieder (1970); Chou (1984). Interview 16. 24. “Paode daming,” Hu Shi’s description of the instantaneous fame that as a graduate student at Columbia University, not even in his own land, he had received in China on publishing in New Youth on language reform. See Yu Yingshi (1984), 5. 25. Keenan (1977), 68–69. Hu Shi (1958), 193–99. 26. Hu Shi (1929). 27. Yang Lianggong (1980), 105. Luo Ergang (1989). 28. Lin Yutang, Dangdai Han-Ying cidian. 29. Hsiao (1975). 30. Without reference to a particular locus, culture has been defined as “the social and intellectual formations of a group,” American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1975). Furth (1976), especially Schneider (1976), 57–89, and Furth (1976), 113–50. Kenji (1990); Young-tsu Wong (1989). 31. Iggers (1983). 32. Lamprecht (1891); Lamprecht (1905), translated as What Is History? (1905); Gilbert (1965), 342. For the emerging idea of culture in Germany and earlier pathbreaking work of Edward Burnett Tyler in England, see the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), 3:527, which quotes Tyler’s definition of “culture” (1871), “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole

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which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Iggers (1983), 197ff. 33. Dow (1898), 431–48. Liang Qichao (1897); Hao Chang (1971), 95–100 passim. 34. I have discussed this change in historiography in Mazur (2007), 106–42. 35. For Liang’s ideas on qun, see Shuo qun xu (1936a). For Liang see Hao Chang (1971); Huang (1972); Xiaobing Tang (1996); Karl (2002). 36. Shuo qun xu (1936a). This is discussed in Hao Chang (1971), 109. 37. Lin Yutang, Dangdai Han-Ying cidian. 38. Furth (1976), 113–50; Kenji (1990); Young-tsu Wong (1989); Fitzgerald (1996). 39. Zhang Taiyan, “Zhongguo minguo jie,” Taiyan wen bielu, juan 1, quoted in Chen Dengyuan (1935), 1, 6. 40. Lin Yutang, Dangdai Han-Ying cidian for jiao: teaching, instructions; Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary for li: external exemplification of eternal principles and also respect or reverence. We understand lijiao as the sense of respect for the teaching of eternal principles; in the context of the canon, order is the highest value. 41. I translate minzu used by Zhang as “ethnic,” here meaning a people or cultural group. It is also sometimes translated as nation, sometimes as race, sometimes as a nationality or people. Zhang Taiyan (1904). 42. Kenji (1990), 121. 43. Wu Han, “Shuo daode,” “Zai shuo daode,” and “San shuo daode.” 44. Furth (1976), 33–34. 45. Later Mao Zedong’s notion of the people’s culture and the people as the agents of that culture expanded and altered the construction of the idea of culture and the custodianship of culture. 46. Fogel (1979), 219–35. 47. Gu Jiegang (1931), 40–41. 48. For national studies (guoxue) and Hu Shi’s part in it, Schneider (1971); Fogel (1979). 49. Hu Shi (1923). Later in most schools of higher education the basic course in Chinese history would become Tongshi (General History). 50. Hu Shi (1923), 43. Hu Shi’s ideas of cultural history are much broader than Liang Qichao’s, for which see Liang Qichao (1930). 51. Zhu Jingnong (1930), in 1935 edition, 199. Iggers (1983), 197–200; Higham on Lamprecht, Higham (1965), 342–43. 52. Liang Qichao (1902). Robinson (1912), Chinese translation by He Bingsong; Higham (1965). 53. Yang Lianggong (1980), 106. 54. Hu Shi was John Dewey’s disciple and when Dewey was in China spent a lot of time by his side. However, in the 1930s Hu began to move away from Dewey’s emphasis on democracy toward accommodation with the GMD. Chow Tse-tung (1960), 221; Keenan (1977), 22–29. In Baihua wenxue shi (1929) Hu Shi looked for early manifestations of vernacular literature but this seems to have reflected his interest in the culture of the nation rather than to provide applications of democratization. 55. Hu Shi (1930), ji 3, juan 9. 56. Hu Shi (1923), 48. 57. Hu Shi (1923), 47. Zhengli is translated here as “systematic examination.” 58. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han de jingji zhuangkuang, hereafter Xi Han. Page numbers are from the 1941 edition. For Hu Shi’s resignation from China College see Hu Shi

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(1979), letter 509, Board of Directors Acting President Cai Yuanpei letter to Hu Shi, 15 May 1930, 14–16. 59. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; the frontispiece of Wu Chunhan, Xi Han. 60. Liang Qichao (1902). 61. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han; Liang Qichao (1902), 2–4. For Liang’s historiography Xiaobing Tang (1996). 62. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 1, 72. 63. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 73. The junxian system was the administrative districts of counties and prefectures, which the founder of the Qin dynasty instituted when he unified the country. Before 1929 little modern historical research had been done on the Han economic situation. 64. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 13–14. Wu’s assessment of Wang Mang’s importance is quite different from the Later Han historian Ban Gu’s opinion of Wang in the “Eulogy” in Qian han shu [The history of the Former Han Dynasty] (1955), 470–74, and also from Homer H. Dubs’s evaluation of Wang in the Ban Gu translation, 3:534–36. For Wang see also DeBary (1960), 1:218ff. It seems that there were very few published models of a nontraditional analytical type available to Wu when he did this study in 1929–1930. This indicates his work was novel and even path breaking. 65. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 1, 14. 66. Chang Kuo-t’ao (1972), 135; see Dirlik (1989), 60ff. 67. Since the 1890s Chinese exiles in Japan had been discussing socialism. For these discussions, Feng Ziyou, Geming yishi, 3:213, quoted in Bernal (1976), 55–57. For Liang Qichao see Bernal (1976), 104; Scalapino and Schiffrin (1959), 335. Also Li Yu-ning (1971). 68. Qi Sihou (1949), 29–30, points out this shift in thinking after May Fourth. Liang Qichao’s essays on New History include Xin shixue (1902), contained in Yinbing shi heji (1936), 4:1–11; Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (lectures given in 1922); and Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (bubian) (lectures given in 1926–1927). The latter two were published together in Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (1936). 69. Tao Xisheng Zhongguo shehui (1929); Zhongguo fengjian (1929); Gu Jiegang (1947), 100–102, page numbers from 1964 edition; Tao Xisheng (1964), 109–10; Teng (1949), 131–56. Dirlik (1978). 70. Tao Xisheng’s title was the same, Xi Han jingji shi [The economic history of the Western Han], hereafter Xi Han (1930), 45–48. 71. Tao Xisheng (1964), 110. Tao lists Zhongguo gongxue as a school he taught at in 1929–1930. 72. Gu Jiegang (1964), 100–102; Teng (1949), 148. 73. Tao Xisheng, Xi Han, was written in September 1930 according to his note, 87. Wu’s essay, a class requirement, was finished before 29 June 1930 when he had already received 80 yuan for the manuscript. 74. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 73. Dirlik (1978), 114. For the Marxist position Guo Moruo (1932). 75. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 74. 76. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 75–76. Wu’s metaphor of the scholar as parasite was also used in 1929 by Tao Xisheng in analyzing the intelligentsia. Dirlik (1978), 114. It was a metaphor used in Communist writing, as well as in previous Chinese thought. 77. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 75–76. 78. Tao Xisheng Xi Han, 85–87.

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79. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 76. 80. Wu Chunhan, Xi Han, 1, 14. 81. See Guo Moruo’s critique of Hu Shi on this point in Guo Moruo (1930), preface, 2–3. 82. Wu Chunhan to Hu Shi, 19 March 1930, Hu Shi Archives, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. Hereafter letters are cited WC to HS, followed by date. This was the first of a number of letters written by Wu Chunhan to Hu Shizhi from March 1930 to May 1932. Twelve of these letters turned up in the Cultural Revolution in Hu Shi’s papers left in Beiping in 1949 after he fled from the Communist occupation and were used against Wu. Photographs of the originals made by this author are the source used here. The letters were made public and published in Lishi yanjiu 3 (15 May 1966): 49–65. Checking the published version with the originals has shown that the published letters were faithful to the originals. The letters are now held in the Hu Shi Archives and have been published in Su Shuangbi (1993). 83. Liang Qichao (1959), 72; Elman (1984), 203–4; Hu Shi (1979). 84. WC to HS, 19 March 1930. Faxian was the first important Chinese pilgrim to reach India, A.D. 399. On his return he brought the Buddhist scriptures back to China. Wu’s work on Faxian was apparently never published. 85. For Hu Shi’s oral history, Chinese Studies in History (Spring 1981): 96. Shen Hui heshang yiji, Hu published in 1930. 86. WC to HS, 19 March 1930. 87. WC to HS, 29 June 1930. 88. Hu Shi resigned 3 May 1930; Cai Yuanpei letter no. 509, in Hu Shi (1979). 89. Hu Shi zhushi xi nian mulu yu fenlai suoyin (1984), 182.90. Grieder (1970), 217–45; Israel (1966); Yeh (1990). 91. Grieder (1970), 226–39; Yeh (1990), 338n53. 92. Hu, Liang, and Luo (1930), 61–81. 93. Greider (1970), 245. 94. Greider (1970), 245.

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hen Wu Chunhan learned unexpectedly that his teacher was leaving China College, in fact had been forced out by the Guomindang, he was shocked. He had only studied one year at the school. Without Hu Shi at Zhonggong he had no interest in remaining. Going back to Yiwu was not an option—he remembered vividly how dull teaching in the village school had been and the angry scenes with his father over the arranged marriage and his future. Most important for him now was to continue his studies. In the course of the year Chunhan’s main goal had become firm: to study deeply the documents and books from the past and dedicate himself to becoming a historian. An inner excitement about the historical past had begun to take hold of him. With the 80 yuan from the sale of his Western Han manuscript, he could buy a train ticket to Beiping. He decided to go north and enter one of the universities in the city. The ancient capital city with its universities and libraries was a mecca that attracted many scholars. At the end of June in a letter to Hu Shi, Chunhan wrote that he wanted to transfer to Yanjing University and asked Hu for a letter of recommendation.

NORTH TO BEIPING In August in great anticipation Wu boarded a train in Shanghai for the long ride north across the dusty central plain to Beiping (Northern Peace), as the Nationalist government had chosen to name the Ming-Qing capital city of Beijing (Northern Capital) since they had removed the capital for their government to Nanjing. Believing he had already received permission to enter Yanjing University as a second-year transfer student in the fall term, he 73

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assumed he would be studying at the elite American missionary sponsored university where the historian Gu Jiegang would be teaching. The city the train carried him toward was the educational and cultural capital of China in 1930, although no longer the political center it had been in the past. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s moving the national capital to Nanjing in central China for strategic reasons, Beijing’s symbolism as the capital of imperial China for more than the last five hundred years could not be wiped away. In 1930, the city was the main metropolis of North China, a city of almost a million and a half people, built during more than five hundred years according to a city design symbolizing supreme imperial power and sovereignty. In contrast to Shanghai, in the 1930s Beiping’s economy was largely preindustrial. Other than newly operating tramcars, most people had little contact with modern machines and relations of production. The little industry there consisted mostly of small shops that were miniature factories operating on a piecework basis scattered about the city. The city’s overall character had been established long before as the imperial capital in the Ming and Qing dynasties. With the physical design anchored by the imperial axis running through the Forbidden City, it “remained a city stubbornly defined by walls, walled enclosures, and gates.” A Western observer who visited the city two years later described it as China in miniature, “a city of strange contrasts, of long vistas in beautiful parks and dirty, crowded alleys, of gilt-edged palaces of splendid dimensions and miserable hovels of confining limits.”1 From the moment he got off the train at the station near the towering city walls Chunhan could see this northern city was very different from Shanghai. A Southerner experiencing the North for the first time, he soaked up the different feeling of the dusty city and later wrote: “as soon as I got off the train I was overwhelmed by the sight of the city walls at the Qianmen Gate and by the tower of the gate, so high and so thick.” Shouldering his bundles he walked through the gate in the thick walls and on through the dusty streets, taking in the unfamiliar sights. “When I entered the walled city, the streets were very straight with shops on both sides, some with all kinds and shapes of signs hanging over their front doors, not a bit like in the South. I thought it was all very strange.”2 He went directly to Yanjing University on the far northwestern outskirts of the city, to see about his transfer to the school to begin his studies there. To his consternation, the Yanjing administration refused to allow him to transfer because his English grade was only a C. This was a serious setback for Chunhan, completely unexpected. On encountering the school’s refusal, he thought of taking the entrance examination for National Beijing University to enter that same fall.3 After making his way back into the city to the Beijing University neighborhood north of the Forbidden City he discovered with dismay that the university entrance examinations were already past for the year. The only thing he could think of to do was find a room in a dormitory in the university neighborhood and go every day to study at the National

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Beijing Library near Beihai Lake, west of Beijing University while he tried to figure out what to do about finding a school. The library, in a beautiful Chinese style building, wasn’t far from Beijing University. Each day as he walked to and from the library he passed the back gate of the Imperial Palace and crossed the bridge between Beihai Lake and Zhongnanhai Lake. If he climbed to the top of Coal Hill he could see the vivid yellow tile roofs of the Ming palaces, surrounded by the dark pink magenta walls of the Forbidden City and in the distance the massive city walls. To the west between Coal Hill and the library lay the two lakes. In the summer, under the leafy canopy of trees in the city were hidden thousands of one and two story houses behind gray walls, most of them arranged around central courtyards. Along the east and the west of the palace grounds ran tree shaded streets with the courtyard compounds of officials and wealthy families ranged behind the gray walls. Many years later one of these courtyard homes would be Wu’s own home when he was an official in the city government. It was to that home on Beichang Street that his niece came to see him in the perilous days of late 1965 on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. When he walked through the streets and lanes in the summer of 1930 he saw the sights of the city. The main streets ran north to south and east to west in a grid pattern. Long rows of one-story shops with brilliant facades decorated with elaborately carved lions and gaping dragons lined some of the streets. The myriad of signs with gaily colored symbols announcing the business carried on within had caught his eye when he first arrived from the South. In the summer there were street sellers with fruit—peaches and persimmons, watermelons cut in juicy slices. In some of the stalls men made onion pancakes with a delicious aroma to sell to the people walking in the streets.4 Sounds of hawkers filled the air, especially in the morning, when farmers brought the fresh produce from the countryside in their baskets slung on carrying poles. Among the carts and people filling the streets an occasional pig rooted in the garbage. Rickshaw pullers dodged children playing in the lanes and roadways as they delivered their regular passengers to the gates of the walled compounds. Water carts brought water to those without wells and the night soil carts picked up from the latrines along the hutongs. Long, wooden wagons pulled by horses and mules, moved goods about the city, and tall camels trailing along in caravans brought heavy packs from the Northwest. For a young student from the South, familiar with the verdant paddy fields of the Zhejiang countryside and fresh from the lively commercial and industrial activity of the Shanghai area the sights and sounds of dry, dusty Beijing were very strange at first. Teng Ssu-yu, who had come to Beiping from the South as a student a few years before Wu, recalled that the first look at Beiping had seemed strange to him also. “Shanghai was a New York in the 1920s” with much wealth and a Western atmosphere. But in Beiping dust was everywhere, penetrating

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the eyes and ears and in your clothes. Grass didn’t grow so when it rained mud was everywhere. He felt miserable—as though he were in a foreign place; even the sound of the speech seemed completely different. Six months later he still felt strange, but after two years he wanted to stay forever and felt totally at home. The people spoke slowly; he heard refined language everywhere, and the environment was cultured. No one despised the blue cotton gown of the poor students. If one had money you could spend it on dinner, good Western clothes, on prostitutes, and associate with diplomats, but it wasn’t necessary to have money to enjoy oneself. In Shanghai it was different, money impressed. In Beiping wealthy people often dressed very simply—to blend with the ordinary people. There were hordes of beggars on the streets, but no robbers. Scholarship was important and respected in Beiping but in Shanghai money talked.5

INTERLUDE AT YANJING Through Professor Gu Jiegang’s help that fall, Wu was introduced to the Yanjing University Library Sino-Japanese Department where Professor Hong Weilian gave him a job as an assistant.6 Wu had no choice but to wait until the time came the following year to apply for entry to another university. Gu’s presence on the faculty had attracted Wu to Yanda, as students and faculty called Yanjing University. The historical themes that he worked on in his own research while he waited to take the next entrance examinations were related to problems Gu Jiegang was studying.7 Yanjing University had just moved from makeshift quarters inside the walled city to its beautiful new campus in the northwestern countryside village of Haidian beyond the city walls. This new campus of Yanjing was a former Qing palace with extensive gardens and a little lake known as Weiming hu (No Name Lake). Many new buildings of fine Chinese traditional design were added by the University to house the educational functions of the university. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in the 1950s Yanjing University was closed and the campus was transferred to Beijing University. Hong Weilian, known in the West as William Hung, was professor of history and director of the Graduate Institute at Yanjing University, as well as the chairman of the Library Committee.8 His first year in Beiping Wu’s work in the Yanjing library as a cataloger provided him a livelihood and also gave him the opportunity to get to know the Yanjing library collection. He was able to work on his own research as well as save a little money. Because of the depth of this young student’s historical knowledge and his commitment to serious research, he was encouraged by Gu Jiegang and also attracted the interest of other scholars at Yanjing such as Rong Geng and the historian Deng Zhicheng.9

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During the fall, Wu continued writing to Hu Shi still in Shanghai about the dating of the Honglou meng. He proposed an argument to Hu that questioned Hu’s hypothesis on the dating of the author Cao Xuejin’s death. Chunhan’s views in the letters are based on a manuscript he has just discovered in the Yanjing library and that he wants to tell Hu Shi about. He adds that he has asked the library to purchase more volumes.10 He offers to copy the poems in the manuscript for Hu’s research. This was the last letter he would write to Hu Shi for many months. At Yanda in the early 1930s the students divided into two groups. The Western Clothes Group, later known as the “Bourgeoisie Group” (Zichan jieji zu), were wealthy students who affected Western ways, and the Blue Gown Group were poor students who wore the long blue cotton gowns of poor scholars. Years later this was the recollection of Teng Ssu-yu, proud to have been a Blue Gown.11 Teng recalled that Wu also belonged to the Blue Gown Group. Sometimes the Western clothes wearers were called the “False Foreign Devils.” The members of the two groups often contested with each other. Chunhan was remembered by Teng, who was three years his senior, as “near sighted and wearing glasses, short, perhaps five feet tall, a studious and dutiful person, who worked steadily from eight in the morning to five at night.” The “most powerful person in the library,” Professor Hong Weilian, had an office along the corridor about forty feet beyond the room where Wu worked with several other people. Passing by the workroom often, Hong took special notice of Chunhan. Teng Ssu-yu was Hong’s research assistant and higher than Wu Chunhan on the status scale. Although Wu was very young and new in the library, Teng knew from Professor Hong that he considered Wu a very good scholar. At Yanda Chunhan, a newcomer to the world of academics, was a bit shy and rather reserved with people he didn’t know well. He wasn’t thinking about specializing in the Ming period yet, although Teng and he talked some about Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming dynastic founder. It was Teng’s impression that what Wu knew about Zhu at that point had been absorbed from his youth in Zhejiang in Jinhua Prefecture. Zhu Yuanzhang had occupied Jinhua for six crucial months during his campaigns against the Mongol dynasty in the fourteenth century.

ANOTHER TRY AT ENTERING UNIVERSITY The next spring, Chunhan wrote once again to Hu Shi, by then at Beijing University as the new dean of arts and letters. In the letter he writes about his research and his uncertain educational situation—he has been very busy on a large new research project but most pressing is his plea for personal contact and for advice on his educational situation. He tells Hu he left China

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College after Hu Shi left in 1930, intending to transfer to Yanjing University. However, because of a C in English, he has not been allowed to enter, even though the university had already mailed him permission. He tells Hu that Gu Jiegang introduced him to the Yanjing library for a job. Now he wants to enter the Beijing University History Department in the autumn term and resign from his job at Yanjing.12 The research project he enthusiastically tells Hu Shi about in his letter was his first work in the Ming era, a “Chronological Biography of Hu Yinglin.”13 When Wu published the completed biography a few years later it was lauded as an excellent biography of the Ming figure. A sixteenth-century literatus and bibliophile from Lanxi County in Zhejiang, Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), had been relegated to second-rate status by dynastic historians. However, after the beginning of the twentieth century when a small treatise on forgeries in ancient texts, Sibu zheng e (Forgeries in the four branches of literature), was found buried in one of his collected works scholars had begun to take renewed interest in him.14 From the same part of Zhejiang as Wu, Hu Yinglin’s home was in Lanxi County, next door to Chunhan’s home county of Yiwu. Wu’s native place ties with his biographical subject made it very easy for him to borrow the rare old books needed for the biography from friends at home in Jinhua and Yiwu, because many of them collected texts on and by Zhejiang figures. His choice of Hu Yinglin as the first major subject for his own research demonstrates the importance of native place ties in Chinese scholarship as well as in social relationships. Beyond native place, Wu’s interest in Hu Yinglin was stimulated by contemporary scholarship he was becoming familiar with that often questioned critically long accepted constructions of the historical narrative. Gu Jiegang, who Wu often talked to, was one of those at the forefront of this sort of deconstruction. A few years before, Gu had become particularly interested in Hu Yinglin’s work on forgeries in the sixteenth century. In 1929 just before Wu arrived in Beiping, he had published a newly punctuated edition of the three chapter Sibu zheng e. Gu’s “doubting antiquity” approach questioning the authenticity of ancient texts was to be a lasting influence on Wu. This sort of iconoclastic skepticism about earlier constructions of the past was a hallmark of much post–May Fourth thinking.15 Actually, Hu Shi’s application of scientific method to textual criticism had been a strong stimulus to the “doubting antiquity” mode of historical thought. Gu’s own description in his “Autobiography” in Gu shi bian gives an idea of what he had learned from Hu Shi about the application of scientific method to the revaluation of the national culture. He says “when attending the lectures of Dr. Hu Shih, I discovered that the historical method consists in the apprehension of a given event from every conceivable angle and in every possible relationship . . . no event being regarded as having sprung

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up independently of other considerations.”16 Gu Jiegang fully absorbed this idea of the interrelatedness of historical events, an approach to history that today is called “contextualizing.” As time went by Wu Han made this conception of how history should be studied and narrated an important element in his own historical thought. The interrelationship of historical events was also an important component of the New History of the American James Harvey Robinson at Columbia where, in fact, Hu Shi had studied; undoubtedly he had been influenced by these ideas from Robinson. This time Wu’s letter about his ideas on the chronological biography (nianpu) of Hu Yinglin got an immediate response from Hu Shi. Wu had suggested that from his own research he thought Gu Jiegang’s ideas on Hu Yinglin’s birthdate and the length of his life might be revised. He also pointed out that the attacks on Hu Yinglin by past scholars had been based on their assumption that he had depended on his mentor, the scholar Wang Shizhen. The critics had simply paid no attention to the actual sources of Hu’s own thinking. Chunhan observes in his letter that now he sees investigating the sources of a man’s thinking is important. He gives a sketch of the nianpu draft, then asks Hu Shi’s opinion on his method and for suggestions of additional sources. The reply Chunhan received from Hu Shi was a turning point for him. It seems that Wu had taken up a subject that Hu Shi found great interest in— the day after he received Wu’s letter Hu enthusiastically wrote to Chunhan: “I remember you and know your work. When I heard you are writing the ‘Hu Yinglin nianpu’ I was very happy.” Hu Shi says his outline for the nianpu is excellent. “When you are finished writing I want to read it. . . . When you have free time come and talk. Luo Ergang is living in my home.”17 Luo had also been a student of Hu Shi’s at Zhonggong. With this response from Hu several years of a close teacher-student mentorship began that deeply affected Wu Han’s life long after the friendship cooled and the two men had moved apart in scholarship and politics.

SCHOLAR AND GUIDE Hu Shi’s taking Luo Ergang to live in his home was another instance of Hu’s great interest in his students. In the spring of 1930, while they were all still at China College in Shanghai, Luo also had been in Hu’s Cultural History class. He was graduating that year and, uncertain about what to do after graduation, had gone to Hu for advice. Luo was from a poor family in Guangxi Province in the far south. When talented poor students without family resources appealed to Hu he often helped, especially if he liked their work. When he heard Luo’s worries about the future he invited Luo to live at his home to teach his two young sons and work on the transcription of the

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collected papers of his deceased father.18 After graduation Luo had moved into Hu’s home in Shanghai and then, later in December when Hu moved his family to Beiping, Luo had moved north with the Hu family.19 At that time, Hu Shi was absorbed with the question of the authorship of the novel, A Marriage Destined to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan). It would be a good model for teaching students the evidential method of research.20 He wanted to prove that Pu Songling was the author and thus he put Luo to work on the research. The methodology of criticism and authentication of documents was at the heart of Hu Shi’s evidential research scholarship on the great classical novels. His was a modern version of the kaozheng (or kaoju) of the Han studies scholars in the Qing.21 Hu’s contribution to the course of historical research in China came basically, not in synthetic analysis or critical theory, but rather through advocacy and application of the two principles of literary “scientific” methodology: making a bold hypothesis and following it with careful textual research to prove or disprove it. For Gu Jiegang, another of Hu Shi’s students, it was also this teacherscholar who had taught him about scientific historical method. The influence that Hu’s work had on many young scholars in the 1920s and 1930s can be seen from Gu’s comments on reading Hu Shi’s preface to the newly punctuated edition of Water Margins (Shuihu zhuan) in 1920. Gu wrote: I had no idea that the text or the authorship of a novel like that could involve such complicated study. The changes which the novels underwent in various periods resulted in different versions, or literary strata, in which the material was deposited. Had not the Shui Hu been critically examined by Dr. Hu Shih, its various changes in structure would have remained as they had in the past, entirely unnoticed. And who would have thought that, by reducing this mass of confused data to its simplest forms, it would be possible to obtain such perfect lucidity!22

The thought that antiquity as it had previously been accepted could be doubted, what we today call “deconstructed,” that the ancient Sage Kings could be set aside and what had once been recognized as the canon could be questioned, fell on fertile ground with the young Gu Jiegang. Gu went on to develop this questioning of documents into the “doubting antiquity school” (Yigu pai) method of scholarship, which questioned the authenticity of hitherto accepted events.23 While working under Hu Shi’s guidance, Luo Ergang began to explore historical questions he wanted to research himself. His first choice had been to take up the spring and autumn and the Warring States periods as his research field. But instead Hu recommended that because textual materials for modern history were relatively more abundant and it was easier to determine their reliability it would be better for Luo to concentrate on modern history. Hu’s choice of research questions was often driven by the availability of reliable materials, which could be studied with evidential methodology, rather

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than by the fundamental nature of the historical question. This stress on the primacy of documentary sources was consistent with the Qing school of evidential research. At first Luo had been thoroughly discouraged by Hu’s advice, as later he recalled he had felt as “though my teacher had dashed me with a basin of cold water.” After this he floundered about for two years until he finally found the Taipings of the nineteenth century, a subject he could totally commit to. A major reason behind Luo’s choice was that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, previously unstudied, was closely connected with his own home area, Guixian, in the far south of China. While visiting his family, he uncovered important documents about the local activities of the Taipings at the beginning of the uprisings that led to the major rebellion. For Luo this was a subject distinctively his own and obviously important to Chinese historical understanding. He recognized it was of great relevance to modern Chinese political history. For many young intellectuals, certainly for both Luo and Wu Han, the historical significance of the subject was a fundamental concern. Up to Luo’s time, the Taipings had been neglected by orthodox historians due to their heterodox belief system and also to the Qing dynastic taboo on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which had been a major threat to the dynasty. Luo would be among the first to take up historical study of the Taipings. As the years went by with his published works, he became a preeminent authority on the rebellion.24 As soon as Wu Chunhan heard from Hu Shi that he was in Beiping and Luo Ergang was a part of his household, Wu went into the city to Hu’s house to meet him and see Luo Ergang again. From this time a close friendship began between Wu and Luo that lasted all of their lives, long after they both had lost touch with their teacher, Hu Shi. Wu considered Luo his elder brother, as Ergang was a few years older, although Luo was far more reserved than the lively Wu.25 Long after Wu Han’s death in the Cultural Revolution Luo still carried the memories of Wu and grieved for his friend.26 After he visited Hu Shi, Wu wrote excitedly about meeting Hu Shi again to his old elementary school teacher and mentor, Yang Zhibing, back in Yiwu. He told Yang he had talked to Hu about his hope of entering Beijing or Qinghua University and about his financial problems. He had explained to Hu that he had nothing to live on but his salary from his job at Yanjing University which he would have to give up to enter the university. Wu had gotten the feeling Hu was really concerned about his situation. In his letter to his former teacher about his new relationship with Professor Hu, he told Yang that at the very moment “he was saying to me, ‘If you need . . .’ he took out his wallet and wanted to give me money.”27 Hu Shi saw that Chunhan was hoping for help in transferring to Beijing University. However, he explained that he couldn’t use his influence to help him get into the university where he had just become the dean because this would be favoritism, but he would help him find a way to pay his fees.28 Hu recommended that in the meantime Wu audit classes at Beijing University to

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prepare for the examinations. In the past sitting in on classes at Beida (Beijing University) without registering for the class had been very easy to do. But Wu soon discovered it would not be so easy. Quite disappointed, Wu wrote to Hu that he had learned Beida no longer allowed auditors. Revealing his anxiety about the examinations he is facing, Wu writes to Hu “Now I can manage for English, Western History, and Logic, now I can read English, but French is uncertain and Mathematics a total loss. . . . I must clutch the feet of the Buddha. This really is an unlucky blow!”29

FINALLY A STUDENT AT QINGHUA In the summer Wu sat for the examinations for both Beijing and Qinghua Universities. As he feared, he failed to pass the Beida exam because of the zero he received in the mathematics section, although his grades in Chinese literature, Chinese history, and English were perfect.30 His dodging the math requirement in middle school had come back to haunt him. Unfortunately, Beida’s rules were clear—no one could be admitted with any zeros in the exams. There was nothing Hu Shi could do to help. Chunhan’s Qinghua University entrance examination results were also mixed; once again he got a zero in mathematics and excelled in history and literature. However, while the rules at Qinghua were the same, its financial situation was very different from Beijing University’s. Although it had recently been made National University, yet the school still received American money from the Boxer Indemnity. This meant there was more university money available to help students. Furthermore, Wu benefited because Qinghua was undertaking reforms to change the nature of the university; students who concentrated on Chinese cultural subjects were needed. Because of its origin as a preparatory school for students who were going to study in the United States on the Indemnity Funds, Qinghua had always been oriented to the West, by the source of its funds, and also in the content of the subjects it taught, as well as in the background of the faculty and students. However, as a result of the surge of nationalist feeling influencing education throughout China since the establishment of the Nationalist government, Qinghua was going through university-wide reforms to reorient the school to serve the needs of the country as a national university. The curriculum was being reoriented to stress subjects with relevance to the rising consciousness of a sovereign Chinese state. Subjects that particularly emphasized Chinese culture were given more attention. The school was moving away from only teaching about matters of importance in a Western environment.31 To develop a strong program in Chinese history students thoroughly prepared in the Chinese classics, traditional literature and history were necessary. Since Wu’s achievements would be a definite asset for

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a student in the Chinese history department, for him Qinghua willingly dropped its math requirement. In early August he wrote another letter home to his teacher Yang, with the exciting news he had been accepted at Qinghua. However, now he had a new worry. He knew he would have to work and feared it wouldn’t be easy to find a job. But, he told Yang, both Gu Jiegang and Hu Shi had promised to help him. In the early part of the summer Chunhan had visited at Professor Gu’s house at Yanjing University and both professors had encouraged him.32 This anxiety, even at the moment of his excitement at getting into Qinghua, lets us see his difficult situation. The next time he wrote Yang it was to tell him the news of his good fortune—“there is great progress about going to school.” Two days before he had gone into the center of the city to Beida to see Hu Shi. Hu had already written to Qinghua’s acting president Weng Wenying, dean of humanities Feng Youlan, and history department chairman Jiang Tingfu about Wu’s situation. Hu had sent along Chunhan’s first draft of “The Chronological Biography of Hu Yinglin” so they could see his work and asked them to arrange a work-study job for Wu.33 In his letter to President Weng Wenying and Dean Zhang Zegao, Hu had written of Wu Chunhan: Among the students transferring to Qinghua this year is Wu Chunhan, transferring from China College. He is a student of very high achievement and his foundation in Chinese literature and history is very good. He has done several pieces of research, all very objective. This year he has worked at Yanda library and written a “Hu Yinglin chronological biography” himself. Neither his merit nor his judgment are weak. This person’s family is very poor; he, himself, wants to do work-study but he knows no one at Qinghua and fears that he will not be able to get an opportunity to work. So I’m writing this letter to entreat you two elder brothers especially to give your attention to him, to give him a workstudy opportunity. If he has no chance to work, he will not be able to enter the university. I have advised him to make the decision to enter and promised him that I would ask you two elder brothers to help him.34

Chunhan could rest easy now. He told his primary school teacher: “There is great progress in entering school and I don’t need to worry about it.” The Qinghua academic dean, Feng Youlan, had arranged with the chairman of the history department, Jiang Tingfu, for a work-study position and the university had informed Chunhan that a position would be available to study in the history department. He knew now that his living expenses would be covered as well as the tuition and with that he stopped worrying about how he was going to continue his education. Hu Shi had even lent him 40 yuan to buy books he needed to start school. Wu wrote to Yang that Hu’s “great kindness and boundless love have moved me deeply.”35 Clutching Buddha’s feet had worked. Ironically at this point both Yanjing and Beijing

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universities, regretting passing up this brilliant student before, tried to entice him away from Qinghua with offers after they heard about Qinghua University’s arrangements for him. However, Wu stuck by his decision to study at Qinghua. When he registered 9 September, Chunhan met the provost, Zhang Zegao, and the chairman of the history department, Jiang Tingfu, who both made him feel they would take special care of him because of Hu Shi’s recommendation. He continued to work at Yanjing library for Hong Weilian right up to the day he started class at Qinghua since he needed even the last half month’s pay. In a letter to his old teacher at home he betrayed how much he missed his home and family when he wrote about his brother, Chunxi, who had also gone to Yang’s primary school, now in Beiping beginning to study that fall at a preparatory school. He told Yang now he would have a family member close by for the first time in the last four years since he had been away from home.36

CHOOSING MING HISTORY The first time Jiang Tingfu, chairman of the history department, talked with Chunhan he advised him to specialize in the history of the Ming period. Jiang had been appointed to carry out reforms in the history department as a part of the university-wide reform Qinghua was undergoing. Since Wu had already been researching in the period the decision to specialize in the Ming era was not difficult for him. In his next letter to his teacher Yang to tell him that at last he was really going to have the chance to carry on his studies, he wrote “I have decided to concentrate on Ming history. The history of the Qin-Han has already been studied deeply. When I have time I will review this history but it will be a minor study.”37 Although Chunhan’s father was still alive Yang Zhibing seems to have become a substitute for the harsh father Chunhan had left behind in the village. He worried in the letter that the books he would be using in his studies would not be his. The history department would have to borrow some of the books he would need on the Ming dynasty since they were not available in the university library. He revealed the scholar’s need to appropriate the material book itself as well as the ideas of books: “I must have my own books eventually.” If the books are those of others, “when I read the book and find important parts or have some new explanation I cannot mark it or write notes in the books.”38 He remembered from Yiwu the inconvenience of walking miles to borrow other peoples’ books and then having to return them as soon as he finished reading. Now he longed to have his own collection. Several days after Professor Jiang talked with Chunhan, Hu Shi wrote Wu about his studies, heartily approving Jiang’s recommendation that Wu specialize in the Ming period rather than the Han. This was a real turn-around

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for Hu from his earlier idea that the Ming was not an important era. Perhaps he was simply adapting to the changing intellectual climate of the times. True to his ideas about evidential research, Hu wrote to Chunhan: Materials for the Qin-Han period are so scarce it is a difficult period for even experienced scholars to work in, much less beginning students. If the material is scarce then too many assumptions must be made, there is not enough solid evidence. With later periods materials are relatively more plentiful and although at first it seems difficult, actually they are comparatively easy to put in order (zhengli) because there is solid evidence to back up analysis and theory. . . . The best method for training.39

Hu’s emphasis on the abundance of materials for satisfactory research contained the same warning he had given Luo Ergang, to stay away from the Warring States period, with the difference that Hu had recommended to Luo that for him the modern period would be the best to study.40 Hu Shi’s reluctance to see his students work on the early periods was related to his mindset about historical studies needing to be strictly based on evidential research and textual criticism. Further, he tended to be negative about research that emphasized theory and analysis. Hu particularly wanted his students to stay away from ideological left-wing issues and the style of analysis in the controversy over social history that was brewing among Marxist inclined historians. These were the interpretations that flitted from “theory to theory.” For the historians participating in the controversy, interpretations of the early historical periods were especially important. The sparseness of textual material in these eras did not bother them because it was not the text, which, for them, was the final and most central criteria but rather the basic trends of history and the theoretical ideological interpretations of these trends.41 Hu Shi, on the other hand, was against ideologies in the broad political and academic sense and certainly didn’t want his students to become academic ideologues. If Luo Ergang and Wu Chunhan were to be Hu’s special students, he wanted to make sure their research would have the maximum possibility of attaining his standards for scientific evidential research. If the historical materials were adequate and reliable the scholar could research and write on a historical hypothesis and obtain the greatest degree of “truth” from the evidential research to substantiate the hypothesis. In the teacher/ student relationship, the master then, feeling confident of the historical materials, would be in a position of leading. The success attained by his disciples would enhance the master’s reputation and of course the master’s fame would rub off on the students. Although this was the way it had worked in traditional scholarly lineages when the student’s life was oriented around the master teacher, by the 1930s the scholarly world was changing. The exclusive hold the master-student relationship had on the participants was much more fluid and subject to multiple external professional academic

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influences that had not been present in the fixed hierarchical, scholarly social relationships of previous centuries. The lineage relationship, which Hu Shi attempted to follow in his relationship with Luo Ergang and further along with Wu, was no longer a relationship in which the master’s sway was the only influence dominating a young scholar’s life.42 Over these years, Wu Chunhan developed other close relationships with teachers and colleagues with the effect that there were multiple influences on his historical thinking. While Hu Shi’s encouragement was in the background of Wu’s choice, in actual fact, the main reason he shifted so eagerly to the field of Ming history was the coupling of his own intense interest and work in the Ming period with Jiang Tingfu’s recommendation, that he concentrate on the Ming.

QINGHUA HISTORY DEPARTMENT REFORM Jiang’s encouragement of Wu’s specialization in the Ming wasn’t accidental. What he had in mind for Wu fitted into his plan for the history department. Wu came into the Qinghua History Department at a critical time that meant exceptional opportunity for him. In 1928, after the new Nationalist government nationalized the university, a major reorganization was undertaken to bring it into line with the government’s educational policy. History, interrelated as it was with culture and the nation, was a crucial area for China. The first step was to appoint renowned Chinese scholars to raise the quality of teaching and scholarship. Curriculum reform, a graduate program and a faculty that had its own research program were the center of the effort. Jiang Tingfu, a student in history at Columbia University, had been appointed in the fall of 1929 to chair the history department and lead the reforms. He was given a free hand to reform the department, revise the curriculum and hire new faculty as well as carry on his own research. Qinghua’s financial support was better than any of the other universities in China because of its dual source of funds from the Ministry of Education and the Boxer Indemnity endowment. This meant that without question Jiang would have ample funds for faculty and library expansion.43 Jiang Tingfu was a distinguished diplomatic historian and authority on China’s own diplomatic history. In his view, previously when foreigners discussed China’s international relations their view was only from the standpoint of the relations of the Western nations to China, never from the perspective of China’s own viewpoint of its relations with foreign countries. It was essential to study international relations from a China centered viewpoint. In his own research Jiang focused on gathering and publishing a collection of diplomatic documents from the Qing Grand Council. This was the sort of document of key importance to understanding China’s relations with the West from the Chinese viewpoint.44

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Before the reforms began, because of Qinghua’s background, the curriculum in the humanities and social sciences had a strongly Western flavor. Jiang deplored the fact that the history faculty was able to teach courses on the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, or Italy but lacked scholars, either Chinese or Western, who could teach about how China was governed. There were no professors who could teach about the evolution of Chinese political thought. According to Jiang, “China was educating students for leadership roles in the United States, not China.”45 The need for teachers with a broad command of Chinese history was recognized by many historians as a need that must be fulfilled by the universities.46 With the advent of cultural history courses such as Hu Shi had taught in Shanghai at China College, history was beginning to be taught from the broader conceptual perspective as general Chinese history (Zhongguo tongshi). Jiang Tingfu illustrated this problem in the faculty in the Qinghua History Department with his example of a famous older scholar by the name of Yang, a specialist in the Han dynasty, trained in textual exegesis but unable to summarize “exactly what took place during the four hundred years of the Han dynasty”—what the basic political, social, and economic changes were.47 Contrary to this scholar’s approach, in his paper on the economic conditions of the Han period Wu Han had dealt with the basic changes in the Han in the broad scope. Before Jiang brought Wu Han into the department, he had already recognized it was necessary to bring in younger scholars who “would be able to tell where China started, where she went, and where she landed.” In describing the changes he made in his five years as Qinghua department chairman, later he said, “I dropped traditional scholars and brought in younger men—I gave them all the time they wanted. I said ‘now you go ahead and work up a course on, let us say, the Manchu dynasty. . . . Do you see the big problems during that dynasty? Go ahead, I will provide you with the books, the assistants, the time. In the meantime, in order to make a living you must teach something. Teach anything you want, but you must strive for a new course in two or three years time.”48 In this way, Jiang led historians at Qinghua toward a pedagogy and scholarship that aimed at strengthening the teaching of history by specialists who knew the literary and historical background, were trained in modern methodology, and were also able to conceptualize and synthesize the broad picture. Jiang deliberately did not encourage students to think of history as a way to make money or have a political career, but instead emphasized: “historical research had no glory or glamour, except that of finding the truth.” The Qinghua History Department did not have many students but he encouraged a few brilliant young men to stay for graduate work to enter a relatively neglected field.49 Wu was an ideal candidate for Jiang’s departmental reforms as he had no thought of growing rich, his only desire was to study history. In those years there were few students of talent who did not think

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of specializing in science, or growing rich or both. Following his aim, Jiang wanted to find young scholars who would remain in the department as teachers to increase its breadth and strength. Among others, he brought in Gu Jiguang to specialize in the Northern Five Dynasties, Sui and Tang, and Wu Chunhan to study the Ming. He also appointed younger established historians who were fine scholars such as Lei Haizong, Chen Yinque, Xiao Yishan, Shao Shunzheng, and Zhang Yinlin, altogether a stellar group of historians for the department.50 Jiang Tingfu’s plans for development of the Qinghua History Department were carefully thought out. It was his idea that history students be exposed to the social sciences such as economics, anthropology, and comparative government. There must be a balance between Western and Chinese history. And within Chinese history there needs to be balance between Sinological history, that is textual criticism or banben kaozheng such as taught by Chen Yinque, and the analytic, generalizing approach taught by Lei Haizong and Jiang Tingfu, himself.51 Far from turning away from Western influence, for breadth in historical study Jiang advocated reading Western history as a model, selecting the strong points of Western historical methods and viewpoints; then using the methods thus learned to analyze and synthesize issues in carefully researched studies of Chinese history. Of all the university level history departments in China, according to Professor He Bingdi (Pingti Ho) who was a Qinghua history student in the late 1930s, only at Qinghua were history and social science equally emphasized, Chinese and Western history given equal importance, and evidential research and synthesis considered equally important in historical studies.52 Jiang Tingfu’s reforms created a modern history department for Qinghua where, over the next two decades, Wu Han had an important part, first as a student and then as a scholar and teacher.

BEGINNINGS OF A MING HISTORIAN In Jiang Tingfu’s reorganization plan for the Qinghua History Department a specialist in the Ming period with modern training was needed. Until the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the last dynasty ruled by Han Chinese, was one of the most neglected periods in the study of Chinese history.53 Only a few older scholars had specialized in the Ming period. Among them Meng Sen was the best known. Li Jinhua and Xie Guozhen were beginning to publish on the Ming period at this time. The main reason the Ming period had been so little studied was the result of the Qing (Manchu) dynastic rulers’ taboo on their Ming predecessors, reinforced by the eighteenth-century Literary Inquisition of Emperor Qianlong (1736–1795). Little scholarly attention had been paid to the Ming period during the sway of the Qing due to the

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difficulty of locating Ming texts and the censoring of research on Ming questions. Historians had simply found safer periods to study. After the Qing downfall in 1911, although there was no longer a taboo, old habits lingered; Ming documents and books were hard to find and uncatalogued because of the Qing blackout. Because of this lid on consideration of the Ming it was generally thought to be an uninteresting period with no seminal changes. Even Hu Shi had thought the Ming a “dull trough” in Chinese history. By the late 1920s, as documents came to light, the realization rapidly grew that the Ming, the last truly Han era, was a really important period much worthy of study. Since there were almost no mature scholars of the Ming trained in modern methodology Wu’s research in the period was to quickly draw attention.54 Already immersed in the era through his work on Hu Yinglin, he took up the Ming as his field of concentration with excitement and immediately set about buying books he needed. From his first commitment, Wu never deviated from his dedication to the Ming era although from time to time he did work in other eras. The same day he met with Professor Jiang, in high spirits he wrote to Yang Zhibing back in Yiwu telling him: “Recently I found the History of the Ming [Ming shi] and am reading it day and night.” In a few days he wrote again about several other books he had just bought on Ming subjects. His brother Chunxi, nearby in Beijing, was helping him make notes. In his letter to his former teacher his excitement over his commitment to plunge into this new study shines in his description of his newly acquired books. The books that he was buying and arranging on his desk were mainly about or by the scholar Wang Shizhen. He had become very interested in Wang while working out the dating of The Dream of the Red Chamber. He is now happily thinking of writing what he calls an “academic chronicle of the Ming dynasty Zheng, Jia, Long, and Wan periods (Late Ming, 1506–1620).”55 In the midst of this excitement Chunhan had kept a piece of extremely important news to himself, only telling his family later. In the meeting Jiang Tingfu had told him that after he graduated he would be able to stay on at Qinghua as a regular member of the faculty. To be promised a position after graduation at Qinghua University while he was only beginning as a student was an undreamed of opportunity for Wu. What a turn of events in his life! Academic jobs were hard to get, especially at the best universities. With his father’s declining health, not only was there no possibility of help from home but already with the deteriorating family financial situation as the eldest son he was beginning to take on family responsibility. He had begun to help his younger brother Chunxi, and there were also the two younger sisters.56 Qinghua’s strong financial position meant that there were generous sums of money available to operate the university. The university supplemented the national university faculty salaries with sabbaticals in the United States or Europe, as well as travel expenses and lower teaching loads. Among the elite of academia, a scholar at Qinghua had the greatest possible opportunity

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in China for advancement in his academic line of study. It was an exciting time to be at the university.57 The Qinghua campus still today northwest of the city, very close to Yanjing University (now the Beijing University campus) had once been the estate of a Manchu prince. A few of the old buildings on the Qinghua campus with graceful tiled roofs and courtyards remained from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the earliest modern buildings were barracks of gray brick built for dormitories. Many of the larger modern buildings had been designed by Chinese architectural students who brought back from their studies abroad a mixture of American and European styles. The spacious university campus was on the edge of the ruins of the Qing summer palace, Yuan Ming Yuan, looted and destroyed by the troops of Lord Elgin and Baron Gros in 1860. A favorite place for students to walk, these haunting ruins reminded them of the extravagance of the Qing emperors and the barbaric brutality of the colonialist British and French expeditionary forces in the nineteenth century.58

BOOKS, WORK-STUDY, AND BIBLIOPHILES Chunhan’s work-study job in the Qinghua History Department archives organizing documents and books was a joy to him. Jiang Tingfu had begun a project to build up the university historical archives from his own research on the documents of the Qing dynasty grand council. When he became aware that a great deal of the Qing archives, including Ming material, were being sold as waste paper, greatly alarmed, he bought sacks of documents by the ton to preserve them. The sacks were dumped in piles in storage space at the university waiting to be sorted. Jiang also went regularly to Liuli Chang, the antiques and old book market in central Beiping, to search out books to add to the Qinghua archives. Wu worked Saturday afternoon and Sunday every week in the archives59 to sort and order the books and documents. For him it was like being paid to eat intellectual sweets. He learned a lot and was able to watch in the dusty piles for special finds among the manuscripts and books. And find treasures he did—during his first few months at Qinghua, he discovered a hitherto unknown edition of the Qing novel, Lü ye xian zong (The Traces of the Immortals in the Green Fields). Although he immediately wrote an essay to share the find with the literary and academic world, a modern printed edition wasn’t published until 1986.60 Work in the Yanjing library and now in the Qinghua archival collection put him in an exceptional position to enrich his knowledge of texts and be in touch with all sorts of historical issues. For one thing, the world of the Chinese book collector over the centuries was opened wide for him. Coming from Zhejiang, he had a strong sense of being part of the unique tradition of

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historical writing of his home province. Although the tradition had flowered in the Eastern Zhejiang (Zhedong) School in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even in contemporary times this heritage has remained a major influence on historians.61 The Hu Yinglin biography Chunhan was working on was a study of one of the scholars in this Eastern Zhe school. As a major bibliophile, Hu Yinglin himself had amassed a collection during the Ming period that preserved many important Ming and pre-Ming volumes. Before Chunhan left Yiwu he had already known that publishing and collecting had flowered in Zhejiang along with the Zhedong Historical School. While working at Yanjing he had begun to compile a history of Zhejiang book collectors, including 399 bibliophiles beginning from the Jin dynasty, which he published as a long article in Qinghua Weekly the first year he was at Qinghua.62 Wu underscored his native place ties (tongxiang) embedded in his historical writing by calling this article a “Zhejiang product.” In the preface he expressed his fascination with book collecting, recalling that even as a child he had loved books. Actually, his work was even more thoroughly a Zhejiang project than might be suspected because his old Yiwu friend and drinking companion, Jiang Shan, now in Beiping as well as his younger brother Wu Chunxi, had both helped on the organization and compilation of the data on the Zhejiang bibliophiles.63 Jiang Shan had come north to Beiping seeking political refuge from Guomindang secret agents hunting out Communists in the South. In this article, and a later piece on Jiangsu bibliophiles, Chunhan’s emerging social historian’s interest in the issue of the cultural and educational resources available to the broad number of people in a particular time period make for interesting reading. His analysis dwells on the significance of the transformation underway from elite, private collections, such as the ones he is describing, to libraries open to everyone, containing books from both the past and the present. He ascribes the trend to influence coming from Europe. The new libraries being built are constructed to prevent fire and control dampness and rot. He predicts that the scientific management and arrangement of these collections will lead in the future to the disappearance of private collections. He deplores the past imperial habit of storing books in royal palaces, far away from the possibility of scholars’ use and subject to destruction by worms and rot.64 Two years later when he published the companion work on the neighboring province of Jiangsu bibliophiles he placed new emphasis on economic and social factors. Wu is moving away from strict evidential research in these works toward looking at material aspects, broad social and economic influences, in literary life. He points to the influence on merchants of the upper social strata book collecting among the scholar bureaucracy and how the merchants began collecting themselves, thus distributing and preserving books more widely.65

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HU SHI’S GUIDANCE In September of Wu’s first year at Qinghua, soon after he decided to specialize in the Ming era, Hu Shi wrote to advise him about his training and research. Hu’s advice, vintage Hu Shi, expressed the kaozheng scholar’s lineage expectations and the paternalism of senior Chinese scholars toward younger talented scholars. Now having reversed his view of the importance of the Ming and become an enthusiastic proponent of study of the Ming period, Hu advised him on the application of the principles of good research methodology to his historical studies.66 He gives Chunhan a five-point study plan for research in Ming history. First, he lays out a reading program in Ming history. True to the kaozheng scholar’s heritage he tells Wu to carefully read and punctuate the Ming History (Ming shi), not yet at that time published in a modern punctuated edition.67 While reading the Ming shi Chunhan must also read the Narrative of Ming History from Beginning to End (Ming shi jishi benmo).68 In this way the relationship of these basic Ming texts will become clearer. This will help in getting closer to what had actually happened in the Ming court. Furthermore, Wu will gain a fuller understanding of what the History of the Ming includes and leaves out, since the history was compiled by the succeeding Qing dynasty to serve their own dynastic purposes. Once he has read the Ming History, Hu continues, he must read the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty (Ming shi lu) for comparison.69 (The Veritable Records were the records of events made by Ming court recorders during the Ming period.) During his reading, Hu wrote, he should be recording the names of people, including their style names and studio names, native places and titles in tables for reference. Hu pointed out having these notes would help with his future reading on the Ming period and by implication his analysis of the people and the affairs they participated in. In addition, Hu Shi cautions the young Wu not to concern himself with the history of the Manchus before they conquered China because other people are working on this, namely Meng Sen who has written a history of the founding of the Manchu dynasty70 and Xie Guozhen who is also studying the materials of this period. Hu explains this is a separate and special field from Ming history. Hu Shi’s warning on this reveals the way Chinese scholars often tended to divide fields and thus consider an area of research to be territory appropriated by specific scholars and thus off limits to other scholars. Furthermore, it hints that perhaps Hu suspected Wu may have already been talking of researching the preconquest phase of Manchu history. In any case, the independent Wu paid no heed to Hu Shi’s advice on scholarly territoriality, for within a short time he began to delve into predynastic Manchu history conducting what became a long-standing intense research interest of his own. Even more interestingly, Wu did this with Meng Sen’s

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blessing and encouragement and would continue his work on this project until the last years of his life.71 Hu Shi’s third point in the letter was that after Wu has studied the entire history of the Ming period he can write essays on specialized research issues.72 In Hu Shi’s instructions, “the smaller the topic the better . . . in writing very thoroughly about a narrow topic you get excellent training. You absolutely must not write on broad topics.” Hu’s guidelines again were directly related to his own roots in Qing evidential scholarship. Although he cautioned against broad topics, he says nothing about what was wrong with broad topics or why narrow topics might be preferable. Nor does he elaborate on what the ultimate objective of this training ought to be for Wu. This concern of Hu Shi’s with narrowly focused topics was in direct contradiction to the trend toward synthesis and analysis promoted by Jiang Tingfu and by the New Historians in the study of social history. It is especially puzzling and contrary to Hu Shi’s own recent praise for Wu Han’s broadly conceived paper on Han economic conditions. In Hu’s fourth point in his letter to Wu he talked about research methodology, instructing Wu to keep detailed notebooks on his readings with careful notation of line, chapter, and volume of every source to use later for reference in citing sources and quoting. This was the nuts and bolts of scientific methodology in the social sciences. Traditional Chinese historical writing not only did not pay attention to crediting sources carefully, but in fact, the source commonly was either not acknowledged at all or, if acknowledged, then only by title, making it impossible for the reader to verify or check the author’s sources. Hu Shi’s careful attention to this aspect of scholarship was a result of his melding understanding of modern “scientific” method with the evidential research notation books and careful note taking Qing kaozheng scholars had long used.73 In his study plan for Wu’s Ming research, the fifth point Hu made was on finding Ming records of foreign contacts, which he knew were scarce. Hu Shi obviously assumed that these questions of foreign contact were important areas that Wu would be interested in exploring. However, Wu’s own research interests, as they matured and he began to develop independently, would draw him principally to focus on internal issues of Chinese history rather than issues related to China’s foreign contacts. A final and pointed postscript to Chunhan at the end of his letter was a paternalistic thought added by Hu Shi: “Please remember: when you study Ming history, I don’t want you to write a whole History of the Ming; we only want you to train yourself to be a scholar who can put Ming historical documents in order (zhengli). You must not misunderstand the intention of Mr. Jiang Tingfu’s advice.”74 In his warning against rewriting Ming history, Hu Shi may well have had in mind the current of radical Communist historical materialism, which was stirring among some historians and swirling through the social history debate. Hu

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did not want his disciples to involve themselves in any fundamental reinterpretations or syntheses of Chinese history. Rather he wanted them to limit themselves to the restudy of historical material, in Wu’s case this meant Ming era material, to make sure it was true and to fill in the gaps.75 From this letter it is clear that it had not occurred to Hu Shi that there might be a big difference between his and Jiang Tingfu’s ideas about the task of historians. In fact, there was a crucial difference between Hu’s and Jiang’s views on the practice of history which was relevant to Wu Han’s intellectual development. When Hu Shi cautioned Wu Han that the aspiring historian’s task was only to “be a scholar who can put . . . historical documents in order,” his code language for evidential research, he came down in a very different place than where Jiang Tingfu stood. To Jiang it was the historian’s task to take what he had learned from the original texts about the course of history and from these facts synthesize his own interpretation of a whole period, even write a general history. Jiang was not the least opposed to careful questioning in documentary research. After all he had spent years searching for and “putting in order” documents on Qing diplomatic history, but he saw that without the overview of a general synthesis and conclusions drawn from the facts, the objective of the research was missed.76 Although Chunhan may not have appreciated this fundamental difference between his two mentors on the writing of history at the time he received Hu Shi’s letter with the flattering words of advice to him, in fact, as he studied, researched, wrote, and published over the next years he experimented with various combinations of evidential research methodology and analytical synthesis. In the process his own historical approach developed and his understanding of the need to go beyond Hu Shi’s use of evidential research methodology grew. Without doubt Jiang Tingfu greatly influenced Wu in this development. Nonetheless, at the moment he received Hu Shi’s letter, of course Chunhan was deeply impressed by the prestigious Hu’s advice. He was already enthusiastically trying to practice the methodology Hu advised. These were the same principles that Hu had impressed on Luo Ergang and many other students. For years after, Wu’s historical writing was influenced but not limited to Hu Shi’s conception of the historian’s task as putting Chinese history in order with textual evidential investigative methodology. In following his mentors’ guideposts, far from being a sycophant, Chunhan never lost his independence of mind. It was not long before he began to work on a project on the pre-Qing rise of the Manchus in the state of Jianzhou and to frame topics more broadly than Hu advocated.77 The divergence in Wu Han’s and Hu Shi’s thinking on Chinese history would be subtle but fundamental in the coming years as the pull of the substance of the Chinese cultural and historical viewpoint became stronger for Wu and the influence of Western thought and alignment with Western culture became stronger for Hu Shi.

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FIRST DAYS AT QINGHUA AND THE MANCHURIAN CRISIS In the autumn of 1931 just as he began his studies at Qinghua University national events in China suddenly crashed in on Wu’s world. On 18 September, only six days after he got Hu Shi’s letter of advice encouraging him in his study of the Ming, the Japanese launched an attack on Chinese forces in Manchuria, the homeland of the Qing founders of the last Chinese dynasty. This attack and the aftermath shook Chinese society deeply. Although students and professors all reacted in their hearts and minds to the crisis of the Japanese aggression, some with internalized agony, some in active demonstrations, nevertheless, life still went on in Beiping. Because it was the beginning of his first year at Qinghua, Chunhan was occupied with getting settled in his studies and working out his personal situation. He had little time to do more than talk anxiously with his friends when they met and discussed the latest news. The flood of many dislocated students who had fled from Manchuria to Beiping added to the students’ anger and fed the tension on campus. Since the Northern Expedition in 1928 Chiang Kai-shek had not yet achieved control of the whole of Chinese territory, nor was the political situation stable.78 The Nationalist government’s clumsy attempts to appease the Japanese aggression in Manchuria angered the students. As they realized the Guomindang was unwilling to actively oppose the Japanese, open criticism of the Nationalist government erupted on the university campuses. Out of this anger over the invasion, given the name “Jiu yiba” after the Chinese for the date 18 September, there grew a patriotic student movement known as “September Eighteen.” But in his first weeks at Qinghua, despite the campus unrest, anxious to make a good start at Qinghua Wu kept his focus on Ming history and his job in the library. He was frustrated as he waited two months before actually starting work in the archives due to the new library building just being completed. Meanwhile he had bought the Ming History and was reading and punctuating it and taking notes on note cards according to Hu Shi’s advice. Several days after the Japanese invasion, he wrote to Hu to express his gratitude for the work-study job so vital for his living and book buying. In the letter Chunhan told Hu about his research work, but wrote not a single word acknowledging the national crisis.79 By December he was completely immersed in his study of the Ming Shi and had begun to find the kind of textual problems that Hu Shi thought should be the main objective of the historian. He reported two cases to Hu where there was confusion in the identity of people due to a name being omitted and concluded from this that there must be many more errors such as this in the Ming History.80 It seemed that Wu had truly been infected by the evidential research bug as he began to experience the satisfaction of the

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“kaozheng” historian in “reordering history,” much like the pleasure of a detective who solves the riddles of a crime.

A FRIEND FROM HOME: NATIVE PLACE IN THE FLESH Only a few days after Wu had taken the examinations at Qinghua in August his name had been posted in the Beiping newspaper, Shijie ribao, in the list of new Qinghua students. His Jinhua middle school roommate, Qian Jiaju,81 saw the name “ Wu Chunhan” on the newspaper list and wondered if this wasn’t his old friend from middle school. In great excitement he immediately wrote off a letter to Chunhan to find out. As soon as Wu received the note he took the bus into the city to find Qian. What a reunion!—Although the two had been separated many years, when they saw each other again it was as though they had never been separated. Throughout his life, for Wu as for most Chinese, ties of native place (tongxiang) were especially important despite his adult, urban-centered life. Bonds of location were often important in his choice of subject in his historical research as well as in his personal friendships. Strong interpersonal bonds interlace Chinese society in general and ties of locality, the sense of place one comes from, have always added bonding that permeates the social milieu. Wu and Qian would remain friends throughout their lives. Long after Wu’s death Qian recalled their ties of home place, school, and party (Democratic League), when he talked of their “san tong” (three ties).82 When they met, Wu’s first words were from the Christian Bible, “The prodigal son’s return is more precious than gold, Jiaju. I have already completely reformed.” Then he admitted sheepishly to his friend: “only I still haven’t stopped smoking!” The two launched into catching up on the years they had been separated and Wu’s good fortune to have his disciple relationship with Hu Shi.83 For both, a lot had happened since they were roommates in middle school. After Qian had transferred to another Jinhua school they had lost touch. Somewhat of a wayward playboy, Wu had transgressed the bounds of Confucian morality with his wild behavior, and flaunted his father’s authority by refusing the arranged marriage, but Qian had not conformed to the Confucian norms of behavior either. However, his transgressions had been at a higher level of rebellion for they were against political authority. During the 1925 May Thirtieth Incident he had participated in radical socialist activities and afterward helped organize a Communist Party organization in Jinhua. During the May Thirtieth incident in Shanghai when a student activist from Shanghai University came to mobilize people in Jinhua, Qian had stopped going to his English class with an American missionary woman and had gone out on the streets to demonstrate against imperialism and the warlords.

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He told Chunhan that becoming a radical political activist made him feel he could “never again be the slave of Westerners.”84 When he was sixteen at the end of 1925, Qian Jiaju had become a kuadang (dual party member) with two identities, one as a Nationalist Party (Guomindang) member and one as a Communist (Gongchandang) member. This was during the First United Front when both Nationalist and Communist parties were underground and dual membership was encouraged by the CCP.85 Although this kind of radical spontaneity had spread like wildfire among students during the May Thirtieth period, Wu Chunhan had stayed out by his own choice, completely untouched by it. Throughout the activism Qian, nevertheless, held to his goal of a modern education. When he graduated from Jinhua Normal in 1926, in the face of his father’s firm opposition to his going to study in a university, he had been able to enter the preparatory class at Beijing University by examination.86 Apparently Qian had paid more attention to math and English in his studies than Chunhan. He had also plunged into reading Marx and Engels on his own. Then in the spring of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek launched the purge of Communists from the Guomindang Qian had learned that many of his Communist friends back in Jinhua had been imprisoned and executed. He was shocked by the realization that if he had been in Jinhua he would not have lived. Nonetheless, in Beiping Qian once again had become involved in Communist organizing. This time he was arrested by the Guomindang police and spent three months in jail awaiting execution. This was going on while Wu Han was at China College in Shanghai. Terrified by the three months experience in prison, after he was released Qian never again joined the Communist Party, not because he disagreed with Communist political theory, but because he feared for his life. The vivid sense of terror he had while waiting for execution never left him. But it didn’t deter him from studying economic history and Marx’s economic theory especially On Capital, when he was freed.87 Together again the two friends renewed their close relationship. The two had a lot in common. Their lower gentry-official family background was similar—the disintegration of the financial situation of the two families put both in similar positions. The fathers of both boys were failed minor officials who had lost out in the transformation of gentry society into the emerging modern society in the early years of the twentieth century. Neither student had reason to stay home in the rural countryside; the failure of their gentry fathers spurred each to turn to urban academic pursuits. Each had been alienated from his father at a crucial point in his youth and thrown totally on his own resources to find his way. For both, this break and the sense of independence that went with it was a decisive influence in their lives. Beyond their backgrounds the two had in common their serious commitment to their studies. Both were interested in Chinese history but Wu did

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not share his friend’s interest in contemporary political or economic theory or in political activism, at least not at this time. Although he had friends who were activists Wu preferred concentrating on historical issues. According to Wu’s Qinghua University roommate, Zhou Fucheng, a student in the philosophy department, Qian was Wu Han’s closest friend in his first years at Qinghua. Zhou also recalled Wu’s close friendship with Gu Jiegang who was on the faculty at nearby Yanjing University, just a few minutes walk away. Professor Gu, a friendly casual person, came to their room from time to time to talk with Chunhan about their common research interests and Wu would go to visit Gu at his home. Among his other relationships he was also close to Hu Shi but if Chunhan wanted to see Hu he took a long ride on the bus into the center of the city to Hu’s house. Although much older than Wu, Gu Jiegang was also a student of Hu Shi’s who had asked him to look out for Chunhan. Wu also became a good friend of Luo Ergang’s who he saw at Hu’s house in the city.88

CRISIS OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY: MANCHURIA AND THE STUDENTS The crisis precipitated by the Japanese aggression in Manchuria on the 18th of September touched the lives of both students and teachers. Qinghua and neighboring Yanjing University quickly became hotbeds of student activity. Immediately after the invasion in Manchuria voluntary student military training began on campus. By 1 October, Yanjing students had organized an army and Qinghua had suspended some classes to train a volunteer army.89 Across China students began to urge the Nationalist government to fight the Japanese and protect China’s sovereignty, but in reality, the new government was too weak militarily. At first, most of the student activity was concentrated on circulating petitions to the government and accumulating signatures. As anger and frustration grew large student delegations traveled by train from Beiping and Shanghai to Nanjing where crowds of students confronted the political leaders with petitions and demonstrations and heard them defend their policies. Nationalism was the common element in the spontaneous movement powered by the students’ patriotism. The government officials were anxious to turn back the students and prevent their demonstrations from bringing pressure that would make the government look weaker in the eyes of the aggressive Japanese. To suppress the movement before it got out of hand student leaders and petition organizers were arrested in Nanjing. Generally, from September 1931 until January 1932, the movement failed in its objective to get the government to fight Japan. The mood on the Qinghua campus was grave and deeply troubled: the students were convinced that if the national sovereignty of China was to be preserved the Japanese aggressor had to be stopped. In their room Chunhan

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and his roommate, Zhou Fucheng talked of little else. At the beginning of the term before the attack all they had thought about was beginning their studies, but now, according to Zhou, whenever they saw each other they immediately started to talk about political issues. Nonetheless, Chunhan showed no urge to go out and participate in the demonstrations and political activity himself.90 At Beijing University his good friend Qian Jiaju, however, had been quickly caught up in political action. Later in December as the demonstrations grew stronger, Qian was arrested in Nanjing for his aggressive political activities organizing demonstrations and petitions to the government. One day Wu and his friends suddenly learned Qian had been arrested in Nanjing when someone came anxiously to try to get Chunhan to help get him out of jail.91 Chunhan’s ideas about the crisis in Manchuria and what to do about it were quite different from Qian’s radical activist ideas. Wu agreed with the teachers that the students continuing their studies was the way they should carry out their responsibility to the country. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Cai Yuanpei, chancellor of Beijing University, had criticized students who “strike one day, parade the next and completely forget about study.” In 1927 Cai had recommended that in the conflict between patriotism and learning, students be guided by the principle, “In loving your country, don’t forget to study; in studying, don’t forget to love your country.”92 Cai’s advice was directed at the potential of the students for disruptive action that would undermine the new government’s drive for national unification and strengthening. Hu Shi also opposed the student political activism. Wu Han accepted Hu’s opinion that the students must use their knowledge and study “to save the country”;93 it fitted his own wish to concentrate on historical studies and his conviction that history was vitally important to the country. Within days after the Japanese grab of Manchuria two of Wu’s teachers, Professors Jiang Tingfu of Qinghua and William Hung of Yanjing, had spoken at Yanjing University to a large audience to try to calm the students. Wu Han did not disagree with the activist student objectives, but with the methods of the leftist students. He strongly criticized those who did not show their concern for their country by learning about its history and culture.94 Beyond Manchuria the Japanese aggression, setting fires in Jinan in Shandong Province and creating provocations in Tianjin, focused attention on the Nationalist government’s ineffectiveness. In November the tone of student action had begun to heat up after petitioning had not forced any change in Guomindang policy toward Japanese aggression. By 1 December, while Chunhan was buried in his research projects, his friend Qian had become a key leader in organizing demonstrations in Nanjing, a crucial change in student movement strategy. Demonstrations were becoming the weapon of choice in the student strategy.95 During a demonstration, Qian was arrested along with 185 other demonstrators. Although it failed in this action, the

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Beida Demonstration Corps activities redirected the anti-Japanese movement. After that student confrontation with the government in demonstrations and such clashes became a much more prominent method to pressure the government.96 In January after Qian had gotten out of jail and returned from Nanjing the two, Wu and Qian, had long talks. As the mood of discouragement grew in Beiping, in distress Chunhan wrote Yang Zhibing in Zhejiang that people were disillusioned and confused; the atmosphere of depression was everywhere. In disgust he wrote: “Educated people only know how to read Shanghai authors’ novels about sex and worthless exposé fiction from behind the black curtain. They put high level decent books in the toilet.” The lack of historical knowledge was distressing: “ordinary reformers now-adays don’t even know there were Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, much less Zhou and Qin.” It was his idea that the responsibility of the scholars, especially the historians, was to “save the country” by writing about history so that reform could be based on knowledge of the past. “If the social atmosphere is like this what can you say!”97

INVASION AT SHANGHAI: THE PAIN OF PATRIOTISM Into this dark mood on the campuses came the electrifying news on 28 January 1932 that the Japanese had invaded Shanghai. This was an attack on the heartland of China, very different from their previous takeover in the peripheral Northeast. This time the Chinese government reaction was quite different from the hands-off response to the invasion of Manchuria four months earlier. Galvanized into action, the Nationalist Nineteenth Route Army fought back valiantly for more than a month in bloody fighting at Shanghai.98 Wu Chunhan’s mother school, China College at the mouth of the Wusong River in Shanghai, was in the direct line of the Japanese attack. In the first day of the invasion the school buildings were destroyed by the Japanese and left in ruins, the students “scattered like stars.”99 The vicious attack on Shanghai, China’s largest city and its commercial center standing at the entrance to the Yangtze heartland, was a wrenching blow to the country. For Chunhan, the shock of the destruction of his former college touched his own life in a way the September Eighteenth Incident had not. Less than two years before he had been a student at the school, now it was completely destroyed by the Japanese aggressors. Silence was no longer possible. Even though he saw Hu Shi from time to time when he stopped at his home to see Luo Ergang or talk with the professor about some research problem, nonetheless two days after the Shanghai invasion he wrote a formal letter to Hu Shi about the crisis. In the letter we can see Wu taking a deep breath, picking up his pen and pouring out on paper his anger and

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resentment toward the government and his frustration over Hu’s instructions to remain inactive and continue to study.100 Now with the nation reeling under the invasion at Shanghai the national crisis had become far more serious. Wu writes: Dear Mr. Hu: There is a matter of great difficulty which the past several months I have been worried about and unable to resolve. I hope you will guide me to the road to take. Everywhere in the present national situation, the leaders of the party and nation sell the nation, the government sells the nation, the high border officials (in Manchuria) sell the nation. The slogan “Keep cool! Keep calm!” which we saw in the beginning every day in the newspapers, next changed to “The government has already completed the preparation, made the decisions, please trust it” and has now become “We completely agree to whatever you want and if you will only not destroy our stand we will be extremely grateful, under no condition will we surrender.” If you open the history of any country or any dynasty you cannot find this sort of shameless, depraved, crazy government and it is also difficult to find this sort of innocent, naive, benumbed people. Students should not leave school for senseless activities like handing out leaflets and shouting slogans denouncing the government. But, should not one act individually in order to struggle for one’s own moral integrity and self respect, for the nation’s honor? Is this activity significant or not? What use is it for students, who, first, have no weapons to kill people with; second, have no power which can be reliably drawn on; and third, have no masses to summon for support, to shout emptily “Save the nation.” (Now in the Beiping-Tientsin region there is not even anyone who is shouting “Save the Nation.”) If not, when you see large numbers of people who sold your fathers and mothers and brothers and listen to the cries of myriads of fellow countrymen who were slaughtered and when the news that you see everyday is also only “submit” and “yield,” if you are still an individual yourself and still have a drop of warm blood in your breast, when you act, how can you bear the pain? Suicide is an irresponsible, ignoble action, but if you are among the living people are you any more happy and better off than the dead? At least they will not again have to suffer what we suffer. In the past four months there has been no time when I have not been overwhelmed by this kind of pain. My first way of controlling it was to bury myself deep in the library, however, as soon as I left the doors of the library I was once again attacked. Later I concentrated on writing and took shelter in the library to avoid this kind of anxiety, but still I had no success . . . at the point of falling asleep I was caught in a deep state of anxiety over what to do: as a result I started to have insomnia. Recently, I have begun my work in the history department and am putting the Peking Gazettes of the Xianfeng, Tongzhi and Guangxu reigns in order, compiling an index for them. After I had worked for a few days to my surprise I began to feel interested, but later I gradually began unconsciously to compare the records of all kinds of foreign affairs and

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military affairs, one by one, with contemporary events. The result was to make you angry and disappointed: supposing you could change time and were willing to turn it upside-down. At least, those emperors and grand officials were only incapable and short sighted, but they certainly did not sell the country or surrender it. In order to learn current events you cannot help but read the paper everyday. But then the result of reading the newspaper is only to make you helplessly angry and sorrowful, and feel that “it is unfortunate to be Chinese.” This day once again I cannot suppress my anger and accomplish anything. I cannot confide this pain to those with party affiliations but I also cannot tell people who have absolutely no stand. In the past I have been guided by your teachings and exhortations to young people; I hope that this time you, in the same way, will indicate a method of decision-making and point out the road I should follow. Your student, Wu Chunhan 30 January101

His passionate anger and resentment is evident in the letter when he asks Hu directly how to act individually for one’s own moral integrity and for the nations honor. The question he puts to Hu Shi that hangs unexpressed in the letter is “how is it that you can bear not to act to struggle for your own moral integrity and self-respect? When I respect your guidance so much and seek the road to follow?” The letter contains both the anger and the anxiety that Wu feels for his country. There is also the sense of conflict in the heart of the frustrated student toward his teacher. In fact, Hu Shi’s own reaction to the emergency was less the feeling of passion and more a sense of helplessness. The day after the Japanese attack in September, he had a painful sense of hopeless discouragement when he heard the news. A week later, in a letter to Zhou Zuoren Hu wrote that he had been immobilized, “unable to do a thing,” when he heard the news of the attack. In a poem he had written, which he sent Zhou in the letter, his thoughts were on the “Decline” (moluo) of China. He felt completely helpless—“pens are useless” to mend the sky.102 Hu could understand the terrible problem caused by China’s weakness in the face of the Japanese threat, but he seemed unable to recognize the importance and positive nature of the nationalist feeling that was rising in the country, especially among students, even among his most loyal followers. Despite his agony, Chunhan maintained his loyalty to Hu Shi’s idea of studying to save the country and for many years suppressed the tendency to express his own patriotic anxiety. On weekends the two Wu brothers, Chunhan and his younger brother Chunxi studying at Furen University preparatory school in Beiping, often went together to Qian Jiaju’s place to visit. In these days the three had long talks about the situation. Chunxi often disagreed with his elder brother on politics. Now a good friend of Qian’s, Chunxi shared with him the conviction that active protest against Nationalist government policy was necessary.

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He had even begun to participate in the student movement. Chunxi liked Qian. They both had the same practical bent and interest in the economic problems of their country. Both were especially concerned about economic conditions in rural China, coming as they did from rural agricultural areas.103 When the three got together, although Chunhan took the line of wanting to “study to save the country,” he never opposed their participation in the student movement or argued against their opinions about economics or politics. Qian commented years later that he could see that it was the activist, revolutionary part that Wu Han couldn’t share with them even though he criticized the government as they did.104 Wu Chunhan’s roommate, Zhou Fucheng, also noticed that Wu was very upset and seemed to begin to change during the year. Qian, involved in translating Marx at this time, was obviously very interested in Communist theory. When they got together, inevitably they all talked about issues in Marxism. However, none of them had much real understanding of Marxist theory and its implications for society and individuals. As the Chinese troops fought to repel the Japanese, Chunhan and his friends followed the news anxiously everyday. He soon published a biting ironic essay, a zawen, under the penname You Sheng. It was written at the moment when the Chinese soldiers’ resistance to the Japanese crumbled. In this essay “Everything in the Past,”105 playing with the paradox that the present was yesterday’s future and the future can never be separated from the past, he ridiculed the Qinghua students’ lack of commitment to continuing their anti-Japanese resistance after the first few weeks in the fall and especially in the crisis of the invasion of Shanghai. Of the importance of students to the nation he wrote: “Because students have the most vitality they symbolize the restoration of the Chinese nation.” But he mocked their inconstant patriotism: “What is the way to prove patriotism? If you use these ways you can demonstrate it” and then he listed the threeweek military training in the fall, petitions to Zhang Xueliang, meetings, demonstrations, slogans, petitions in Nanjing, and afterward sarcastically commented—“Together all these equal patriotism.” Mockingly, he wrote that China was not doomed because everyone knew from these activities that Qinghua students were patriotic. At the end of the three weeks of military training all cried, “We’ll meet on the battlefield in the future,” then scattered like birds and beasts. But in January in the moment of need when Shanghai was overrun by the Japanese, where were Qinghua students? His indictment of them in the essay was biting: Now, people still put on their fur gowns as before and take their reference books to prepare for the exams. . . . In Qinghua University in the last few months everything is the same as before (the attack) except the slogans on the wall which have survived through wind and rain; “Let us consecrate ourselves with our hot

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blood” . . . “Let us fight to the death” . . . “Go to the front and charge into battle” and the bugle still calls the students to classes, sleep and dinner.

He writes that this is the way it was in Beiping, but in the midst of embattled Shanghai he sees the students were different, they fought for their country with their own lives: “In Shanghai it was recorded in the newspaper that there were eight hundred volunteers from Fudan University. More than one hundred were killed fighting on the battlefield, more than two hundred wounded.”106 At the end he asks where will Qinghua be in the future? Nonetheless, doubly ironic, not one word in the essay hints that the author, You Sheng (Wu Han), had never even participated in the empty acts of the activist Qinghua “patriots” who he ridicules. Wu was seemingly paralyzed, torn between the need to be active in the defense of his country and Hu Shi’s charge to “save the country through study.” After the capitulation of the Chinese forces in Shanghai in March when the battle between the Nineteenth Army and the Japanese was over and a truce had been reached, he burst into print again. To vent his feelings about the crisis and the incompetence of the government and to commemorate the Chinese soldiers who fought valiantly he composed a poem, “A Moving Event.” Actually the poem was first written for his “poetry friends,” several young intellectuals, among them Qian Zhongshu, who exchanged poems as scholars had for centuries.107 Wu published the poem 26 March under his style name, Chen Bo, in the Qinghua Weekly: A Moving Event108 The evil wind blew and yellow sand rose all over the land, Soldiers were left without family and home. Angry shouts surprise the world and the lion awakens from its dream,109 Curing the country’s disease, like a dose of good medicine the brave soldiers are praised as the lofty spirit of the nation, New ghosts are added to agitated and resentful old ghosts. Different were the fighters of the southern government and the northern government.110 Raising our heads we see the red flames of battle on the eastern coast, The ignoble royal court so distant hears not the cries of agony. The heroic general surpassed even the able and virtuous men of the times, Forced to resign, he lives on the secluded Mount Tai.111 If Ma Fu had an able son to resist, the Qin would never have become an empire, If there had been no traitorous Qin Hui112 in the Shaoxing reign, the Song dynasty would not have given in.

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Although blood was shed in Jiangnan, yet the submissive agreement was signed, In the north the song to punish the enemy is sung, even in front of the enemy headquarters, Looking back on Liaoyang, when the sun is setting I can’t help recalling the tragedy. Deciding to abandon the calm life of a scholar, I’ll strive to take part in the patriotic fight against the enemy.113

Taking up the challenge of his own question about the future in his angry essay of two weeks before, “Everything in the Past,” Chunhan finished his poem with the stirring pledge to strive to “take part in the patriotic fight against the enemy.” Bold lines, but if he could have looked ahead, he would have more honestly added “someday,” for in spite of the patriotic stirrings in his gut, it would be years before he left his “calm life” to join those who “take part in the patriotic fight.” In 1932, Wu was no less confused and conflicted than those who had cried in the fall “We’ll meet on the battlefield in the future” and then scattered to their everyday activities. Nevertheless, the Japanese aggression in 1931–1932, especially the total destruction of his alma mater in Shanghai, his friend Qian’s participation in the Jiu yiba demonstrations, his kinsman Jiang Shan’s flight from the Guomindang police to Chunhan in Beijing for help that year,114 all brought home to Wu the political crisis of the country. And the students were not the only ones conflicted in their patriotic concern. Despite Hu Shi’s own admonition to students to refrain from political activities, Hu himself would participate in a public debate over political theory, the debate on authoritarianism versus democracy, with Qinghua History Department chairman Jiang Tingfu. This was hardly nonpolitical behavior in the environment of post-1928 authoritarian one-party rule by the Guomindang. Not even Hu Shi could suppress his involvement with political questions even though he claimed to remain convinced that political action served no purpose. At this time, luckily for Wu’s friend Qian Jiaju, Tao Menghe was organizing a social science survey research institute, the Social Research Institute, financed by Rockefeller money, and he needed bright young social scientists. Hu Shi had admired some of Qian’s writings on China’s international relations and economic issues and recommended Qian for a position at the Institute.115 Once Qian had his new job he rented a two-storied house and lived there with his mother and elder sister who he had brought north to Beiping from the Jinhua countryside. On Saturdays Wu would go into the city to spend the weekend with Qian and his family. He often kept Qian’s mother company playing cards and drinking. When one of the two friends published something they always exchanged publications. According to Qian, “We were both dissatisfied with the government but he still buried his head in Ming historical research and did not participate in the student

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movement . . . he had not accepted Marxism.”116 If Wu remained dedicated to study and research in those years of the 1930s it was not because political events did not touch his life almost daily. Rather his exploration of the historical past was more important and immediate to him. During these student years of Chunhan’s at Qinghua among his close friends were two other fellow countrymen from the Jinhua-Yiwu area. One was his childhood friend, Jiang Shan, who had become a leftist writer and poet in Shanghai in the Zuolian, the League of Leftist Writers, that had gathered around the author Lu Xun. When life had become very dangerous for him because of the Guomindang secret police in Shanghai, Jiang had written to Chunhan for help in finding a safe place and work in Beiping. Later in 1934, another friend and a kinsman from Yiwu, Wu Zhang, who had taught in the adult night school in the same school Wu taught in before he left home, came to live in Beiping and often stayed with Wu. Back in Bitter Bamboo Pond Village the three of them had spent many evenings talking about the problems in Zhejiang Province with Chunhan’s father sitting in on their sessions. Later in the Anti-Japanese War, Wu Zhang was killed at Ningbo when he took part as a guerrilla in fighting against the Japanese. It was Jiang Shan, who shared Wu’s interest in history and local ties, who helped Wu search for books in the secondhand bookstalls and with research on the Zhejiang bibliophiles.117

A CRITICAL FORAY Wu soon tried his hand at another zawen essay. This one he titled “On Professors” (Lun jiaoshou). It was a biting satire on foreign educated Chinese professors and the importance of teaching. Satirizing the teaching style of Chinese university professors, the essay characterizes types of Western style pedagogical behavior implying that the Chinese manner of teaching is more effective because it is more relevant to the contemporary Chinese world. At the beginning of the essay, referring to the lexical meanings of the Chinese characters lun jiao shou in the essay’s title, Wu explains that the title “xiansheng,” the traditional term of respectful address for a teacher, is more meaningful than jiaoshou (professor), an appellation of Western origin. Xiansheng, in Wu’s interpretation, means “he was born first before us, his experience and knowledge are greater and better than ours and he is more than capable of teaching us.” Teachers should have learning, methodology, and ideas relevant for the times, and a scientific spirit he said. They also should be good models “because the old chicken itself is the model for the little chicken to follow,”118 the Confucian idea of teachers as moral exemplars. With good models and scientific spirit (Western influence) combined, learning can be relevant for the times.

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His main point he would return to again and again in the future: the learning provided by education must fit the actual situation of China. This emphasis on education relevant to China was an aim Wu shared with numerous other people in the 1930s. It was the basis of Jiang Tingfu’s pedagogic philosophy. It underlay Liang Shuming’s rural reconstruction work, and motivated the efforts of historians to write general histories of China. Wu derisively divided modern professors into two types: national goods (guohuo) and foreign goods (yanghuo) but it’s the “foreign goods” he focuses on here. The “national goods” professors are “pure local goods.” The “foreign goods” were those who moved to foreign countries where they were “covered by a layer of foreign gold” before they returned home. However, not all the “foreign goods” come off poorly in his comments. After all, some of the people who influenced Wu the most were “foreign goods.” He gives the highest rating to the “compass professors” who have a wide range of knowledge and use the scientific method to solve the problems of China. In descending order after the admirable compass professors, there are the “motor professors,” not so good at combining learning from the West with the Chinese situation; the “gramophone professors” who only repeat what they learned and pay no attention to the times; the “Japanese goods professors” who demand much money but the quality is not as good as others; the “opium professors” who enjoyed themselves abroad but learned nothing so have nothing to teach at home; and last, the “Western product professors” who identify completely with the West, talk incessantly about London and Paris, and refer to other Chinese as “you Chinese.” These people only serve other countries. They are totally Western products without the slightest breath of China. This biting attack on Western educated professors is indicative of the strong critical attitude held by many students in Wu’s generation. In the 1930s, there was a noticeable difference among Chinese students in the way they related to the West. This difference is reflected in photos of the Qinghua Weekly student staff published in the journal each year. In the 1932 picture as in other years roughly half are in long Chinese gowns and half in Western dress.119 Actually, the attitude of students toward the West as well as the manner of dress was quite complex; the choice of allegiance to China or to the West was not a simple binary either/or choice. Many factors were at play, often within a person. Wu Han himself was ambivalent, sometimes appearing in a Chinese long gown and sometimes in Western dress. The financial situation of many students was one basic condition deciding how they would wear Western dress. When a little extra cash came along a choice was made, often between books or clothes. Wu was known as one of the “blue gowns” who put their extra cash into books and helped their families, yet in the Qinghua Weekly picture he is wearing Western clothes. He and his Qinghua and Yanjing University friends were quite aware of the symbolism of dress. Even

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though they were at the two most Westernized universities in China, and occasionally donned Western dress themselves they still looked as if they were out of place in it. Those who wore their Western clothes with ease at Qinghua and Yanjing were often taunted as “foreign devils” by the students who identified with Chinese dress. Added to the factors of finances and differences in the extent of Western influence in the individual student’s background, were strong feelings about cultural identity and national salvation. For some of the students, dress was a symbolic representation of cultural integrity.120 Wu was very much aware that he had been accepted into the Qinghua History Department to help fill the need created by the lack of well-trained scholars able to handle modern ideas. Jiang Tingfu’s vision for the history department at Qinghua was a balanced faculty which would combine depth of knowledge about China with Western scientific learning that suited the indigenous Chinese situation as Chinese, not Westerners, assessed it. The theme that Wu played on in his essay was not the legitimacy or lack thereof of Western education and Western ideas but the relevance of those ideas for China. It was professors who returned from abroad full of knowledge that had nothing to do with China or its needs that he ridiculed, not the ideas from the West in themselves. Wu, after all, was a favored disciple of Hu Shi, the intellectual leader who was an educator widely known for encouraging the introduction of modern Western thought into China. From references Wu made elsewhere, Hu Shi and Jiang Tingfu must have been “compass professors,” who pointed the way and used their foreign acquired learning to fit the Chinese situation. It was daring for Wu, a mere student, to take on the professorial community so openly. This kind of fearless criticism undoubtedly contributed to problems he was to have after graduation when he became a young teacher in the Qinghua History Department. The zawen “On Professors” is by far the sharpest critical piece that Wu had published thus far. Nonetheless, it was completely in agreement with the post–May Fourth ideas about utility of knowledge which Hu Shi and John Dewey had both helped to shape. Undoubtedly Hu Shi’s sponsorship gave him a degree of shelter in the moment. This foray into satire was Wu’s first experimentation with writing in the popular zawen literary genre. This short critical essay style called zawen or zagan, very popular at the time, had been developed by Lu Xun as a modern literary form called suigan lu in the magazine New Youth around 1920.121 Lu Xun’s zawen gradually developed into the mature style of short essays, characteristically satirical and critical, with the subject generally Chinese society, the nation, or criticism, even attacks, on individuals.122 In contrasting zawen to traditional forms of literature, Lu Xun once wrote they should be “pertinent to the present and vital; lively, beneficial, and capable of causing a shift in people’s feelings.”123 These early zawen of Wu’s were the experiments of a young writer, attracted by the literary technique of iconoclastic criticism,

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who intuitively understood the ironic purpose of the genre. In the late 1940s Wu Han would turn again to use the zawen style, particularly in a series called Old History, New Comments.

ANTIMODEL AND MODEL Wu was especially disgusted with the leftist professors at Qinghua at that time, according to Qian Jiaju, particularly with Zhang Shenfu. Zhang was represented in Wu’s essay by the “Western product” professor. Wu’s disapproval of Zhang and what Wu saw Zhang as standing for undoubtedly was a major reason provoking him to write “On Professors.” A philosophy professor with Marxist predilections and a prideful Western finish, the result of years of study in France, Zhang had joined in organizing the original Communist Party cell in 1920 at Beijing University and was a member of the New Tide group.124 Among Zhang’s colleagues at Qinghua he had a reputation for arrogance. In the 1930s, as a specialist on Bertrand Russell he was a key figure in the leftist New Philosophy circle at Qinghua. Zhang and his circle wanted to enlarge the basis of Chinese social theory with Marxist dialectical materialism.125 Due to the combination of Zhang’s interest in blending Marxism with Chinese social thought and his arrogance and Western polish, Wu wasted no admiration on him. In the late 1940s Wu’s disdain for Zhang Shenfu was to surface again in a clash of leadership between the two in the Democratic League.126 While Wu rejected Zhang Shenfu, another professor, Zheng Zhenduo, the literary historian and critic, became his admired model during his student years at Qinghua. Zheng taught a course at Qinghua, probably the first year Wu was there. A May Fourth Cultural Revolution leader, he had already published his Wenxue shi (Literary History), and was widely respected as a literary historian and author. During the early 1930s Zheng was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Nationalist Party government’s censorship. Although not politically active he had many left-wing friends and associates such as Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun) and Lu Xun. Wu was attracted to Zheng not by his political stand but the happy enthusiastic manner and the simplicity with which he went about his academic life and, of course, his scholarship. Zheng, quite the opposite of Zhang Shenfu, did not put on airs or elevate himself above others. In Wu’s words later there was “none of the gilding of the Qinghua foreign flavored professors to inspire awe” about Zheng Zhenduo.127 A modest person, he did not profess himself to be anyone great, although he was a truly fine scholar. Although Wu was a student Zheng treated him as his friend and as a colleague who had the same ideals and followed the same path of scholarship. The next year, 1933, Zheng paid the young Wu, not yet graduated, an enormous compliment when he invited Wu, still a student, to join the six–man

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editorial board of his new literary periodical, the Literary Quarterly (Wenxue jikan), alongside senior intellectuals like Zhu Ziqing and Xie Bingxin. With very little money to spend, Wu seldom had any business in the city and when he did his trips into the center did not include amusements or eating in restaurants. One day soon after he came to Beiping he had gone into the city center to look for secondhand books in the stalls at the Eastern Peace Market. As he stood waiting at the stop for the bus to return to Haidian, he saw Professor Zheng, who had also been buying books at the stalls. As soon as Xidi Xiansheng, as he was called by friends and students, saw Chunhan he asked him, “Have you eaten?” When he heard that Wu hadn’t eaten he invited him to join him at a restaurant for dinner. Wu remembered later that they had ordered a special fish that he had never eaten before. They talked as they ate together, enjoying each other’s companionship. Zheng soon returned to Shanghai, but the two men, junior and senior, shared their friendship and mutual interests over the years. Within a few short months after being admitted Wu had become known at the university as an undergraduate whose scholarship was mature indeed. During the year before, working in the Yanjing University library had given him the chance to learn the resources of that library and adjust to the pace of the city and Beijing academia. After he was taken into the Qinghua History Department by Jiang Tingfu under the mentorship of Hu Shi, Gu Jiegang, and Jiang, Wu’s historical vision and ideas and research methods had begun to expand at the same time that he was committing to specializing in the Ming period. Social history issues began to attract him although he had no particular interest in Marxist ideology. Among other influences, his friend Qian Jiaju’s work on economic history showed him the importance of the material and social aspects of historical events. But at the same time, despite his intense involvement with the academic sphere, national events kept intruding into his life. In a vein reflective of the post–May Fourth period, he was trying his pen in various genres to express his concern for his country and his frustration and criticisms of the present national situation. The ambivalence, even conflict, manifested in this mix of scholarship and political concern in this young man represented real, competing forces in his life. On one side were the standards of scholarship held up by Hu Shi and his other mentors and on the other the demands of the times and the mood of his fellow students that played on his consciousness and identity as Chinese and as an intellectual. Far from unrelated, the two forces would become intertwined in his study of history in the coming years.

NOTES 1. Coulter (1934), 161–62; Hu Shih (1929), 113; Strand (1988); Lin Yutang (1961). 2. Wu Han, “Wo ai Beijing,” 107.

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3. WC to HS, 5 May 1931. Wu Han, “Kefu liao,” 47; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 4. Coulter (1934). 5. Interview 41. 6. Wu Han, “Kefu liao,” 47. 7. There probably had been earlier contact in Shanghai between the two. WC to HS letter, 5 May 1931. 8. Egan (1987), 129. William Hung was the English name of Hong Ye but Hong Weilian is the name Yanjing students, including Wu Han, knew him by. Hou (1988). Hou Renzhi was a student of Hung and Gu Jiegang. 9. Wu Han, “Kefu liao,” 47; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Xia Nai (1980), in WHXS, 2. 10. WC to HS, 28 month illegible, 1930. 11. Interview 40. 12. WC to HS, 5 May 1931. Beijing University History Department was a classical department which emphasized evidential research methodology. Yeh (1990) for this. 13. This would become “Hu Yinglin nianpu.” 14. Arthur Hummel’s introduction to Ku Chieh-kang (Gu Jiegang) (1931), xxvi; DMB1, 646. 15. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Tse-tsung Chow (1960), 314–17; Grieder (1981), 112–16. 16. Gu (1931), 175. 17. Hu Shi to Wu Chunhan, 6 May 1931. 18. Hu Shi also helped Wu Han and Qian Jiaju because they were poor, brilliant students. 19. Luo Ergang (1958), 7. This book was recommended to me by Quan Hansheng as a very good picture of the relationships between Hu and his special students. 20. Luo Ergang (1958), 14–15. 21. For Qing Han Studies and kaozheng, evidential research, see Elman (1984). 22. Gu (1931), 70. 23. Gu Jiegang (1931); Schneider (1971). 24. For scholarship on the Taipings and an evaluation of Luo’s scholarship Teng (1950) and (1962). 25. Luo Ergang, preface, WHZ, 7. Luo Ergang letter to Hu Shi in Hu Shi laiwang, no. 566. 26. Communication from Su Shuangbi. 27. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 8 August 1931. Fragments of five letters and one complete letter from Wu to Yang in 1931–1932, were published in Qi and Meng (1966) and collected in Su Shuangbi (1993). 28. Luo Ergang knew that Hu had told Wu this, see WHZ, 17–18. 29. WC to HS, 19 month illegible 1931, probably June. 30. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 8 August 1931. 31. For the Western orientation of the school see “Wu Han zizhuan.” 32. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 8 August 1930; WC to HS, 18 month illegible 1931. 33. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 27 August 1931. 34. Hu Shi to Weng Wenying and Zhang Zegao, 20 August 1931, original at Qinghua University, published in Wu Han pipan quanji (1969). 35. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 27 August 1931.

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36. Wu Chunahn to Yang Zhibing, 27 August 1931; Interview 30. 37. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 9 September 1931. 38. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 9 September 1931. 39. Hu Shi to Wu Chunhan, 12 September 1931. 40. Luo Ergang (1958), 21–22. 41. In fact, it was this difference in historiographic thought that Guo Moruo pointed to in a comment on Hu Shi’s historiography in Zhongguo gudai shehui yanjiu (1930), preface, 2–3. Dirlik (1978). 42. Luo Ergang (1958) for Hu’s relationship with Luo. For scholarly lineages Yeh (1990), 32–37. 43. Tsiang (Jiang Tingfu) (1958), 127; Lilley (1979), 261–63. Israel (1982). 44. Jiang (1932b); Interview 40; Tsiang (1958), 133; BDRC1, 355. The collection was the Jindai Zhongguo waijiao shi ziliao jiyao. Jiang’s point is similar to the recent critique of “outside History” made by Cohen (1984), 198 and passim. 45. Tsiang (1958), 129; Feng Youlan (1931), 906–10; Jiang (1932a), 952–54. 46. For general history (tongshi) see He Bingsong (1928). 47. Tsiang (1958), 130. 48. Tsiang (1958), 131. Jiang chaired the Qinghua History Department 1929–1934. 49. Tsiang (1958), 137. 50. He Bingdi in Interview 13; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 51. He Bingdi Interview 13; Tsiang (1958); Lilley (1979), 263–69. 52. He Bingdi Interview 13; BDRC1, 354–58; Yuan and Ou (1979), 82–88; Lilley (1979), 268–70. 53. Franke (1968), 1–4. 54. Franke (1968), 1–4. 55. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 9 September 1931. This chronicle was never written as far as I know. 56. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 57. Tsiang (1958), 128–31, 139; in a personal communication He Bingdi spoke of these as Qinghua’s golden years. 58. Tsiang (1958), 128. 59. Tsiang (1958), 133–34. Zhou Fucheng Interview 68. Jiang asked Wu Han to do an article on the collection, “Qinghua daxue suo cang dang’an de fenxi” (1934). 60. See Chen Bo [Wu Han], “Lü ye xian zong de zuozhe” (1932). The importance of Wu’s discovery was pointed out to me by Wu Xiaoling in 1987. It was only published for the first time in a modern edition by the Beijing University Press in 1986. 61. He Bingsong (1932); Elman (1984). The historian He Bingdi, in a personal communication to this author, emphasized the influence of local consciousness of this Zhedong tradition on historians whose native place was Zhejiang. He Bingdi’s own ancestral home (guxiang) was Jinhua and thus he felt a strong bond with Wu Han, who was to become his teacher at Xinan Lianda. In fact, He Bingdi followed Wu Han’s scholarship in his own teaching at the University of Chicago. The present author was his student. 62. See the preface in “Liang Zhe cangshujia shilue” (1932), published in 1934 in book form, together with a similar work on Jiangsu bibliophiles. 63. See the preface in “Liang Zhe cangshujia shilue” (1932); Jiang Shan was a writer in the Leftist League of Writers around Lu Xun in Shanghai: for this Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Wu Han had no connection with Lu Xun himself.

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64. Preface in “Liang Zhe” (1932); second work on bibliophiles “Jiangsu cangshujia xiaoshi” (1934). 65. Wu Chunhan, “Jiangsu cangshujia,” preface. Elman (1984). 66. Hu Shi to Chunhan, 12 September 1931. 67. Zhang Tingyu (1739). Franke (1968), 48. 68. Gu Yingtai (1658). Franke (1968), 54. 69. Yao Guangxiao, eds., Ming shilu [The veritable records of the Ming dynasty] (1964); Franke (1968), 8–23. 70. Meng Sen had recently published Qingchao qianji [Pre-dynastic history of the Qing] (1929). In 1931 he was appointed professor of history at Beijing University. In 1934 he published the first part of Mingyuan Qingxi tongji [Pre-dynastic history of the Qing in accordance with the chronology of the Ming]. 71. Yang Dehua (1962). Wu Han, comp., Chaoxian Li chao shilu de Zhongguo shiliao, 12 vols. 72. Zhuanti yanjiu zhi xiao lunwen is translated here as “essays on specialized research issues.” 73. See Elman (1984), 174–77. 74. Hu Shi to Wu Chunhan, 12 September 1931. 75. In WC to HS, 13 May 1932, Wu refers to the use of materialism popular in historical interpretation at that time when he mentions Qian Jiaju’s article on India just published in Qinghua Weekly. 76. Gao Yunhui also pointed out Hu Shi’s aversion to historical analysis in “Zhoudai tudi zhidu yu jingtian” (1935), 12; Levenson (1968), 28. 77. Wu’s first work on Jianzhou: “Guanyu Dongbei shi shang de yiwei guaijie de xin shiliao, Lichao shilu zhong zhi Li Manzu” (1934); for his plans for the Jianzhou project see Yang Dehua (1962). 78. Eastman (1974), 31–36; Israel (1966), 47–86. 79. WC to HS, 26 September 1931. 80. WC to HS, 15 December 1931; the passages referred to are from Ming shi, juan 285, 286. 81. Qian Jiaju was a well-known economist whose critique of PRC government policy in the late 1980s was published in the Shanghai World Economic Herald before it was closed by the government in May 1989. Interview 30; Qian Jiaju (1984), 64. 82. Interview with Qian Jiaju; for local ties Goodman (1995). 83. Goodman (1995), 46; Qian Jiaju (1984), 64; WC to HS, 13 May 1932. 84. Qian Jiaju (1986), 16–17. 85. Van Slyke (1991), 14–25; Isaacs (1951). 86. Qian Jiaju (1986), 22–23. 87. Qian Jiaju (1986), 33, 42, 45–46. 88. Zhou Fucheng Interview 68. 89. Eastman (1974), 31–36; Israel (1966), 47–86; Coble (1991), 33–35. 90. Interview 68. 91. Interview 68; Qian Jiaju (1986), 48. 92. Cai Yuanpei, “Dushu yu jiuguo,” quoted in Israel (1966), 16. 93. Qian Jiaju (1984), 65. 94. Qian Jiaju Interview 30; Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 25 January 1932. 95. Qian Jiaju (1986), 48; Israel (1966), 66. 96. Qian Jiaju (1986), 50–51; Israel (1966), 66–78.

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97. Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing, 25 January 1932. The word Wu uses translated as “novels about sex” is xingshi. I am indebted to David Roy for explaining that the original Xingshi was a collection of sexual case histories written by Zhang Jingsheng who, following Havelock Ellis’s influence, claimed to be reporting actual sexual case histories. After the collection became popular it had many imitations. Wu obviously was not a devotee of salacious fiction, much preferring historical texts. 98. Coble (1991), 39–55. 99. Cai Yuanpei, “Zhongguo gongxue xiaoshi,” in Liu Zhiying et al. (1982), 3. 100. For a description of Hu Shi on resisting Japanese aggression Grieder (1970), 249–54. 101. WC to HS, 30 January 1932. 102. Hu Shi laiwang, no. 567. 103. Wu Chenzhong, “Zhejiang Yiwu Xian nongcun gaikuang,” in Qian Jiaju (1935). 104. Interview 30. 105. You Sheng [Wu Han], “Guoqu zhongzhong.” John Dewey had spoken about the present being yesterday’s future and the future becoming the present in his lectures. 106. You Sheng [Wu Han], “Guoqu zhongzhong.” 107. For this exchange of poems see Li Hongyan (1992). Qian Zhongshu responded to Wu Chunhan, 26 March 1932 with an admiring poem in Qinghua zhoukan under the penname Chen Mo. Interview 140 with Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu; Interview 135 with Wu Zuguang. Xia Nai (1980). 108. Bo Chen [Wu Han], “Gan shi.” 109. Napoleon is said to have said this about China. Near Marco Polo Bridge outside of the museum commemorating the incident that began the anti-Japanese war in 1937 is a large, powerful statue of the lion awakening, a symbol that came to be used to signify a nationally strong China in the future. 110. Generals Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang had fought in a civil war in the north against Chiang Kai-shek’s army that erupted in May 1930. 111. General Feng Yuxiang. 112. Ma Fu (implying Feng Yuxiang) was Zhao She, a general for the state of Zhao at the end of the Warring States Period who protected his state against the Qin. Qin Hui (implying Chiang Kai-shek) was the traitorous premier of the Southern Song who gave in to the Jin and betrayed General Yue Fei to the emperor. Wu Han, being from Zhejiang Yue Fei’s home territory, knew well the local stories of the history of the heroism of Yue Fei and the traitorous Qin Hui. 113. During the Japanese attack in Manchuria, 18 Sept. 1931, the Chinese in Manchuria capitulated quickly. The invasion of Shanghai came on 28 Jan. 1932. The 19th Route Army and the 5th Army fought the Japanese valiantly for more than a month to repel the Shanghai invasion but finally crumbled and Chiang’s government retreated to Loyang. In a truce 5 May 1932 the Japanese agreed to give up Shanghai for concessions from the Chinese. I am indebted to Hou Renzhi and Zhang Weiying for their assistance in the translation of this poem. 114. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 115. Qian Jiaju (1984); Qian Jiaju (1986), 62. 116. Qian Jiaju (1984), 65; Qian Jiaju (1986), 65–67.

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117. Chen Bo [Wu Han], preface to “Liangzhe cangshujia shilue”; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Yiwu xianzhi, 661. 118. You Sheng [Wu Han], “Lun jiaoshou,” 110–11. 119. Qinghua zhoukan, 2 pictures. 120. A yangguizi is a foreign devil. In interviews Teng Ssu-yu and Qian Jiaju both initiated discussion of this issue of student attitudes toward Western influence. 121. For Lu Xun’s development of zawen as a literary genre Pollard (1985) and Lee (1987), “The Zawen: Sundry Visions of Life and Reality.” 122. Pollard (1985), 76, 78. 123. Lu Xun, “Xu Maoyong zuo ‘Daza ji’ xu,’” quoted by Pollard (1985), 82. 124. Qian Jiaju letter to present author, 18 April 1990, describes Wu Han’s opinion of Zhang Shenfu. Schwarcz on Zhang: Schwarcz (1986) and Schwarcz (1992). Interviewees Teng Ssu-yu and Qian Jiaju recollected negative opinions about foreign educated intellectuals. Lu Xun’s story, “Ah Q,” vividly portrays the scorn heaped on foreign educated students. This was the attitude also of sophisticated intellectuals, sometimes even of the foreign educated themselves, that is, Jiang Tingfu on some of Qinghua’s teachers. 125. Schwarcz (1986), 170, 222, 335n20; Chow (1960), 56; Zhang Shenfu (1982), 549. 126. See chapter 9 in this volume. 127. This account is taken from “Yi Xidi xiansheng,” WHWJ4, 153.

4

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H

is three years as a student at Qinghua University were a time of intense intellectual excitement for Wu Han. Exploration of the past and what it meant for the present, in real life, meant constant hard work on the mundane, daily level. As his second year of classes began at the university he plunged into historical and literary publishing activities. He had come to realize by then that through study for a degree in history at Qinghua he was preparing to be a professional historian, not a traditional omnicompetent scholar living in a rural milieu like his father, but a specialist, trained to undertake expert studies of the past.1 He recognized that his livelihood and status would be tied to the role of professional historian, not to the prospect of official bureaucratic office or income from rural landownership as with traditional scholar-literati in the past. Wu was entering the professional world of the modern academic historian and preparing to be a specialist in the Ming period.

STUDENT HISTORIAN He enjoyed writing and always was in need of money. Because the income of academics was generally low the writers’ fees paid by publishers, even though meager, were a way of augmenting income. This was no slight consideration when there was not enough regular income to buy books or support families. Within months of his arrival in Beiping, Chunhan had published several pieces in the Yanjing Library journal, even before he was admitted to Qinghua. Another of the journals he soon published in was the Qinghua Weekly (Qinghua zhoukan), a serious academic journal edited by a 117

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student board. Prestigious senior academics such as Zheng Zhenduo, Gu Jiegang, and Hu Shi published there among the student authors from Qinghua and other universities. The Weekly provided a widely read forum of research for student and faculty in the Beiping academic community with its articles. However, no one wrote for the Qinghua Weekly for the money because the fees were a pittance, a mere seven jiao (seventy cents) for a thousand characters.2 Other reasons such as devotion to historical research and his desire to achieve a professional identity motivated Wu to publish in the Weekly.

MYTH AND TERRITORY: QUEEN MOTHER OF THE WEST By December of his first year at Qinghua, Chunhan had already published two major articles in the Qinghua Weekly. A week after his long article “The Story of the Painting, ‘Spring Festival on the River,’ and The Plum in the Golden Vase and Its Development,” was published the “Queen Mother of the West and the Xirong” appeared.3 Each of these essays was a part of two separate, extended studies he had begun: one study, the authorship of the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), we will come back to later, and the other, not in the Ming period at all, a group of essays on the early legends of the Queen Mother of the West. The Queen Mother of the West essay was the first of a series of four articles he wrote within a short time focused on this intriguing legendary figure who had persisted as part of the core of Chinese culture since ancient times. The ancient text, Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan hai jing), both a geography and a record of legendary figures, was the first source that had drawn Wu to trace the course of the Queen Mother legend through the ages. Although the Classic had long been considered a forgery, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries research revealed that the Classic, the Shan hai jing, was actually authentic. In fact, it contained fleeting glimpses of the very early past. By the late 1920s it was beginning to be understood as an ancient work that preserved written accounts of legends handed down by word of mouth from as far back as prehistoric times.4 Through the Classic Wu became interested in the development and evolution in the Queen Mother legend as it was retold through many centuries and manifestations, continuously reflecting changing aspects of the ages through which it passed. His first article in the series, on the Classic itself, classified a great deal of information he had found in the text and set forth an overall picture that included the Queen Mother legend. Gu Jiegang was one of those who saw the Classic as a credible text through his investigation of very early Chinese history, especially the folklore and legends. Gu was interested in the Classic text because of its character as an early geography, geography in the sense of the broad spatial relationship of man and his environment. Through this text he could distill and validate

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historical facts about the distant past in the context of space.5 Wu Chunhan, already stimulated by Gu’s work, pursued his own explorations of some of the legendary aspects of the Mountain and Sea Classic. Three more essays from Wu followed in quick succession on the legendary Queen Mother of the West.6 Wu demonstrated the Queen Mother’s geographical location changed over time. He was particularly interested in the relationship of geography and ethnicity revealed by the legends.7 The most intriguing essay, published the fall of his first year at Qinghua, set forth his premise that the Queen Mother of the West was symbolic of the conception of geographical location. In his deconstructionist analysis Wu demonstrated that the legendary Queen of the West became a mythic, symbolic representation for the changing boundary of Chinese geographical penetration into the western borderlands on the edge of Han Chinese borderlands.8

EXPLORING THE JIN PING MEI During the same time that he was working out the Queen Mother series he published an essay on the Ming novel, the Jin Ping Mei, titled “The Story of the Painting, ‘Spring Festival on the River,’ and The Plum in the Golden Vase and Its Development.” This was also part of a more extended project he had underway. This novel was one of the great novels written in the vernacular, which Wu and Qian Jiaju had read surreptitiously, in their middle school days. During the previous summer he had become interested in the Ming scholar-official, Wang Shizhen (1526–1590). In this essay, he looked at Wang’s relationship with the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase).9 Wang Shizhen had been accepted by many as the novel’s author from stories that had developed over the years, but not from solid textual evidence. Quite a few of Wu’s projects were linked like a patchwork tapestry through their sources with the threads leading from one piece to another, contributing to each other, yet parts of completely separate historical issues he was interested in, existing as segments in the historical panorama. Characteristic of much of the panorama he was dealing with at this time was that geographically it was in central Zhejiang, his home province. For instance, while he was searching in the Wu Shu (Book of Wu), Wu being the name of the Jinhua region that Wu Han and these historical figures all came from, for the date of the birth of the bibliophile, Hu Yinglin, because he needed it in the chronological biography of Hu he was writing, he discovered a Wang Shizhen chronological biography (nianpu). In fact, his work on the Hu Yinglin biography was the thread carrying him into several other projects. Hu Yinglin’s mentor had been Wang Shizhen and it was Wu Han’s interest in Wang Shizhen’s life, which then led him into studying the legends and stories surrounding the authorship of the Jin Ping Mei novel, and the ownership

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of the very famous Song painting “Spring Festival on the River.” Of course, Hu Shi’s major pioneering studies on the classical novels had sensitized Wu Han to the importance of all of the novels as historical sources, although Hu Shi himself had no particular interest in the Jin Ping Mei.10 After unexpectedly finding this short biography of Wang buried in the Wu Shu, he decided he would write a full chronological biography of Wang, a major Ming literatus-official. While collecting material he uncovered legends and stories that connected Wang to the Jin Ping Mei and also to the famous Song painting of the Qingming Spring Festival in Kaifeng. This led him to conclusions about how the old assumption that it was Wang Shizhen who authored the novel had begun. This research soon became the parent of a study on Wang’s purported authorship of the Jin Ping Mei. This project on the creator of the novel and the painting quickly grew so large and important it no longer could be kept within the Wang biography. When he realized that his decision was to publish the work on the authorship of the novel separately as an appendix to the as-yet-unwritten “Wang Shizhen nianpu.” Thus the full name of the 1931 article was “The Story of the Painting “Spring Festival on the River” and The Plum in the Golden Vase and Its Development—an appendix to the “Wang Shizhen chronological biography.” Wu thought it amusing that “the stomach had gotten too big for the body.”11 And after all, the Wang Shizhen biography he had been planning and which he actually cited several times later in the Hu Yinglin nianpu, was never published by Wu.12 In his several articles on The Plum in the Golden Vase, generally thought of in the past as too risqué for polite tastes, Wu wrote admiringly of it as a novel of realism and irony. He saw it as depicting the market town life of urban society, a story sparing no details of the salacious and loose life of the town residents. He pointed out that its unrestrained and natural manner of writing had brought high admiration from the literati of the time. However the fearless and bold narrative of sex in society had led to efforts to suppress it by those who objected to such frank writing, while other oversensitive and neurotic people, wishing to save the book from blame by endowing it with another reason for existing, had fabricated heroic stories of revenge to explain it.13 Through all of this, according to Wu, it had not been doubted that Wang Shizhen was the author until it was possible to delve into the issue in the evidential research of the Republican period.14 Wu’s path breaking conclusions in his investigation of the old accounts imputing authorship to Wang are: first, that the Wang family and the painting had absolutely no relationship; secondly, the Jin Ping Mei was not written by Wang; and thirdly, all of the stories linking Wang to the painting and the novel are baseless.15 Because in the earliest text of the novel (published in 1695), available when Wu wrote this first article, there was a preface that said that the novel had been written in the Ming Jiajing period (1522–1566) he accepted this as the date of writing.16

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In this first essay on the novel’s authorship, Wu flits through the fantastic who-dunit plots of poison pens, a missing arm from a corpse, of revenge wreaked and of assassination, recounting these complicated tales of the presumed ownership, with the alternative names of the figures involved. But recounting in this way and leaving out the most commonly known names of the people, unfortunately he added even more to the reader’s confusion. While the article was generally well received in literary circles, Hu Shi, ever the teacher, was quick to tell Wu a few days after the article came out in the Weekly that he needed to try harder to help the reader understand a very complex situation.17 Thinking of the ordinary reader Hu Shi often stressed the need for clarity and simplicity of language. Chunhan replied to Hu’s letter that he had left the names in the manuscript since he was in a rush to get the piece published because he needed the money from the book fee to buy books for his Ming studies. Since he knew that Hu was sympathetic to his financial problems this was a safe excuse. Two years later when another text of the novel unexpectedly came to light Wu returned to write an even more important essay on the Jin Ping Mei.

EDITORIAL BEGINNING: PLUNGING IN By the end of his first year at Qinghua in 1932 Wu was on the student editorial board of the Qinghua Weekly. He served as the Literary and History Section editor on the all male editorial board. The table of contents and preface of a special issue of the Weekly he edited that spring, the Literary and History Issue (Wenshi zhuanhao), shows his editorial hand. First comes an article by Jiang Tingfu on the value of the historical material in the Qing foreign policy documents; then an essay on the documents found in the caves of Dunhuang in far western China by Chen Yinke whom Wu admired greatly; one jointly by Hu Shi and Qian Mu on a discussion of Laozi; another by Qian Mu; two major articles and three colophons by Wu himself; and an essay by his old friend Qian Jiaju on the breakup of the East India Company and the Opium War; as well as one by Zheng Zhenduo writing under the name Xiti; and one by Feng Youlan.18 The list of authors read like a selected who’s who of contemporary Chinese historians. In the special issue’s preface, Wu represents his editorial credo with citations from two exceptional Qing rebel thinkers whom Liang Qichao had pointed to as models for the writing of history in China. The first was the pragmatist, Yan Yuan (1635–1704), and the second the Qing historian, Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801).19 He used the example of these two men’s ideas to emphasize the spirit he was convinced history should be written in and the methodology that should be used. He also was promoting the idea that there were roots deep in Chinese thought for the formation of modern Chinese historiography.

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From Zhang Xuecheng, the Qing literatus-historian who has often been considered the forerunner of modern historiography in China, Wu drew the idea that all historical scholarship should use a variety of methods: comparative analysis, independent evaluations, and textual evidential methodology. Zhang’s principle was that all academic endeavor must have two avenues: one, learning that is based on independent judgments for selecting and evaluating, and the other, textual research to provide the evidence for the judgments.20 The particular passage Wu drew from is significant for the priority Zhang Xuecheng gave to the avenue of independent judgment, or what might be considered the exercise of the subjective point of view over objective evidence or facts. Although surrounded by the prevailing Han Studies kaozheng historiography school, Zhang was unwilling to limit history writing merely to evidential investigation in texts despite using it as an essential part of his own work. Wu Han shared another of Zhang’s conviction’s—that history should be written from a viewpoint that is relevant to the time in which it is written, that changes relative to the time and its needs. As the years passed Wu was to become more and more convinced of the need to relate history to contemporary times, even in his own work in the post-1949 years in the People’s Republic. In the Yan Yuan selection Wu chose, Yan makes the point that the truth of an idea is more important than whether it agrees or differs from other thought or previously accepted ideas. Validity cannot be measured by how many consider an idea to be true.21 Writing history is not a summary of the majority viewpoint. In evoking Yan Yuan’s thought on truth and the scholar’s responsibility to find it and let people know, Wu was identifying with a thinker exceptionally suited to modern pragmatic thought. In his own time in the early Qing, Yan had little influence but the iconoclastic, yet pragmatic ideas he promoted were distinctly relevant in the twentieth century for those trying to work out contradictions between the need to act in the present and the heavy, constricting, pervasive demands of the customary habits and traditional role of the intelligentsia culture bearers. The rebel Yan had broken free of the restricting neo-Confucianism of his own time. He viewed learning as active through personal experience for without experience knowledge has no substance. When Liang Qichao, not a follower of the May Fourth troupe of iconoclasts himself, had introduced Yan Yuan in his lectures and writing in the 1920s while he taught at Qinghua, Yan had become even more a modern symbol of pragmatic independence. Liang made the point that as a pragmatist Yan was even more effective than John Dewey, a favorite of May Fourth participants, because Yan had approached, as no foreigner could have, the preceding two thousand years of Chinese thought with a revolutionary attitude.22 Liang held Yan up as a model for intellectuals because he realized that the style of learning must be transformed from within to create a new society. It was this indigenous aspect of Yan’s message that the student editor Wu Han invoked

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in the special literary and history issue of the Qinghua Weekly as he was beginning his editorial career. Liang had quoted Yan Yuan, “You should carry books to school to become a person who changes the world, not be a person changed by the world.”23 To Wu Han this meant in his own life: only when learning is used by intellectuals as a tool for action would it be relevant, then intellectuals will be enabled to change the world. Yan Yuan wanted people to fasten their minds on practice; there should be much less time spent on reading and theorizing and more time for doing and activity. The condition of life of the common people in the historical past concerned him. Yan’s ideas about results and value Wu embraced as relevant to modern life. Yan’s notion that only in the objects of knowledge does knowledge have form suggests the concepts of materialism, which made him relevant to a number of the historians of the 1930s.24 In a few years Wu would invoke Yan Yuan again when he and other historians organized a society to discuss and write New History, social, and economic history for China.25 Wu’s editorial work on the Qinghua Weekly took a good deal of his already crowded time and earned him his share of editor’s enemies. After a year of editing Wu went to his friend, Xia Nai who would specialize in archeology, to ask him to take his place. When Xia tried to turn him down because he didn’t know a lot of people Wu told him although he might not have a lot of close friends among historians he also had no enemies who opposed him. Wu said that was not his case: “I have friends but I also have enemies.”26 After reluctantly accepting the job, Xia soon discovered his rejection of manuscripts resulted in his acquiring his own enemies. Consequently he soon followed in Wu’s footsteps to resign.

HOW TO STOP THE DOCUMENTARY DRAIN FROM CHINA TO THE WEST? While working at the Yanjing library and later at the Qinghua library, Wu had identified several texts that had never before been available to the scholarly world. He had written colophons to explain the origin of several of the texts, some from the Ming period. There was one he particularly considered especially important: the Qing dynasty Kangxi reign edition of a Song dictionary, the Guang yun.27 Wu was very excited about this newly discovered edition of the Song period Guang yun dictionary—actually, he had found the first three volumes of this most perfect edition, one of only three editions extant. But he learned that part of this multivolume edition had already been taken out of China, to Harvard University. He feared this might be his and other Chinese scholars’ only chance to examine the three volumes that remained in China since there was a great possibility these might also be removed from the country, out of Chinese scholars’ hands. In studying

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the text he had discovered that the proofreading of this particular Kangxi edition of the Song dictionary was excellent and of course the quality of the proofreading of a dictionary was a very important feature. After working all night for two nights in great excitement, he had even been able to establish the identity of the proofreader. His distress about the very real possibility of the dictionary being taken away from China and Chinese scholars thus deprived of the possibility of studying an important work firsthand discloses the resentment of Chinese scholars toward such actions by foreigners that denied them the possibility to study their own cultural artifacts. Very few of the Chinese who were going abroad to study at that time were interested in ancient Chinese documents; almost all who did go abroad went to learn Western thought and Western science. Once the ancient texts were removed to Western countries, the possibility of Chinese scholars having access to the volumes decreased significantly. The Guang yun was an important phonological dictionary for the study of the language. Its removal would have implications for the study of the development of the Chinese language. Wu’s ideas on this had nothing to do with the expression of simple nationalism but derived from his interest in indigenous Chinese culture. After all, how could the culture that was his be understood historically if ancient texts that were its basis were beyond the reach of modern scholars in the country?

DOUBTS ABOUT TEXTS AND CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE EMPEROR From the time he entered the university in the fall of 1931, Wu had been poring over the Ming History (Ming shi) and discovering innumerable questions. Many of the short notes and commentaries or colophons he published were the result of his critical sifting. Eventually he began to write on the Ming shi itself and its validity. The question that caused him most to doubt the Ming shi’s reliability was the case of the prime minister at the beginning of the first Ming reign, known historically as the “Hu Weiyong Affair.” His study published in 1934 of Hu Weiyong (d. 1380) and the emperor’s destruction of him was one of the works, which established Wu’s reputation as a leading Ming historian in the 1930s.28 A path breaking work on a crucial event in the founding reign of the Ming dynasty, this study of Wu’s became the first work in a succession of studies that led to his biography of the Ming founder, which he finished in 1943 and published in 1944.29 Hu Weiyong was the Ming founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang’s powerful prime minister. The emperor had Hu Weiyong removed after accusing him of lese majesté, because he was jealous of Hu’s power and suspicious of the loyalty of powerful officials who had supported him in the rebellion that

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led to his overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Hu was put to death at the emperor’s command, the position of prime minister abolished, and Zhu Yuanzhang took into his own hands the day-to-day governance of the realm. Finally, he had all of Hu’s colleagues and their families, numbering tens of thousands of people, killed. Wu had observed in his investigations that there were certain inconsistencies and illogicalities in the Ming History text on these events. As early as the spring of 1932, he had already developed enough data to write Hu Shi a long letter in which he reviewed his findings and projected his conclusions.30 The essay on the Hu Weiyong affair which he published two years later in the prestigious Yanjing xuebao of Yanjing University on the eve of his graduation from Qinghua in June 1934 was his first major work on the early Ming founding period. At the point of his April 1932 letter to Hu Shi when he was first setting out his discoveries he was not yet discussing his tentative conclusions on the affair in terms of the study of institutional-political power which it became, nor was he yet even planning to publish on the affair at all. Rather, as he began the project he framed it as an issue of Japanese relations with China at the beginning of the Ming. At the time he began this research, tension was very high in the minds of all Chinese because of the current actions of Japan toward China. For a scholar to be viewing early Ming affairs, centuries earlier, from the perspective of its relations with Japan at that time was not surprising, in fact Hu Shi encouraged him in this. Hu Weiyong had been accused by the Ming emperor of plotting with the Japanese to overthrow him, and as Wu began to structure his study in 1931 it was this Sino-Japanese aspect that drew him into the affair. In his letter to Hu, Wu explains he has concluded that these actually were charges by the emperor trumped up to create an excuse for cutting off relations with Japan. Furthermore, he thinks the Japanese historians also have accepted the Ming emperor’s distortions of history. Thus, “for the past several hundred years the truth has been hidden from everyone.” Wu obviously is spurred by what appears to be a perfect case for a “doubter of antiquity.” As he launches the research Wu wants to let Hu Shi know his plans on this projected essay about uncovering the true situation in what he has framed as the topic, Ming Sino-Japanese relations. This first version of his study on early Ming Sino-Japanese policy was Wu Han’s attempt to answer his anguished question of “What to do?” as he faced the national emergency precipitated by the Japanese invasion of the Northeast that he groped with in his earlier letter to Hu Shi. Now he was deep into a careful “scientific” evidential study of this Ming dynasty historical issue and concerned with getting at the “hidden” truth about Sino-Japanese relations in the Ming period. Somehow or other this “putting in order” of the history of the early Ming Sino-Japanese relations was supposed to “save the nation by study,” following Hu Shi’s charge to the students. Wu wanted Hu

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Shi to know he was on the research track, as defined by Hu. Nevertheless, he was searching at the same time for historical notions he could live with to satisfy his need to meaningfully support his country. Despite his initial interest in the relations of the Ming with Japan, as a result of his further research Wu Han soon was diverted from his initial approach to the problematique of the Ming founding emperor’s motivation and the significance of the Hu Weiyong affair. When he reached conclusions they were quite different. His work had been transformed into a study of the growth of absolute power in the Ming, focused on the emperor’s intentions, his power, and methods of rule and the changes he made in institutional structure, which strengthened absolutist power. The issue of Sino-Japanese relations had faded into the background in the face of his refocusing on the issue of the distribution of absolute political power. But other, immediate and more pressing matters in his own life diverted Wu in 1932.

CALL OF FAMILY TIES Unexpectedly at the end of his first year at Qinghua, Chunhan had a letter from home telling him that his father’s illness was worse. He was needed at home. As soon as the summer vacation began he must come home with his younger brother. Apprehensively, he wrote Hu Shi at the beginning of July he would have to go back to Yiwu: “In the event of a disaster in my family, there are no other adult males except for me and my younger brother studying in Beiping. The future is uncertain, I really don’t dare to think about it.”31 Wu and his brother made the long journey home to Zhejiang in July. The year before his father had contracted tuberculosis. With only two young daughters at home this meant his mother had to take over management of the farmland. The littlest sister, Puxing, only five years old, Chunhan had only vague memories of as a tiny baby, but the older sister, Puyue, now fifteen, he knew well. Many of his hours had been spent playing with her and looking after her and their brother Chunxi, when she was small and their mother busy.32 Expecting the arrival of the two sons from Beiping, the family must have waited with great excitement and anticipation. Chunxi had only been gone a year, but Chunhan had not been home to stay since he had left for school in Hangzhou five years before. Puyue had graduated that very year from the elementary school run by the old scholar Yang Zhibing, Wu Han’s favorite teacher and friend. Because her brother had been sending her copies of modern magazines she had begun to have modern ideas, especially about women being freed from the bonds of arranged marriages. To her consternation, a few months before her brother came home she had discovered that, without a word to her, their father had arranged for her to marry a rich landlord’s son, Wang Mou. He had told her she could then “enjoy an easy

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and carefree life.” After she learned this, she had written her elder brother to ask for his help to rescue her from this marriage. A son might succeed in resisting parents’ plans for an arranged marriage, but without help, a daughter had no hope of stopping the arrangement her parents had made for her life. She knew that Chunhan had refused to marry the girl their parents had chosen for his bride. When Chunhan learned about their parents plans he had written repeatedly to his father opposing his sister’s marriage: “Yuemei is very young, such an important thing as marriage should not be arranged by parents.” “Since Father loves Yuemei so deeply, you ought to raise her to be well-educated, to make her self-sufficient. You absolutely cannot let her spend her life as a peasant and cause trouble for her whole life.”33 In referring to her becoming a “peasant” Wu revealed his own idea that such a marriage would relegate her virtually to being a peasant woman as was his mother despite her marriage to his father. But Chunhan’s pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Puyue knew that once married to the landlord’s son the requirements of obedience and filiality would tie her to her husband and his landlord family. Now that Chunhan had come home her only thought was that somehow he would save her from this fate. She had complete trust that he could help her. Indeed, he did talk forcefully with their father about opposing the marriage but nothing would deter Wu Binyu. The family atmosphere quickly became extremely strained. Everyone could see that Chunhan’s relationship with his father was not the same as when he had been a young student.34 Despite his father’s worsening health, Wu returned to Beiping at the end of the summer. When he left Bitter Bamboo Pond village he took his sister Puyue with him as far as Hangzhou. There he took her to be admitted to the Hangzhou Middle School for Girls and paid her tuition and living expenses with his own money. Now he had undertaken to support not only his brother but also his sister as well as himself on his pay from his work at the Qinghua library while he was a university student. After leaving Puyue in Hangzhou, Chunhan returned to Beiping with his brother and took up his studies and research for the coming year. But the next summer, with the ease of rail travel now possible since the railway had been extended to Yiwu, Chunhan came home again to see his family. His sister had returned from school and much to the family’s surprise, this time he seemed more agreeable to her marriage. One day he made his parents especially happy when he invited Wang Mou, the bridegroom-to-be, to the house. Asking the two to sit opposite each other at the table he sat between them, then told them he was going to give them both a quiz. Putting before them a book of classical Chinese selections, he turned to “Peach Blossom Spring” and asked them each to translate a part of it from the classical Chinese into baihua, first Wang Mou and then Puyue. Both of them had finished the first year of middle school. After scratching his ear and laboring for some time, Wang presented his attempt, most of it wrong. Puyue followed, quickly

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producing a correct translation of the whole essay. Giving the two translations to his father, the father who had been so strict with his own studies when he was at home, he said to him, “You must consider, both are at the level of first year middle school. But the difference is great. He is a good-fornothing young man from a wealthy family. You really cannot choose him.” Despite this evidence, their father would still not allow the marriage to be broken. In the fall Chunhan took Puyue back to school in Hangzhou and returned to Beiping again. The next spring their father died. Very soon after the funeral, Puyue’s marriage contract was broken by the Wu family, now headed by Wu Chunhan. Later, when she finished her schooling she made her choice to marry a young man by the name of Song Ruji, also from Yiwu County. She had gone to school with him at Yang Zhibing’s elementary school and the two had also been classmates together in Hangzhou at the upper middle school.35 Before Wu Han’s father’s death there was yet another episode over his children’s marriages. Chunxi, the second son, had been promised to his father’s business partner’s daughter, Ye Meiying. The Ye family lived in the small market town of Wudian nearby where the general store the two men owned had been located. Meiying, a modern girl, had openly opposed the marriage because it was arranged, but Chunxi, more obedient than his elder brother, obeyed his father and did not object. As the senior Wu became more seriously ill the last year of his life, because he believed the good luck resulting would be efficacious to saving his life, the father called the younger son home from Beiping and ordered him to marry. In spite of the bride’s opposition the ceremony was duly conducted and the marriage consummated. But the luck wasn’t good enough—within a short time in the spring of 1934, the elder Wu died and after his father was buried Chunxi went back to Beiping to continue his studies at Qinghua University. In a few months his bride Meiying bore a son. By the end of the year she had left the baby with her mother-in-law and joined Chunxi in Beiping, her destiny firmly tied to the Wu family.36 As the young members of the family one by one left the rural village for educational reasons, in effect they were turning their backs on rural China. They left because they were driven by cultural values and by economic necessity. To participate in the modern world they wanted modern educations, which could not be found in rural Zhejiang. The women wanted to be freed of the oppressive Confucian familial norms that bound their lives. Later they lived in urban areas because there were few jobs in rural Zhejiang for educated people like themselves with degrees in history and economics, or, for that matter, in science or technology. Their education in the 1930s prepared them only for urban life. Very little they learned was relevant to the rural areas they left behind. Nevertheless, the ties they felt to their home area, ties of sentiment, blood and culture, as well as history, remained real forces even down to the end of their lives when bones were carried back to the village tomb for burial.37

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Chunhan’s visits home confirmed to him that there was little of interest to him in the countryside, especially since he had rejected so completely his father’s plans for him to remain at home and head the family. At the end of his first year at Qinghua he had gone home with a sense of impending disaster about to befall because of the heavy responsibility he knew would come to rest on his shoulders as the eldest son if his father died from the tuberculosis, known to be a deadly disease in those years. Still he had willingly taken over some of the responsibility even before his father was completely incapacitated by illness. He had involved himself in his sister’s marriage and education problems and later had even sent money home to help with the family expenses. By gradually taking more leadership in the family he was turning the direction of the family away from rural Yiwu to an urban environment, leading his siblings into modern society in a way that his father had been incapable of doing. Already his brother had followed him to Beiping and he had taken his sister to Hangzhou for secondary school.

RETURN TO QINGHUA: JAPAN AND THE WHITE TERROR Back in Beiping in his life at the university, he spent his time on classes and continued his extensive reading in Ming history. Since no one was teaching Ming history at Qinghua, Wu was self-trained in Ming texts and Ming issues. Among the courses he took that year was Lei Haizong’s Historical Method. He and another transfer student, Xia Nai, were the best among a dozen students according to university records.38 During his three years at Qinghua, among his other courses were one taught by Zheng Zhenduo and Yu Pingbo’s course in the History of Fiction.39 There were also courses from Jiang Tingfu and Chen Yinke and others. Lei Haizong’s teaching style emphasized principles and synthesis, not traditional evidential research. Chen Yinke’s pedagogical method was evidential research in the historical literature coupled with synthesizing and summarizing from this basis. All of these teachers combined emphasis on research in documents with differing degrees of modern analysis and synthesis, but it was Jiang Tingfu and Lei Haizong who were the most important synthesizers among Wu’s teachers. Jiang, a diplomatic historian, promoted Western methods in research and New History, the non-Marxian materialism associated with James Harvey Robinson’s group at Columbia that was current in American historical methodology. According to his friend Luo Ergang who knew Wu’s work well, Wu Han’s own historical methodology was most influenced by Jiang Tingfu in his student years. In the late spring of 1932 the Guomindang suppression of radical Communist thought meant that writers had to be very careful about discussion of social background or materialism in historical questions in their academic research. Chiang Kai-shek was focusing on wiping out the subversives he

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feared in educational circles as he stepped up the extermination campaigns against the Communist Soviets. Known as the White Terror in academic circles, by the summer and fall of 1932 there were sudden police raids and searches, often followed with arrests of students and faculty. Although Communist Party members often got away, nevertheless the atmosphere of the Terror permeated the university campuses. During the six months from June 1932 to January 1933, one hundred faculty and students in Beiping were arrested for political crimes. Campus political organizations were suppressed, and examinations and curriculum became more regimented.40 In this atmosphere, inevitably those who participated in academic discussions were aware of pressures to conform to the Nationalist political line. For instance in February 1934, 149 books in the humanities were listed and outlawed for mention of class struggle. This was followed by orders to burn some books and to ban books that “introduce proletarian literary theories.”41 If proletarian literary theory was being banned, one could not be certain that analysis of the policies that were harmful to the peasant class in the late Ming, a subject Wu was interested in and worked on, was not also suspect. Or that simply discussing a true literature of the common people as Zheng Zhenduo did in the first issue of Wenxue jikan would not be considered too radical to be permitted.42 Under the repressive policies of the Nationalist government even completely innocent projects seemed radical. The spreading atmosphere of thought control influenced the choice of vocabulary and even subject in intellectual discussions. Communist writings themselves were often purged of all overtly communist terms such as “class struggle.” Explicit references to communist ideas and use of terms were avoided by communist writers to avoid attracting the attention of the censor.43 In this situation the line between what was really communist historical literature and what was influenced by non-Marxist materialism became hazy and the two very difficult to separate. The New History discourse that Wu and his friends began to develop about this time, even though it had no explicit political component, seemed to be daring in the midst of this atmosphere of White Terror and press censorship. Although today we assume the scope of history encompasses the whole of society, at that time in China, with the era of orthodox dynastic history left behind little more than two decades, to discuss the breadth of society and emphasize conditions within peasant society and oppression of the farmers by the upper classes was a bold change. It was a change that flew in the face of criticism from traditionalists, as well as faced the absolutism of the White Terror political control. Even when Liang Qichao had talked of “grouping” and of the “people” at the beginning of the century he was referencing abstract ideas, not peasants and plain people in the fields and streets. Disregard of the orthodox conception of history did not necessarily mean hidden criticism of the current governing power, but such disregard challenged the ideology of those wishing to control historical orthodoxy. Historical writing

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and political ideology had never in the past been wholly separate in China. Now in far broader terms than orthodox historians had previously used, society, culture, and the proper scope of historical issues and elements were being redefined by historians at the very center of the intelligentsia. The issue of the society-wide scope of history had been discussed theoretically by Liang Qichao and He Bingsong among others, but now historians were actually practicing the writing of history delineating anew the framework of the historical narrative. There was criticism of this New History from the old guard and Wu felt the criticism directed at him.44 Beyond the issue of open academic discussion, the White Terror and the censorship that accompanied it produced among intellectuals a rising resentment of the government’s increasing use of totalitarian power. What little sympathy there had been for Chiang Kai-shek among moderates quickly disappeared as Chiang’s men attempted to suppress free discussion and free expression in the press. When suddenly the Japanese army advanced on Beiping and Tianjin to expand their influence in north China below Manchuria in January 1933, it was just at the time of university examinations in the middle of Wu’s second year at Qinghua. Only three hundred students stayed at Qinghua as many fled to find safer places. Intimidated by the Japanese, the Guomindang would not fight. Wu was one of those who stayed in Beiping, having no money for travel.

FINDING A BOOK: EMBRACING A MODEL During the midwinter crisis after exams were over in the bleak days of February he visited the bookshops in Liuli chang, the street where booksellers and shops selling art works and antiques clustered.45 Here in the Qing period Manchu princes and high officials had come to stroll the street to look in the shops and examine the old books and paintings. A great fair was held every year just before this time, which meant the shops and stalls were still especially well stocked with old books by the dealers.46 Now Wu browsed in the shops, picking up the books and turning the pages, but the prices were too high for him so he left the shops to look among the peddler’s stalls on the street where the prices were cheaper. Among the books, he found a three-cent copy of the Bi Xue Lu, a volume about the Donglin Party at the end of the Ming dynasty,47 a book he admired and particularly wanted. In the days following his buying excursion he pored over the Bi Xue Lu, making notes in it. Inside the cover, he jotted his thoughts: “I came because I was eager to get the books and records I dreamed of.” After going home he had thought, “the books in the sets I didn’t get I can read in the Beijing library and all the events will be before my eyes.” Every day he read and took notes in the book. “I call myself a bibliophile but it’s laughable for me

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to say this,”48 he disheartedly wrote as he thought about the purchases he would really have liked to make in the shops. Still, every book he bought added to his treasure. The Bi Xue Lu vividly brought him into touch with the corruption and political problems at the end of the Ming dynasty. It is the record of the last words of six leaders of the Donglin Party who were condemned to death by the emperor for censuring the government. These men were members of the Donglin Party (Eastern Forest Party) in the Ming Tianqi period (1621–1628). They were officials whose crime had been to fearlessly criticize the ineffective, corrupt Ming rule with the intention of improving and strengthening Ming dynastic rule, not overthrowing it. They had ignored their own safety and in their loyalty sacrificed themselves to their responsibility. The compiler of the Bi Xue Lu praises their spirit. The last words of Yang Lian, one of the Donglin leaders, are recorded at the beginning of the book. Just before he was put to death Yang had written that the emperor must pay attention to the affairs and security of the country. Yang wanted the emperor to understand his loyalty to him and he wanted the people to understand his loyalty to the country.49 Unable to put down the book, Chunhan finished reading it while he sat in Yu Pingbo’s class on the history of fiction. He wrote on the flyleaf of the book as he read the Bi Xue Lu: I don’t know if I feel bitter or sweet. When I think about how I will die in the future, to die in bed would be stupid. The best way for me is to follow my own ideas and find a way to die free and pure. If I am weary of living, I will wave my hand and say farewell. How straightforward!50

These passionate words sprang from the heart of a young man deeply engaged with history and life, not merely from the dry mind of a detached scholar who could easily hold himself in reserve while he studied remote historical texts. It was commitment of the individual to action, even selfsacrificing action, in the Bi Xue Lu that appealed to Wu as well as the identification of the abstract but very real flaws of state corruption and morality the Donglin men were trying to rectify. In the Donglin people, Chunhan saw the nobility of selfless men so committed to their convictions about their country and ruler that they would sacrifice everything, even their lives. In contrast, he did not admire men like the shidaifu, the literati-officials he had written about in his Western Han study for Hu Shi’s class, men who had sacrificed all else to retain and strengthen their own powerful positions. These two types of behavior offered alternative models that were far from lost on Wu. The dilemma faced by the Donglin leaders was a deeply etched model for Wu, a model that stayed with him all of his life. In the spring of 1933 after the Japanese attack the mood was despair at Qinghua and Yanjing. In May the school year was abruptly declared over

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and the students were told to go home when Japanese troops advanced close to Beiping’s walls and their planes carrying bombs flew over the city, leaving everyone terrified.51 After the Chinese government signed the humiliating Tanggu truce on 31 May 1933, the aggressive Japanese pressure on North China relaxed somewhat and the situation seemed to stabilize. Wu’s first year at the university had been a great success. Moving far beyond the ordinary student’s involvement with the subject he was studying, with great purpose Wu had launched into his professional career in historical research and writing. The following year his pace of publishing seemed to slow a bit. His own work and reading in Ming historical records kept him busy. Also the trip home with his brother to see his family and the realization of the family situation—his father’s illness and the declining family finances—was a profoundly sobering experience. The political atmosphere in Beiping and the tension caused by the aggressive Japanese pressure on North China increased the daily anxiety of even the most nonpolitical of students. This combination certainly contributed to his comparative muteness in print that year, although he did publish a few pieces in the Qinghua Weekly and was working on some major projects. In two articles in the spring of 1933 he had critically evaluated the Ming History (Ming shi), developing his critique of the imperfections in the History and comparing it with other texts such as Huang Zongxi and Wang Fuzhi.52 During this time, Wu was spending a great deal of time reading Ming texts at the Beiping Library in the city center. The two essays were preliminary evaluations of the Ming History. Later in 1940 he completed a more penetrating analysis of the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shi Lu).53 Underlying these critical analyses was the wide ranging, thorough comparative reading of the Ming historical records he was immersed in. In these undergraduate years he developed a method of investigative research for himself that stayed with him his whole life. He talked often with Xia Nai, also in Lei Haizong’s class on historical methodology that year, about how he read historical texts and took notes on his reading.54 In fact, Chunhan copied extensively by hand the important sections of much of what he read and enthusiastically recommended this way of studying to friends. Wu thought this copying not only provided the history student with his own copy of the material but etched the text into his mind. Besides the actual copying of texts he took copious notes on cards, thousands and thousands of notes, which later as he wrote were available for reference on many topics he worked on in Ming history. With such intense work there was little or no time for entertainment at the opera or movies or for politics. His long trips into the city took him to the Beijing Library to read historical texts, as well as to the bookstalls. They took him to Hu Shi’s home and to Qian Jiaju’s place. In 1933, the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shi lu) in 2900 juan, had yet to be published in a modern edition. To know the Ming period he needed to be intensely familiar with the Veritable Records, which had actually been

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written when or soon after the events occurred. To do this he spent countless hours in the library reading and copying. In later years Wu thought this way of working, “much reading and much copying,” had given him familiarity with the periods he worked on.55 In personal work style, influenced by his mentor Hu Shi’s recommendations, he was actually very similar to the late Qing dynasty kaozheng scholars.56

FINAL YEAR AS A QINGHUA STUDENT— NEW WORK ON THE JIN PING MEI Wu’s last year as a student began with reopening his work on the novel, the Jin Ping Mei, with considerable excitement after an edition of the novel that would prove to be the earliest extant text was discovered in 1932 in Shanxi Province. As he examined it he observed it was significantly different from the edition he had used previously for it contained two unique prefaces that illuminated definitively the question of when the novel had been written. His study of this newly discovered text, the Jin Ping Mei cihua, convinced him that he must review and expand his earlier article. 57 In this new essay begun in October 1933, his historical purpose in using factual material shifted and expanded. As he moved beyond the evidential research issues in the texts he was studying to evaluate and even disprove the myths about the authorship of the novel, his interest in the material conditions and social background of the period expanded to include consideration of the milieu of the author’s life. In the social background within the novel, Wu observed there were clues to the author’s reasons for writing. Pushing beyond the issue of authorial intent he could see that the social background threw light on the reality of the social conditions that had caused the Ming disintegration. In Wu’s view the novel actually became a source text for a broadened sociopolitical history of the Ming. This emphasis on the social context as relevant to understanding the novel ran counter to the “classicist” method of study of written texts. For strict classicist or kaozheng scholars the intention of a “purposeful, creative authorship” was not relevant. Rather the purity of the language of the text was the focus.58 When Wu turned, in this final Jin Ping Mei article, to address questions of social background he was leaving this classicist framework of exclusive emphasis on the text and instead situating the text in the larger context of the social situation of its origin. In this major work, “Jin Ping Mei de shehui beijing,” (The Social Background of the Jin Ping Mei) published in the inaugural issue of the prestigious new journal Wenxue jikan, edited by the literary historian, Zheng Zhenduo, Wu restated his earlier kaozheng research that disproved Wang Shizhen’s presumed authorship.59 With the evidence of the newly discovered manuscript he corrected his dating of the novel from the Ming Jiajing

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period and established that it was, in fact, written in the later Wanli period (1573–1619), but not before 1582. This dating established by Wu Han has stood the test of time and is accepted by scholars today.60 From establishing the dating of the novel he moved on to new ground on the social and material background of Jin Ping Mei. Wu pointed out that the relationship of the merchant class and the official class, the decline of the feudal ruling class, the decline and collapse of the rural economy, degraded urban life, the concentration of manorial land in the ownership of large landlords and royal domains are all part of the social background in which the novel is situated.61 The rise of the merchant class as a new social force, growth of a commodity economy, expansion of foreign trade, exploitation of the peasants, the moral corruption of the ruling emperors—all are part of the novel’s framework62 and figure in Wu’s description of the social context of the novel. From the world of the novel we know the world of the Ming period. In this essay his historian’s view extends far beyond the issue of the authorial intent of the novelist. His approach to the history of the past is, at heart, not limited to that of an evidentiary literary historian, but becomes that of the social historian, using critical analysis to explore historical issues of the time. Wu sees that the social background revealed in the novel’s text was linked with, in fact was an underlying cause of historical events following the Wanli period, particularly the peasant uprisings that ended the Ming some years later. In Wu’s words: The leisure class of the society, according to this corrupt fashion, enjoyed prostitutes, performers, gambling and alcohol day and night as the usual life. They lived a life of luxury and extravagance. Below this group, there was the other extreme: peasants who lived in poverty. They suffered a dozen kinds of exploitation, lived below the average and wandered about destitute. If something unexpected happened they had to sell their children. There were only two options: either to die in poverty or rebel.63

The elite of this society, particularly the new merchant class which the novel’s antihero, Ximen Qing, represented was the part of society which brought the downfall of the Ming dynasts: With such times and such a society, the day eventually came when peasants could not stand this situation. In less than thirty years, the volcano erupted at last! The great uprisings of Zhang Xianzhong and Li Zicheng were the inevitable outcome of this era and this society. Only in times and in a society such as this could a work like Jin Ping Mei be produced.64

In Wu Han’s view the novel gives the reader a view of the social conditions that caused the fall of the Ming dynasty. Evidence of Wu’s move into social history is abundant in this piece as he writes about issues in the

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breadth of society, issues that were at the heart of contemporary New History materialism. The contrast with his earliest essay on the novel where he had stayed within the fold of classically influenced evidential research is a case study in interaction of the historian with his source material. While his essay on the Jin Ping Mei brought him the high praise of the literary historian Zheng Zhenduo among others, after it was published in Wenxue jikan one of the Qinghua professors, perhaps more, did not share Zheng’s opinion. This traditionalist told Wu that it was enough to explain clearly the period the novel was written in, but he could see no point in discussing the social background of the period. When Wu went beyond the problem of dating and used the novel as a source for the social dynamics of the late Ming era, a use which today would not be challenged, he had ventured into academic territory that was new and exciting to some but yet was considered by conservative traditional scholars to be outside the proper realm of scholarship. Behind this negative opinion was the attitude that even discussing the social and material conditions of the period of a literary work savored of a Western, perhaps even radical socialist, political interpretation. Not only was the Nationalist government censorship making it difficult to openly discuss legitimate historical issues that were concurrently being raised by Marxism historians, but to some traditionally oriented minds the very social background of a period was taboo. In their conception this had not been a part of the traditional kaozheng discourse governed by its conception of the orthodox political structure of the historical past.65 In another aspect Wu’s study of the Jin Ping Mei is indicative of his own growing interest in irony. The novel’s penetrating critique of the Wanli era and the sense of immediacy induced by the author’s satire of the corrupt hero Ximen Qing and the society in which he lived, lets the reader see the intriguing use of ironic style. In the translation of the novel by David Tod Roy we see how the brilliant use of satire reveals the rotten nature of society. While Wu’s immediate interest in the novel was historical, its satiric style resonated with his own experiments with ironic criticism in essays. Certainly his familiarity with the Jin Ping Mei was a major factor influencing his own later style in ironic zawen. Already, in “On Professors” Wu had sharpened his use of ironic mockery with a jugular attack.

THE LITERARY QUARTERLY AND FICTION IN HISTORY When Zheng Zhenduo had decided to publish a new periodical, the Wenxue jikan, in 1933 to carry on the aim of the “construction of a new literature” through the iconoclastic work of “attacking and destroying traditional . . . dehumanized literature,” he invited seven other people to join the editorial board.66 Among the seven were the most famous woman novelist of the period, Xie Bingxin, the poet Zhu Ziqing, and the student Wu Han. Still a mere

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fourth year undergraduate, to be selected by Zheng, one of the decade’s leaders in the literary world, to be on the editorial board along with such prestigious people was a singular honor for Wu. Zheng gave exceptional critical approval to Wu Han’s essay on the social background of the Jin Ping Mei when he selected it for publication in the inaugural issue of the new journal. Zheng’s aim in the journal was to see the old literature reevaluated with modern criteria. He was interested, not only in promoting the “construction of the new literature,” but he also recognized that because of the work of some of the leaders of the New Culture movement there was now a “second generation of people plunging ahead,” working to develop a new understanding of the past through “reconstruction of the life of this ancient people.”67 Wu’s work on the Ming novel and another of his essays on fiction contained in the Ming dynastic history, the Ming shi,68 were both major contributions to this discourse on reevaluating the past to shape the new culture that Zheng was engaging in. Wu had gotten to know Zheng Zhenduo when he took a course from Zheng at Qinghua. The two had struck up a friendship, which later developed into a lifelong friendship. Their shared love of collecting old books and manuscripts was a common bond between them from the beginning. Another bond between the two was their shared questioning of the old canons in Chinese culture without wanting to completely discard them.69 For Wu his last year before graduation was a time of major research activity and publication. He brought his major projects on the Jin Ping Mei novel, the Hu Yinglin biography, and one on the Zhejiang-Jiangsu bibliophiles to completion as well as his research on the Hu Weiyong Affair. The Hu Yinglin nianpu (Chronological Biography of Hu Yinglin), which he published as a separate volume with the Commercial Press had been a work in progress since his year at the Yanjing University library.70 In the fall of 1933 as he started his last year at Qinghua, Wu joined the prestigious editorial board of Zheng Zhenduo’s new journal, the Literary Quarterly (Wenxue jikan). His article on the Jin Ping Mei published at Zheng’s invitation in the inaugural issue was followed in the next issue by two of his short articles.71 Then the third issue of the Quarterly published a major piece of Wu Han’s on the relationship of history to fiction. In this new venture he was breaking new ground exploring the construction of history. As iconoclastic as anything published about historical writing in the May Fourth period the article was a serious piece of scholarship, far-reaching in its thesis. During Wu’s reading of the Ming History (Ming shi) certain kinds of fictional materials included in the history had attracted his attention. From these observations he shaped an analytical study, calling it “Fictional elements of history.” Using the Ming History as his guinea pig, his project was to explore the relationship of fiction and history, a project in historiography that is very similar to what we today call “deconstructionist.” The sense of the term “history,” as he was using it here, is the written or narrative construction of the

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past, not the past as it occurred in its time. In 1934 Wu’s analysis was bold. His ideas about history and fiction prefigure some of the later notions on the purpose and characteristics of historical writing and the relation of history and myth. Only a few years after Wu’s essay, Georg Lukacs dealt with the relation of history and fiction in his study, The Historical Novel.72 While Lukacs is not concerned as much with history as with fiction, his broad question is essentially the same—how are fiction and history related? While pointing out the differences between fiction and history, Wu emphasizes their close relationship, and says they are so close that it is only the name that differentiates them. This is constructed history in all but name that he is writing about. One important difference he sees is that the histories—the standard or orthodox histories compiled for each dynasty— were constructed on the basis of “imperial doctrine and hegemonic power” but fiction doesn’t need the basis of this power. He observed that fictional writings “attack the weak points of society,”73 as he had found in the Jin Ping Mei. The common ground history and fiction have is due to their both reflecting the social situation, ideology, and economic organizations in which they are produced. According to Wu, both “record the narrative and the process of development in living styles and the development of the culture in man’s activities in the past.”74 Wu makes the astute point that the constraints placed upon orthodox history by its official purpose of glorifying the rulers, autocracy and official class give it a false form which limits the material that can be used to the “pedigreed biographies of the world and to the records of the struggles within that world.”75 On the other hand, because novels were not produced for the emperor’s world, but for literate readers beyond the control of the imperial sphere, they did not have to conform to these limitations. In the Jin Ping Mei study he had pointed to the importance of novels as historical sources for background of a period, especially for nonelite groups outside of the ruling group. Here in this essay on the Ming History he says, “For valuable social history materials it is better to read a novel than a history book of the same time because it will give a greater understanding of society.”76 With his thesis he is essentially making an attack on official histories. Wu proposes that a new term, “fictional elements in history” (lishi zhong de xiaoshuo), be used to include both the fiction, which describes the weak points of society and the histories, which record the main events. To rephrase it we can say that even the orthodox histories were created narratives because they were constructed to represent only a narrow part of society. Wu is virtually saying that, while both are constructed, the fictional element created as a novel (xiao shuo) gives a broader understanding of society because of its scope. He expands his idea and finds several sorts of fiction included in the Ming History itself: fiction about the supernatural, fiction about the foretellers and the gods and ghosts, and fictional stories such as those about historical figures in criminal cases for example.77 Discussing “the relationship of society

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and thought” and how this relationship influences the writing of the history of a period, he argues that in the long duration before the end of the nineteenth century all belonged to what he calls the “period of divine power.” Divine power is the power that everyone in the polity acknowledges descends from the gods to the legitimate ruler and pervades all he does. It was this hegemonic power that made the emperor supreme.78 In the time of the Ming shi the belief in the Gods who legitimate everything never changed although the Gods changed and evolved, for example, becoming personalized and politicized in the form of the City God. In the social ideology of the ruling power the methods used to control people relied on fatalism as a tool and on the “theory of heaven and earth combined” which, Wu observed, meant that it became the duty of the commoners to allow themselves to be oppressed. Due to this assumption, the historical records gave a high position to those who practiced the four virtues well—in other words, the Confucian scholar literati class and those who did as the rulers wanted. In this way, in life and in history the power and authority of the Gods described the role of both classes—the ruling class and the common people and legitimated the rulers: “The Gods are the tools of the rulers” and “the rulers exercise the functions of the Gods,” Wu wrote.79 The traditional ideology, expressed in the form of the Gods whom the peasants trusted, was used to control them. In the construction of the histories, while the writers did include the tales that circulated among the peasants, under the control of the prevailing traditional ideology these tales were always classed as “supernatural” and “curiosities” because they were outside of the legitimate sphere recognized by orthodox thought. Since in the traditional mindset, the historians particularly had the responsibility to guide and teach the people and maintain the underlying assumptions of the polity, when they recorded the fiction that the fiction writers had collected from the people they had no choice but to praise it as “history” in Wu’s words. In this way it was accounted for legitimately but the content was isolated and protected against because it was superstition. Wu viewed fiction and history and the supernatural as having no fundamental difference in the material, which was selected for the histories and the novels, differing only in the complexity of the description. Today the historiographic concept Wu was developing here we discuss under the rubric of myth-history or myth in history and as “constructed narratives.”80 An essential point Wu Han wants his readers to absorb is the vulnerability of the historian to the official social ideology and the historian’s role in creating normative models for the ruling authority to use in ruling. History had been given an integral part in the official ideology of rule since well before Sima Qian’s Shi ji in the long ago Han dynasty. This remained an important issue for China’s historians in the 1930s. The relationship of official ideology and history, both its writing and its construction of the past, remained a

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crucial issue in Wu’s thought throughout his life, until finally in the mid1960s the issue drew Wu himself into the very center of the polity. This essay, “Fictional Aspects of History,” was a brilliant critical work, far ahead of its time. Wu was questioning the fundamental truth of histories and pointing out the constructed nature of historical narrative and its relationship to legitimation of the structure of the polity. In this work of the mid1930s, Wu formulated concepts of history that, in the late twentieth century, were trotted out with fashionable names such as “invention” and “construction” and claimed as brilliant fresh insights into the ideas of history in works by Eric Hobsbawm and later Benedict Anderson as well as others.81

WU’S AFFAIR WITH THE HU WEIYONG AFFAIR Wu’s essay on the crisis in the first years of the Ming dynasty that had come to be known as the Hu Weiyong Affair was a major academic triumph for him. This essay altered significantly the accepted understanding of the founding emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang. Through critical examination of a great deal of evidence Wu had become convinced that the Ming History (Ming shi) story of the plot of the powerful prime minister Hu Weiyong to kill the founding emperor and usurp the throne had been contrived with lies to mask the true situation. This essay on Hu was the first in a succession of studies he undertook on Ming social, political, and economic history, which would culminate in his biography of the founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Emperor Ming Taizu, ten years later.82 Originally, as we have seen, when he began to work on the early Ming and the “Hu Weiyong Affair” his line of inquiry had focused on the problem of relations with Japan. This line of investigation was in keeping with Hu Shi’s recommendation that he research Chinese relationships with foreign countries. In order to control the depredations of Japanese pirates in the early years of the dynasty the Ming court had friendly relations with Japan. However, the Japanese ruler’s inability to control the pirates, plus the Japanese wish to trade with the Chinese resulted in the failure of negotiations and continuation of the pirate threat. As a consequence formal relations between the countries were stopped by the Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, but he needed an excuse to rationalize the breaking of trade and thus created a crisis within his dynastic government. Or so it had been assumed by historians.83 As he dug around in the records Wu Han’s study of Prime Minister Hu Weiyong’s case had led him to observe that the situation was far more complex: true, there were international relations reasons, but there were also internal political, economic, and class relations reasons powering the crisis. While it was true that the failure of foreign relations with Japan and the resultant closing of the country to Japanese trade had meant that the emperor needed a cover-up to prevent the responsibility falling on his court,

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Wu concluded that Zhu Yuanzhang had multiple reasons for the course of action he followed.84 Wu saw that politically the emperor worried that his male descendants were too weak to control the powerful officials and military officers surrounding the throne after his death. The death sentence on Prime Minister Hu Weiyong was only the beginning. Wanting to eliminate the officials to remove the threat he perceived to his dynasty, he ordered the killing of tens of thousands of people, a massacre that was a blood bath. In Wu’s view, in addition there were economic reasons for the emperor’s schemes to destroy the officials and the military leaders. In the founding reign the Ming imperial treasury was badly in need of funds because the Yuan dynasty had left nothing after their defeat. Zhu coveted the officials’ wealth and repeatedly plundered the property of the wealthy to enrich the imperial treasury. Additional factors of class relations also contributed to the case. From a poor and lowly background, suspicious by nature, afraid of the intellectuals’ ridicule, the Ming founder took measures to control and intimidate the scholar class by having tens of thousands killed. Even his own tutor, Song Lian, was to die in exile. After this decimation of the intellectual class, unable to rule without a scholar-official group, Zhu Yuanzhang created a new class of intellectuals submissive to him. The records and private notes Wu located revealed the efforts Ming Taizu took to organize these cases through intimidation and false evidence to create and prove the situation of the supposedly traitorous officials, beginning with Hu Weiyong. He wrote of the way a small matter was exaggerated to create evidence: “In fact, it was necessary to create crimes for Hu Weiyong.”85 Actually, contemporaneous with the massacre and later there had been some suspicion that the charges had been fabricated. But in the Ming period the penalty for a historian uncovering the truth would have meant death to the investigating scholar. Later the succeeding Qing dynasty exercised control of the historical narrative of the Ming for their own dynastic purposes so there had been no real motivation for Qing historians to study the record to set matters right. In closing Wu says: Most of the several tens of thousands of people killed in the Hu and Lan cases were intellectuals. . . . No scholars who had any connection with Ming Taizu at that time came to a good end . . . [he] created, by means of high pay and punishment, a group of new intellectuals who cautiously obeyed him instead of using the literati of the older generation. They became the tame servants of the emperor himself. This was the way that Ming Taizu consolidated his power.86

At the time Wu Han was finishing his study of the Hu Weiyong case Jiang Tingfu and Hu Shi, both Wu’s teachers and mentors, were debating the relevance of autocracy or democracy for China in its current state of disunity and weakness in the pages of the weekly Independent Critic.87 Although

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Wu’s monograph on the Hu Weiyong case was not published directly in this political theory debate in the Independent Critic, it was a part of the broad, historical discourse on autocracy in China and the propensity for autocracy in modern times. In the center of the debate in the Critic, Jiang Tingfu took the view that autocratic rule was necessary while Hu Shi held that democracy (of a passive nonactivist nature) should be the basis of governance in modern China.88 All of this—Wu Han’s essay, the Independent Critic debate with the contending positions of Jiang and Hu—demonstrates the meaning of the “mirror of history” in the Chinese context. History informs the present through its examples and lessons.89 Nevertheless, in the Hu Weiyong Affair essay, even though he dealt headon with the subject of autocracy in Zhu’s reign Wu Han avoided the broad issue of the long-term political implications of the strengthening of absolutism in Zhu Yuanzhang’s reign. Hu Shi had made very clear to him that a monograph “absolutely must not deal with broad subjects.” Wu knew full well that as Hu’s student he was working within the orbit of the master’s influence. Hu’s injunction not to write a new Ming history but only to put the history in order coupled with his current participation in the autocracy versus democracy debate with Jiang Tingfu who was supporting autocracy, must have persuaded Wu Han to let lie discussion of the implications of the growth of autocracy beyond the Ming founding emperor’s own reign and avoid taking a stand between his two mentors. A copy of the paper, his senior qualifying essay, exists inscribed to his chairman and Professor Jiang Tingfu who praised the essay highly. Nonetheless, a short while later under a penname Wu wrote again on Ming autocracy in an essay on the beating of officials in the imperial court and another on the Embroidered Guards. This time he did not hesitate to enlarge and sharpen the scope of the mirror.90

LAUNCHING A SOCIETY OF HISTORIANS TO CONSTRUCT CHINA’S NEW HISTORY As he stepped into the academic world of the mid-1930s, among his friends in Beiping there were a number of young historians who shared ideas about the modern discipline of history and what Chinese history should be concerned with in their time. It was Wu’s idea that they organize an association of historians to discuss research issues.91 Liang Fangzhong, a very close friend, who shared Wu’s research interest in Ming history was especially interested.92 Liang was an economic historian. He introduced Wu to another economic historian, Tang Xianglong, who was working in the Social Research Institute set up by the senior social scientist, Tao Menghe.93 Tang’s field of research was Qing period economic history, particularly tax administration. His monograph on “The Silver problem in the Daoguang period” was the first Chinese monograph on the economic background

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of the Opium War. Tao Menghe had established the earliest Chinese academic journal of social and economic history, the Journal of Chinese Social and Economic Research.94 In the 1930s, the cutting edge of historical studies among young historians in China was the interrelationship of social and economic history with political history. From the perspective of the group of young historians Wu was a part of, the study of history meant looking at society and events in a framework of historical materialism. Tang Xianglong’s retrospective view confirms that in the mid-1930s “the intellectual atmosphere for young historians was underlain with the concepts of historical materialism and New History.”95 As the three: Tang, Liang, and Wu talked over their ideas about research issues and the development of New History in China, Wu had brought up the idea of forming an association of young historians who shared research philosophies and conceptions of history. The need to create an organizational structure that would formally embody the common intellectual ground among them and would provide an arena for historical discussion among like-minded historians was voiced by a number of young historians. Of course, the existence of independent study associations, known as xuehui, among students and intellectuals in the Qing was a model familiar to them.96 The motivation of the group, and particularly Wu Han, was a combination of the aspiration to develop this New History of China and the desire for a forum in which to discuss their own work and make it known in the public arena. Discussion of historical studies was in the air in China at this moment. Gu Jiegang’s multivolume Gushi bian project and the accompanying “doubting antiquity” debate was already widely known. The historians around Wu Mi and Liu Yizheng in central China and the more evidential historicist historians at Beijing University had all been expressing the foment in historical thought as it reflected and responded to modern life. At the same time a small group of historians stimulated by Marxian dialectical materialist ideas about history were involved in a public debate that became known as the Social History Debate.97 It was in this environment of provocative discussion throughout the field of historical studies that the group of historians Wu Han moved in began to think of forming a group sharing a common approach to history. Two months before his graduation, at the end of April 1934, Wu talked to his friend Xia Nai about their aim to organize an association to meet together often to talk over what they were learning in their work toward the ultimate aim of “constructing China’s New History.”98 In May a meeting was held to organize the association with ten people attending: Wu Han, Tang Xianglong, Luo Ergang, Liang Fangzhong, Gu Jiguang, Zhu Qingyong, Sun Yutang, Liu Chuan, Luo Yudong, and Xia Nai. They met for a day to organize and pass the founding rules, taking the name of the Historical Research Association (Shixue yanjiu hui) for the organization. Wu was suggested for chairman because he had been the most active bringing them together but he

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declined and Tang Xianglong was elected. In Xia’s judgment without Wu’s initiative and enthusiasm the group would probably not have been formed. They decided to meet monthly and invite others to join them. Later Zhang Yinlin, Yang Chaoshen, and Wu Duo joined, as well as others. They were all young professional historians, some already graduated, some still at university. Zhang Yinlin was already a well-known professor. His essays had been published in the multivolume anthology, The Symposium on Ancient History (Gushi bian) edited by Gu Jiegang. Before the founding meeting, Wu had worked hard to encourage his friend, Luo Ergang, to join them. Luo had been in the far south in his home province of Guangxi, where he had discovered many unpublished texts related to the Taiping Rebellion. It was in Guangxi that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had risen in the early nineteenth century. The discovery of these documents had committed him even further in his decision to study the Taipings and he returned to Beiping filled with enthusiasm for his project. Wu made a special effort to include Luo because he thought Luo would make an important contribution to the association, but he also knew his friend Luo had a real problem with anxiety and dreaded meetings.99 Nevertheless, Wu enticed him to go along to the first meeting. It wasn’t long before Luo became deeply involved in the association as one of the major contributors to the publications, even later serving as editor. From the beginning a central part of the activities the Historical Research Association planned was to publish the members works. Wu and Tang began making arrangements with two daily newspapers, the elite Tianjin Yishi bao in the north of China and the capital city newspaper, the Zhongyang ribao in Nanjing, for the association to sponsor and edit a bimonthly history supplement in the newspapers. In addition, Tao Menghe, the editor of the new economic history journal, gave the association his encouragement. With affiliations with these three periodicals they knew there would be ample opportunity to publish their works to reach a broad audience of academic and popular readers. Beyond the group there was a great deal of interest in the aims of the association and the contributions it would make. At this time the social history debates among Marxist inclined historians involved in arguments over ideological positions on periodization and the nature of feudalism had been in full swing for some years. Although the people around Wu Han, Liang Fangzhong, and Tang Xianglong had no special interest in joining the Marxist debate, certainly some of the wide interest their organizing and publishing activities for the Historical Research Association aroused was related to the interest in social history aroused by the Marxist debates going on since the late 1920s.100 However, in the broad scope of historical publication in this period the debates among the Marxists were a side stream in the historical discourse while, in contrast, the work of the Historical Research Association historians was a part of the mainline social history discourse.101

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The group gathered monthly in Beiping to read and discuss papers. Later the papers were considered by the editor of the supplements for publication. This kind of professional interchange was important to each of them. They all looked forward to the meetings; those who worked away from Beiping made a special effort to come back for meetings. Xia Nai recalled returning a year later for the association’s first annual meeting at which Wu and others read papers.102 The Historical Research Association continued their regular meetings and publishing the two history supplements, both called Shixue or Historical Studies, until they were forced to stop when the capital city of Nanjing was lost to the invading Japanese in 1937. In all, in the three years of their activities before the war there were more than one hundred issues of the two Shixue history supplements published in the two major nationally circulated newspapers, Tianjin Yishi bao and Zhongyang ribao in Nanjing, as well as articles published by association members in the Journal of Chinese Social and Economic Research. Even after the war against Japan began, when some of the members relocated in Kunming in southwest China, the association continued to publish Shixue in the Kunming edition of Zhongyang ribao. The first issue of Historical Studies was published in the Yishi bao in April 1935, almost a year after the organizing meeting. The editor the first year was Wu Han, followed later by Xia Nai, then Luo Ergang. In the Shixue manifesto in the first issue, Wu Han used a quote from Yan Yuan, the early Qing pragmatic thinker he admired so much and whom Liang Qichao had pointed to as a model for intellectuals in the new society. Yan had said: Establishing ideas involves truth and falsehood rather than similarities and differences. If it is a truth, one or two people’s opinion can not change it. If it is a falsehood, it must not be followed, though hundreds of thousands of people consider it a truth. Even if thousands of people have believed so blindly for hundreds of years, as long as we find it false we should not follow and chime in. Instead, we must each teach others to know the truth also.103

In the manifesto Wu added “to prove truth and falsehood without regard to similarities and differences, this is our purpose in editing this publication.” There were to be no sacred cows too divine or rooted in tradition to be challenged, nor would the participating historians shy away from disagreement. They would not ignore the foundation of past historians’ work, but would not hesitate “to leave decayed skeletons” behind as Yan Yuan did when he turned away from the Song philosophers, Zhu Xi and the Cheng brothers. Nor would they blindly “wear fashionable exotic costumes,” a reference to the Marxist historians with their rigid periodization of slave and feudal times. They identified themselves as the “modern group of New Historians” and named “New History” as their guide in theory and methods. This was a reference to both Liang Qichao and to the historical school around the Chinese disciples of James Harvey Robinson

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at Columbia. The Shixue manifesto declares they will not be restricted to the standard historical works but will go beyond to find hitherto, unused sources to aid in questioning the identity of sources and restore their original position (in this, true descendants of Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang). Representing the purpose of the Historical Research Association members, the manifesto stated boldly in the closing lines their Liangian commitment to the New History of and for the broad masses of society, not just the ruling class: “the period of biographies of heroes and emperors has passed, an ideal New History should belong to society and the people.”104

THE PRACTICE OF NEW HISTORY These words in the manifesto were the statement of purpose of the young historians: the history they wrote would be about the people and the broad society and it would be for the people.105 Their intention was to lay a course between those theorists of Marxist tinge who had been involved in the debate over social history and historical periodization and, on the other hand, the classicists who never left their texts long enough to formulate a synthesis.106 Most of them were using as their research tools the evidential (kaozheng) and putting-in-order (zhengli) methodology of Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang for studying history but they intentionally were not allowing themselves to become mired in the methodology or limited by its narrow parameters emphasizing text and method ahead of synthesis as Hu Shi was wont to do. As one critic had pointed out, “Hu engages only in (kaozheng), criticism of ancient texts, but he does not study history. . . . He has only negative doubts, not positive explanations.”107 In their New History materialist view of the past, theory should grow out of and be closely linked to the knowledge that resulted from the careful perusal of the historical materials that are collected and ordered.108 Their vision of the task of writing a new history of China saw it as fundamentally a social and economic history. They were fully aware, in the words of one of their number, that “because research in social and economic history was work that was opening up undeveloped territory, without any pre-existing foundation,” their project would need the energetic work of many historians to lay out the “main threads” of the history they wanted to write. It might take a period of twenty or thirty years to write the social and economic New History,109 but their commitment, at that point in time, to writing this history for China was complete. Their conception of the necessary scope of history encompassing the breadth of society led to another facet of the association’s project, the plan for the creation of popular histories for the broad reading public audience. In the discussion of their plans for the future the members gave great attention to popular historical work.110 In modern society, history was no more only

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for the elite than it was only about the elite. The Historical Studies supplement itself was published regularly in two newspapers, the Yishi bao of Tianjin and the Zhongyang ribao in Nanjing, the Guomindang capital city. One of the main purposes of the group was to reach a much wider audience than it could in academic and literary journals. What they were really talking about in popular history (puji lishi) was history written to high standards of scholarship for the literate common people, a pioneering idea. When they first organized it had been decided to publish a series of short simplified Chinese histories (lishi xiao congshu) for the general reader, in addition to their New History research papers in the supplements. Unfortunately, because of the intervening war crisis this remained only a dream, although it persisted as an important aim in the minds of Wu and some of the other members. Only decades later in the People’s Republic was the plan for brief simplified popular histories finally realized under Wu Han’s leadership.111 There was great success with the supplement, first published in the Tianjin Yishi bao, with framing and studying historical issues involving the breadth of society. The emphasis in many of the works published in Historical Studies was on economic and social history. Some of the topics were: the Ming period tax captain system, several articles on the salt monopoly system, the land system of the Northern Wei, the creation of the China Merchant Steamship Company, the administration of state finance in the Sui, the land system of the Taipings, tax administration problems, and Ming farmers. Wu Han himself published three essays in the bimonthly Historical Studies the first year. As editor he classified one as social history, this was a study on farmers in the Ming period. The other two were classified as evidential research because of the emphasis on kaozheng methodology, although one, an essay on the introduction of tobacco certainly had social and economic aspects.112 Although in the long works he had recently published on Hu Weiyong and Hu Yinglin he had written in literary Chinese for a literary audience, these Shixue essays were all in the vernacular language baihua for the broad reading public. With the launching of the Historical Research Association and its publications these young historians were establishing an independent base for their development of the history that they thought was needed in modern China. Related historiographically to Liang Qichao’s New History and also to the materialist New History from Europe and America, still their works cannot be considered derivative of any particular Western historical studies, nor of a Western originated theoretical framework. The history this group of historians wrote, strongly grounded as it was in textual sources and dealing predominantly with historical issues indigenous to China, was in keeping with their aim of developing China’s own New History appropriate to China’s internal needs. In essays in their supplement, Historical Studies, the subjects are not generally dealt with from the standpoint of the West’s intrusive contacts with China, as so much of the history about China subsequently written

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in the West has self-importantly done. Rather the subject emerged out of a point of view of events, which were essentially within China, events which in some cases although contact with foreign countries and the presence of Western influence was involved, yet the events were fundamentally Chinese. This is worth noting because these post–May Fourth historians had all been exposed to Western thought and Western people, in varying degrees. At this point with one exception, Zhang Yinlin, none had yet been abroad themselves, although some would soon be going to Western countries for further study. While in their writing they were at ease with what they had learned and had experienced of the West, still under their control the focus of their studies was on issues that were fundamentally indigenous. Their familiarity with Western thought was not threatening or driving them, nor was it diluting their view of their own society.113 It can be said their practice of history and historical writing was not simply derivative of the West, nor was it iconoclastically discarding Chinese tradition. It had its own special integrity as Chinese New History. However, it was clearly, at the same time, developing in parallel with Western New History and influenced by Western historiographic thought. The need to have histories for broad audiences that included all strata and all aspects of society and moved beyond historical narratives of the elite and textual criticism to synthesize social, economic, and political aspects of their sphere’s past was actively being met within China. Years before, as a young impressionable student in Shanghai, when Wu had begun his studies at China College, trying to practice Hu Shi’s cosmopolitanism by comparing China with the West as if they both came out of the same barrel, he had written an essay on slavery that forced an artificial comparison between China and the West.114 By the time the association was organized, he had long since abandoned any attempt to compare China artificially with Western situations and was concentrating on historical issues relevant to China’s past. Wu Han’s social history essay, “Ming Dynasty Farmers,” was a natural step for him to take in developing his analysis of the Ming after his earlier essay on “Fictional Elements in the Ming History,” where he had dealt directly with elements of Chinese culture outside of the orthodox sphere. Although today we would not think to comment on this as unusual, in his attention to the material aspects of Ming farmer’s agricultural life and the problems in society, he moved beyond orthodox treatment of past eras. He drew on materialist ideas by treating the farmer class as a distinct economic and social group with intrinsic characteristics and special problems stemming from the group’s relationship to the elite class. This was an approach seldom taken in earlier historical writing. In his last years as a student, Wu had begun publishing under various pennames, as well as under his style name, Chen Bo, which he had begun to use more frequently. He had started to use pennames such as Wu Xuan and You Sheng.115 Wu may have wanted to keep his identity as an author

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of ironic zawen separate from his identity as a historian. The only other time he used the sobriquet, You Sheng, was four years later when he wrote, “Flogging in Court,”116 a piece about Ming autocracy which had meaning intended as ironic commentary on the contemporary scene. By the time Wu Chunhan graduated from Qinghua University in the spring of 1934, he had formally shortened his professional name to Wu Han, his reputation as a brilliant young historian had been established and his historical contributions were significant. Furthermore, he had a position waiting for him in the history department on the Qinghua University faculty. Even if he had not written another word, he would have been remembered as a pioneering historian for seminal contributions to the development of the modern history of the Ming.117 As his interests were turning more to social, economic, and political themes, he involved himself in the construction of China’s New History and the establishment of the Historical Research Association. Young as he was, Wu Han was widely recognized as one of the leading New Historians.

NOTES 1. Greider (1981), 340–41, for professionalism of liberal intellectuals. 2. WC to HS letter, 15 December 1931. 3. Chen Bo (Wu’s style name was Wu Chenbo), “‘Qingming shanghe tu’ yu Jin Ping Mei de gushi ji qi yanbian” and Wu Han, “Xi Wang Mu yu Xirong.” 4. Wu Chunhan, “Shan Hai Jing zhong de gudai gushi ji qi xitong.” Schiffeler (1977); Cahill (1993). Hu Yinglin (1958a) refers to it as a forgery. 5. Gu Jiegang, Autobiography, 139. For Gu’s view of Classic as mainly a geographical work see, Gu Jiegang (1985), 95–140. For Gu Jiegang’s interest in these legends see the Gushi bian [Critiques of ancient Chinese history], 7 vols. (1927–1941), especially the Autobiography in vol. 1. 6. Wu Chuhan, “Xi Wang Mu yu Xirong,” “Xi Wang Mu de chuanshuo,” and “Xi Wang Mu yu Niulang Zhinü de gushi.” 7. Gu Jiegang (1985); Schneider (1971), 259–93; Kenji (1990), 61–67. 8. I have explored this subject in “Boundary and Myth” (1999). 9. For Wang Shizhen, DMB, 1399–1405. Wu Han, “‘Qingming shanghe tu’ yu Jin Ping Mei de gushi ji qi yanbian—‘Wang Shizhen nianpu’ fulu zhiyi,” WHSX1. David T. Roy’s translation of the title of Jin Ping Mei. 10. For Hu Shi on the novels: Hsia (1968), 3–4 and elsewhere. Curiously Hu seems not to have been interested in Jin Ping Mei. His favorites were Shui hu zhuan, Xiyou ji, Rulin waishi, and Honglou meng, which he considered the four outstanding Chinese novels. In his work he paid particular attention to the historical background of the writing of the novels. 11. Chen Bo, “Qingming shanghe tu,” WHSX1, 54. 12. Wu Han, Hu Yinglin nianpu. 13. Chen Bo, “Qingming shanghe tu,” WHSX1, 37; Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” WHSX1, 334.

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14. Chen Bo, “Qingming shanghe tu,” WHSX1, 51. 15. Chen Bo, “Qingming shanghe tu,” WHSX1, 53–54. 16. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei shehui beijing,” WHSX1, 363; Chen Bo, “Qingming shanghe tu,” WHSX1, 37. In the third article (1934) on the novel he corrected this. 17. WC to HS, 15 December 1931. 18. Wu Han, ed., Wenshi zhuanhao, Qinghua zhoukan (13 May 1932). 19. For Yan Yuan see ECCP, 912–15; Liang Qichao (1926), 3–27; Wing-tsit Chan (1963), 703–8; Chung-ying Cheng (1979), 37–67; Wakeman (1973), 165, 238. For Zhang Xuecheng ECCP, 38–41. 20. Zhang Xuecheng, Wenshi tongyi, nei pian 5, quoted in Wu Han, “Juantou yu,” Qinghua zhoukan, Wenshi zhuanhao, see footnote 18. 21. Yan Xizhai, Yan xing lu xuewen pian, in Wu Han, “Juantou yu.” 22. Liang Qichao (1926). 23. Liang Qichao (1926), 24. 24. Freeman (1926), 86–87. 25. See chapter 6 in this volume. 26. Xia Nai (1980), 3. 27. Wu Chunhan, “Ba Guang yun jiao kan ji.” For the Guang yun see Norman (1988), 24–25. 28. For the original publication see Wu Han, “Hu Weiyong dang’an kao” [A study of the Hu Weiyong clique], Yanjing xue bao 15 (June 1934): 163–206. 29. Wu Han’s biography of the Ming founder was Ming Taizu (1944). “Hu Weiyong dang’an kao” (1934); for Hu Weiyong see DMB, 638–41. Men who became Chinese emperors are known by several names. Each had his own personal name given by his family, in this case, Zhu Yuanzhang. Each emperor was given a title after death by which he was addressed in temple ceremonies, such as Ming Taizu for Zhu Yuanzhang meaning “Grand Progenitor.” According to the individual’s place in the imperial clan the title might be Zong for clansman or ancestor, or Di simply for emperor. Also, in the Ming and Qing dynasties the emperors are often called by the names given to their reigns, for example Ming Taizu, is the Hungwu Emperor. Hucker (1975), 239. 30. WC to HS, 24 April 1932. 31. WC to HS, 13 May 1932. 32. Interview 128. 33. Interview 50. 34. Interview 50; Beijing wanbao, 12 March 1983. 35. Interview 47. 36. Interview 58. 37. Interview 58. Wu Chunxi’s bones were carried back to the village to be buried in the Wu family tomb with his parents after the family was rehabilitated in 1979, but his wife was still too frightened by the shattering experience of the Cultural Revolution to return for the ritual. 38. Qinghua University records seen during Interview 109. This class record is the only academic record pertaining to Wu Chunhan preserved by Qinghua, due to the destruction of records during the Japanese occupation. 39. Wu Han, “Yi Xiti xiansheng,” 268–69. In the Bi xuelu note Wu talks about reading the Bi xuelu in Yu Pingbo’s class; Luo Ergang mentioned his taking Jiang’s and Zheng’s classes.

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40. Israel (1966), 99. 41. For censorship and blacklists of books in the humanities to control the leftist “proletarian school” see Ting (1974), 92–93. 42. Zheng Zhenduo (1934), 4–17. 43. Ting (1974), 82–83. 44. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 45. The following account is drawn from a note Wu made 20 February 1933, signed Chen Bo (his penname), on the flyleaf of the Bi Xue Lu. A photograph of the note is found in the front of Wu Han zhuan. 46. Arlington and Lewisohn (1935), 216–17. 47. Bi Xue Lu, compiled by Huang Yu, circa 1628; also ECCP, 893. 48. Chen Bo, note in Huang Yu (1954), photograph of notes at front of WHZ. 49. Bi Xue Lu (circa 1628), 80. 50. Chen Bo, note in Han Yu (1954). 51. Israel (1966), 104–5. 52. Chen Bo, “Dushi zhaji—Ming shi” and “Ming shi xiaoping.” 53. Wu Han, “Ji Ming shilu.” 54. Xia Nai (1980), 14–15. 55. Xia Nai (1980), 14–15. 56. Elman (1984); Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1959). 57. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 363; this article was finished on 10 November 1933. 58. Yeh (1990), 34. 59. It is this essay that Western authorities on the Jin Ping Mei cite; see Hanan (1962), 39, 48; Roy (1981), 41. A second essay of Wu’s only supplemented the first essay, see Chen Bo, “‘Qingming shanghe tu’ yu Jin Ping Mei de gushi ji qi yanbian buyi,” 126–31. It was the final essay that Wu would choose to republish in 1956 in Dushi zhaji. See Hanan (1962), 2–3; Zheng Zhenduo (1957). 60. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 353–64. Later authorities including Zheng Zhenduo, Patrick Hanan, and David T. Roy have accepted this dating as the basis for later refinements. 61. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 364. 62. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 367–68. 63. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 367. 64. Wu Han, “Jin Ping Mei de zhuzuo shidai ji qi shehui beijing,” 370. 65. Wu Han, “Yi Xiti xiansheng,” WHWJ4, 153. 66. Zheng Zhenduo, “Fakanci,” for the Wenxue jikan (1934). 67. Zheng Zhenduo, “Fakanci” (1934). 68. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1201–17. 69. Wu Han, “Yi Xiti xiansheng,” originally in Dushu guan 3 (1961), also WHWJ, 153, 156. 70. Wu Han, “Hu Yinglin” nianpu and “Liang Zhe” cangshujia shilue; Wu Han intended this latter book as a reference aid to bibliographers and experts in textual criticism as well as for those interested in book collecting and its influence. This was also the reason it was republished in 1980. Also “Hu Weiyong dang’an.” 71. Chen Bo, “Meng yu shi,” finished in January 1934. 72. George Lukacs, The Historical Novel, originally written in 1937. Much of Lukacs’s theoretical discussion of the relation of history and fiction has relevance to

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the question Wu is examining, the same question Hayden White deals with in his writings on historical narrative in The Content of the Form. 73. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1201. 74. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1202. 75. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1202–3. 76. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1203. 77. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1201, passim. This is the Ming shi. 78. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1214. 79. Wu Han, “Lishi zhong de xiaoshuo,” 1216. 80. Veyne (1988). Veyne argues that truth is not found but created, as is history. McNeill (1986) on myth and history; White (1987) on narrative. 81. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983); Anderson (1991). 82. Wu Han, Ming Taizu. Mazur, “The Four Zhu Yuanzhangs” (1997). 83. Wu Han, “Hu Weiyong dang’an”; Wang I-t’ong (1953), 20. Later developed the issue of Sino-Japanese relations more fully. 84. Wu Han, “Hu Weiyong dang’an.” 85. Wu Han, “Hu Weiyong dang’an.” 86. Wu Han, “Hu Weiyong dang’an.” 87. Lilley (1979), 441–47; Grieder (1970), 259–70; Chi (1986), 109–12. The debate was initiated by Jiang Tingfu in Duli pinglun 80 (10 December 1933): 2–5; Hu Shi’s first essay followed in Duli pinglun 81 (17 December 1933): 2–5. 88. See chapter 6 in this volume for a discussion of this discourse and other related work of Wu’s. 89. See Q. Edward Wang (2001) for a very different view of the Jiang/Hu debate—Wang sees the debate as a renunciation of the mirror of history. 90. This later work of Wu’s on autocracy staid generally within a specific historical situation, generally following historicist, not theoretical, parameters. See You Sheng, [Wu Han] “Ting zhang” and Wu Han, “Mingdai de jinyiwei he dongxichang.” 91. Xia Nai (1980). 92. Liang Fangzhong is well known among Western historians of China for his monograph, “The Single Whip Method of Taxation in China,” Harvard East Asian Monograph 1 (1936). It was first published in Zhongguo Jindai jing jishi yanjiu jikan 4 (1936): 1–65, edited by Tao Menghe and Tang Xianglong, and was one of the research papers encouraged by this association these historians formed. 93. Tang Xianglong in Interview 39. 94. Originally named Zhongguo Jindai jingji shi yanjiu jikan; in 1935 when the journal was taken over by the Academia Sinica, the scope was broadened to include all of history and the name changed to Zhongguo shehui jingji yanjiu jikan [Journal of Chinese Social and Economic Research] with Tao and Tang as chief editors. See Chiang (2001). 95. Expressed in Interview 39. 96. Hu Shi and some of the other older intellectuals Wu knew had participated in such an association, the Ping she, in Shanghai. Study societies (xuehui) had long been associated with intellectuals’ discussions since the groups formed around Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in the late nineteenth century and from much earlier in the Qing. Elman (1984). For a similar association that Zheng Zhenduo led, see Hockx (1998). 97. Dirlik (1978).

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98. Xia Nai (1980), 3–4; in the 1980s Xia Nai was vice director of the Chinese Academy of Social Science and director of the Institute of Archaeology. 99. Luo Ergang, “Luo Preface,” in Tang Xianglong (1986), 1. Also Luo Ergang (1958). 100. For the debates among Marxist historians see Dirlik (1978). Dirlik does not discuss the formation of the Historical Research Association led by Wu Han, despite the membership of many of the foremost young social historians of the period and the association’s publication of the history supplement, Shi xue, in two of the most prestigious nationally circulated newspapers, Yishi bao and Zhongyang ribao. 101. For the growth of social history in China see Sun and DeFrancis (1956). 102. Xia Nai (1980). 103. Wu Han, “Fakanci” [Manifesto], Shixue 1, Tianjin Yishi bao, 30 April 1935. The second supplement sponsored was Shixue, Nanjing Zhongyang ribao 1 (7 April 1936). Yan Yuan was an early Qing pragmatic philosopher who turned away from the Song thinkers to stress a philosophy of education based on practical training as opposed to book learning. He denounced all studies that focused on contemplation or on writing about morality and instead advocated physical action and social remedies. Yan found the Song thinkers and Gu Yanwu both lacking because their education was too bookish and stultifying. In citing Yan Yuan as a model Wu was underscoring the intention of the group that historical writing be more directed at society and pragmatic action than the self-satisfying inner directed Qing version of evidential research and textual criticism had ever been. For Yan Yuan, see ECCP, 912–15. Liang Qichao had held Yan Yuan up as a pragmatic thinker whose thought was similar to Dewey’s pragmatism. 104. Wu Han, Shixue “Fakanci.” 105. Interview 39. 106. For the debate on social history see Dirlik (1978); for the classicists see Yeh (1990). 107. Gao Yunhui, “Zhoudai tudi zhidu yu jingtian,” quoted in Levenson (1968), 3:28, 164. 108. Tang Xianglong (1983), 123; Interview 39. 109. Tang Xianglong (1983), 123. 110. “Luo Preface” in Tang Xianglong (1986). 111. “Luo Preface” in Tang Xianglong (1986). Wu Han was able to carry out the Research Association’s idea in the late 1950s and 1960s in the People’s Republic when he organized and edited the very successful Zhongguo lishi xiao congshu. 112. Wu’s three Shixue essays the first year were: “Gaoli nü kao,” “Yancao chu chuanru Zhongguo de lishi,” and “Mingdai zhi nongmin.” Gaoli nü kao seems never to have been collected, either by Wu or posthumously. 113. The sort of warp or stress in reconciling the experience of the West with Chinese thought that Joseph Levenson fancied he perceived in Liang Qichao is not apparent in these people, at least not in Wu Han, Luo Ergang, Liang Fangzhong, Tang Xianglong, or Gu Jiguang, nor in Zhang Yinlin who had already studied in the West. Cohen, in Discovering History in China, has discussed the Western tendency to see Chinese history in the shadow of the Western intrusion and points to the necessity of a China centered view of history for American historians. Certainly, the view of these Chinese historians in the Shixue group in the 1930s was China centered. 114. Wu Han, “Kunlun nü kao.”

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115. It may have been that he began to write under different names because he was publishing so frequently in Qinghua Weekly. For instance, in the May 7 issue of the Weekly, a combined issue, he had three short articles and the very long, “An Outline History of Zhejiang Bibliophiles.” The three short evidential research articles were all published under the name, Wu Xuan, meaning the “Wutong Tree Studio,” which was the name of his father’s library, imprinted at the top of the book cabinet in the family house in Yiwu. The penname You Sheng, he used to sign the few zawen he wrote that spring: “On Libraries,” “Things from the Past,” and “On Professors.” You Sheng means “One born in 1909,” the year of his birth. It might also mean “Student of Hu Yinglin” as Hu had named his library in the hills north of Lanxi in the next county, “Er you.” 116. You Sheng (Wu Han), “Ting zhang” (1936). 117. Among these works were: his discovery of a hitherto unknown edition of the Qing novel, Lü ye xian zong; his fine chronological biography of the Ming scholar, Hu Yinglin; his critical analysis in the “Hu Weiyong dang’an kao” of the Ming founder’s destruction of his prime minister, Hu Weiyong, along with the position of prime minister, which revised earlier understanding of the nature of Zhu Yuanzhang’s rule and contributed to the debate on Chinese autocracy; his essays on the Jin Ping Mei, which not only ruled out the possibility of Wang Shizhen’s authorship of the novel and identified positively the period of its writing, but also brought firmly into the arena of scholarly discourse the conception that the historical background in a classical novel is relevant to fully understanding the author’s project and can also be used as source material for the social history of an era; and his critical essay on fictional elements in Ming history which opened the historiographic issue of the relation of fiction and history and the construction of historical narratives.

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he end of Wu Han’s last student year at Qinghua was a time of passage in his life. Although his studies in historical subjects continued little affected by the transformation from student to university teacher and professional historian, there were other major changes in his life to be dealt with. Graduation from college in most students’ lives marked a gate along the way from dependence to independence. But Wu started from a different point. In the last seven years since he had defiantly left his family and village he had been wholly self-directed and, except for his mother’s help at first, financially independent of his family. Now as he was graduating in 1934, events in his life were occurring that affected him at least as much as finishing his student career. In spite of being “out of the family,” his father’s death and its effect on his life revealed that he had not actually turned away from the matrix of family relationships left behind in the village. Becoming head of the family, an obligation he found impossible to ignore, was one of several primary elements that would shape the next years of his life. Another, his total immersion in history and its practice, was already the underlying ground that would continue to be the basis of his life until his death. With the transition from student to Qinghua University teacher and full-time academic, history furnished the meaningful substance of the professional scholarship and teaching that defined his life.

MEETING A VERY SPECIAL PERSON In the year of his father’s death another primary element came into his life, a beautiful and brilliant young woman named Yuan Zhen. She had entered 155

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Qinghua the year before Wu as a transfer student from Wuhan University in central China to study in the history department. Female students had only been permitted at Qinghua since 1928, when fifteen were admitted, so she was a pioneer for women’s equality in academia. Both beautiful and brilliant, even her first year on campus she had been especially popular. Rumors about her revolutionary connections also spread her fame. Although Wu hadn’t known her personally before being introduced by a friend, he certainly knew of her in the relatively small Qinghua campus, especially since both of them were on the student editorial staff of the Qinghua Weekly (Qinghua zhoukan).1 After the tension in his family over his arranged marriage and his refusal to his father Wu had shown no interest in women. But when he was introduced to Yuan Zhen personally, however, he was quick to see her attractiveness and not shy about looking for reasons to spend time with her. Several years before, while a student at Wuhan University in central China, Yuan Zhen had contracted tuberculosis, then raging through China, especially the intellectuals, in epidemic proportions. After she came to study at Qinghua complications developed and she contracted tuberculosis of the bone, an even more devastating version of the disease. When Wu Chunhan first met her she lay completely immobilized in bed. Liang Fangzhong and other friends of Wu’s arranged the introduction of the two, thinking that their mutual interest in history would be common ground between them. With no way to help herself, she was reliant on other people to link her with the world beyond her bed. Since she was still able to read she could manage some research and writing. But forced by her illness to drop out of university classes, she had no means of support. Her parents were both dead and her family persecuted by the Guomindang government for radical political activities. Her friends on campus felt pity and concern for her. From the beginning Wu was attracted by her beauty and intellect. As he came to know her closely he was impelled by a sense of compassion for her helpless condition. Soon friends began to notice that he was coming to her room several times a week and staying all afternoon to talk. He had started arranging his life so he would have the time to visit with her. As time passed, it was obvious their relationship was becoming far deeper than a casual friendship.2 Actually, a bond was developing between the two that would critically shape his future.

GIRLHOOD IN HUBEI The two found much to talk about. They told each other about their own lives and experiences. Friends and family remember there were long and often heated conversations about historical issues and interpretations between them. The times were tumultuous in 1934 and even though a person

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could be fully occupied with academic work, the news of events pressed in on daily lives. For years Yuan Zhen’s life had been deeply touched with political turmoil. Her early life before she came to Qinghua and they met is the key to understanding the special nature of her influence in Wu Han’s life and of what she brought to their relationship. As they talked she told Wu about the village she came from in northwestern Hubei in central China near the county town of Guanghua on the river Han, far from the urbanized areas of central China. The area was ten days and nine hundred li upstream by boat from the three cities that composed the city of Wuhan and far removed from close contact with modernizing, Westernizing coastal influences.3 The Yuan family household in Yuanchong village was large. Because her father’s generation of Yuan brothers had never divided the family “all ate from the same pot” and all of the ten children went to school and studied together. When the family ate together there were twenty-six in all. The family land was more than a hundred mou (about fifteen and a half acres) near the village. This made them landlords. The land was rented, but it was so poor that the rents collected by the family from the tenant farmers was meager. After the harvest was divided among the Yuan family and the tenants, it was difficult for the family of twenty-six mouths to live on the rice. Yuan Zhen’s father, Yuan Litang, a Qing dynasty xiucai degree holder, bore the responsibility for the family and managed the family property as the eldest son. But although a member of the rural landlord elite, to support the large family he still had to teach school. Their mother, from a poor peasant family called Wang, had no given name. As the eldest child she had helped her parents work the land. She cared for her husband’s son by his first wife and bore him two daughters, Yuan Fuzhi and Yuan Zhenzhi. The two sisters were very fond of their father’s younger brother, Yuan Shutang. By the time he was old enough to take the xiucai examination, the whole examination system had been abolished. Cut off from the examination degree route to participation and self-support, he entered the police academy in Wuchang, the capital of Hubei Province,4 much as had Wu Han’s father in Zhejiang. In the academy he was exposed to modern ideas and publications. From the time the girls were very little, he had sent books home about the revolutionary new thinking of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and other reformers who the people in the city were talking about. After graduating he worked for the warlord Xiao Yaonan in the Hubei provincial police bureau in Wuchang.5 It was this uncle who opened the two young Yuan sisters’ eyes to the new thought that was spreading through the youth of Hubei and it was this new thought which later led him into a life as a revolutionary. When the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 broke out and the Manchus and Qing dynasty were overthrown, the whole household had supported it enthusiastically. In spite of these new ideas in the last years of the Qing, according to the eldest Yuan daughter, Yuan Fuzhi, the women in the family were sequestered within the home, knit tightly into the fabric of the patriarchal Confucian

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family. Their grandfather and father both wore queues, the women in their mother’s generation had bound feet and pierced ears. But when the revolution against the Qing had broken out in Wuchang in 1911, her father and grandfather were quick to cut their queues to show their support for the revolution.6 This was a memorable event for the two Yuan little girls, one that marked changes within the family deeply affecting them, for at the age when painful foot-binding normally had begun for little girls, their mother didn’t wrap their feet or have their ears pierced. When their uncle Yuan Shutang came home, he talked a lot to them about the New Thought Revolution, especially about the equality of men and women. This meant that from that time on the girls and women in the family were supported by family members in their opposition to arranged marriages, a significantly different situation from Wu Han’s family. Although a female child, Yuan Zhen had never been subjected to the degree of authoritarian control that Wu Chunhan had coped with in his family. In the Yuan family, the New Thought their uncle brought home appealed to the women in the family. It was not an abstract ideal to them when he talked of removing the oppression and inequality of women, for their own mother was illiterate, despite her husband being a well-known local teacher and scholar. The girls’ two aunts had both been married off at a young age and at the time of their marriages were unable to read. When one of the aunts was widowed and her in-laws planned to sell her to another man to recoup their investment in her as often was the custom, she had rebelled and came home with her children. Even their revolutionary uncle Yuan Shutang’s own wife, only ten years older than the girls, had bound feet. For the women in the family, their consciousness of their oppressed status meant that the New Thought advocacy of equality for women had not only met with their complete acceptance, but had spurred them on to work for attaining equality for themselves. Even though they already had little children, the girls’ two young aunts, who had both been accepted back into their parental home—itself an unusual phenomenon—studied hard to learn to read and eventually even went off to school in Wuchang. The whole extended family was a family in transition, moving out of feudal relationships in the direction of relationships based on equality and individual control. In those early years, their father was their teacher. With him they studied Confucius and Mencius. A kind and even-tempered person, concerned about all of his children’s education, he told them, “I don’t want my descendants to be high officials. I want them to study and be junzi.” Although not a revolutionary, it was this man who talked to them of wanting all of his children, no matter their sex, to be “junzi,” gentlemen of honor, who set the tone in the family. His thinking made it possible for the family members to follow the ideas of equality and modern society without needing to rebel against their own family. The girls’ elder brother, Yuan Zhiying, had been to Japan to study where he learned English and French. From him they learned English when he re-

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turned home. While he was teaching them English he passed on many new ideas that he had learned about in Japan. They read the newspapers and magazines their revolutionary uncle, Shutang, sent from Wuchang, such as the Shanghai Shen Bao and Beijing Chen Bao. Among magazines from the eastern, modern sections of China which their uncle sent home to the village in those years were New Youth (Xin Qingnian), the Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), and Women’s Magazine (Funü zazhi), all eagerly read by the young girls. He told them he was especially influenced by New Youth and its editor, Chen Duxiu.7 They learned about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, in the news from Wuchang. Fuzhi was thirteen and Yuan Zhen ten that year. But although the village was remote, because of their uncle and older brother they knew about events far beyond the village, even on the other side of the world. They often talked about what the magazines said and were fascinated with the way the Russians were rebelling against their rulers.8 Less than two years after the revolution in Russia, in 1919 on the fourth of May an incident erupted in Beijing against the Japanese and the Chinese government that set a new tone to life that spread even to remote country places like Guanghua and their village. The demonstration in Beijing rapidly exploded into the nationwide May Fourth Movement that ultimately left indelible effects on every aspect of Chinese life for the rest of the century. In Wu Chunhan’s life in Bitter Bamboo Pond in Zhejiang and later when he went to middle school in Jinhua the May Fourth events had made a great difference also. However, far from the parts of China touched by Westernization and efforts at modernization, in northwestern Hubei the ideas from the May Fourth movement that touched them were basically ideas that spoke to their own lives. From the magazines and newspapers they read about people like Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Yingchao and what they thought about Chinese society. One of the sisters recalled “The articles that attracted us were about equal rights for men and women and demanded liberation.”9

TO BE “AS EQUAL AS MEN” These ideas fell on receptive ears among the women in the Yuan family. The two sisters and their mother, aunts and cousins all talked about the emancipation of women (funü jiefang) as the girls were growing up. Even their ideas of the meaning of democracy was in terms of their being female. Years later Fuzhi talked about their thinking: Democracy meant freedom and equality, no one bullies anyone else. Like the people in ancient times we were kind-hearted (liangxin), all people are like sisters and brothers . . . they don’t beat others and don’t scold people and don’t oppress other people. At the time we wanted liberation, wanted to be as equal

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as men. Women shouldn’t be slaves of men and obey men. We didn’t want men to support us. This was very important. When women have their own jobs and can support themselves they wouldn’t be beasts of burden at home. This is the way we thought about democracy in those years. . . . When we were young we didn’t want to become daughters-in-law in another family’s house. In our society we could see around us that the daughter-in-law was at the bottom of the family. She must wait on the father-in-law, the mother-in-law, the sisters-inlaw, and the brothers-in-law. She did everything: cooking, washing, cleaning. None of us wanted to be a daughter-in-law.10

That women had to take control of their own lives to be truly equal was a key point in the New Thought and certainly was at the center of the Yuan women’s thinking. The idea that equality for women depended on autonomy and autonomy depended on their ability to support themselves emerged as a main theme in May Fourth thought. This stress on economic self-sufficiency was directly related to the realization that the oppression of women and effective denial of equality was linked with the total dependency of all Chinese women on the structure of the male-headed family. Years later, according to Fuzhi, this was exactly what their mother saw when she looked at her own life of menial service and saw, on the other hand, that her sister-in-law’s freedom was insured by her working and being paid as a teacher. It was the determination of their own mother which first put the two sisters on their course to determine their own lives. In Fuzhi’s words, when later she recalled their thinking in those years: “Both men and women are heads of the family. We are equal. If the husband oppresses the wife we will separate from him. This was our idea of equality. I am a person and you are a person, I am not your slave.”11 The daughters were being educated to read and from that point they began to take control of their own lives, making their own decisions, seeking education, and supporting themselves. As the sisters grew up they became accustomed to a politically sensitized family sphere that validated them and their cause. Since political issues were discussed within the family, when they left their home and village environment, being involved in political issues and action didn’t seem an act of rebellion to them. Rather they revolted against the society beyond the family that denied them, as women, their equality.

SCHOOL IN THE CITY A year after May Fourth in 1920 Yuan Zhen’s elder sister, Fuzhi, then seventeen, went far away to the big city of Wuchang (one of the three cities that made up Wuhan) to go to school. Yuan Zhen, only fifteen, followed the next year. This enormous step away from home for the girls was encouraged by the family. Their favorite uncle, Shutang, had been in Wuchang in

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the provincial police bureau for several years. His wife, Wang Mu, in spite of her bound feet, had gone to Wuchang to study in a technical school after learning to read at home. Up to this time in Hubei Province there had been little public secondary education for girls. In the whole province there was only one public girl’s normal school and a small private middle school, both in Wuchang.12 One by one, the Yuan girls left for school, boarding the small river boat with pigs in the bottom hold and people crowded together on the top deck for the ten-day journey through bandit infested territory down the Han River to Hankow and Wuchang to enter the Normal School. Sadly, just before Yuan Zhen left home in 1921, her mother died very suddenly of liver disease at only forty-eight years old. During much of their girlhood, warlord rule had dominated Hubei and most of China. Although the students in the Wuhan schools at the center of the province had joined the great May Fourth movement as it spread throughout the country, at first it was only boys who were participating. At the Women’s Normal School the conservative school principal had not allowed the girls to participate in the Wuchang demonstrations. In these years, the social atmosphere in the provincial capitol city was generally very closed, reinforced by the local people’s distrust of the warlord troops stationed in the city and roaming the streets.13 When the Yuan sisters came to Wuchang, they each took the examinations and entered the Hubei Women’s Normal School (Hubei Nüzi shifan xuexiao). This school, opened in 1913, was a small school with only 250 students in a five-year program, with each year consisting of 50 girls. Because the school was government supported the students’ tuition was free.14 In Wuchang, their favorite uncle and aunt treated them like their own children, looking after them and taking them into their home at holiday time.

DONG BIWU: SCHOLAR-REVOLUTIONARY AND TEACHER Their uncle’s interest in political issues had brought him into contact with many progressive people in the city who were interested in ideas coming from Russia since the October Revolution. Yuan Shutang’s job responsibilities in the police bureau put him in contact with politically involved people when they were arrested. In progressive intellectual circles, one of the people he had met and admired most was the respected Hubei scholar and teacher Dong Biwu (1886–1976), a member of Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary Alliance, who had recently become interested in Marxist thought. As it turned out Dong was teaching Chinese literature (guo wen) in the Women’s Normal School while the Yuan girls were students.15 From a Hubei gentry family, as a child Dong had studied the classics with his scholar father. After winning the xiucai degree in the Qing examinations, in 1903, he had entered Wenputong Middle School in Wuchang, one of the schools founded by

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Zhang Zhidong, the Qing governor-general and reformer, to bring modern education to Hubei. Wenputong was a modern school combining Chinese and Western subjects in its curriculum. Convinced that the people of China must study foreign learning, Zhang had provided that foreign subjects be taught along with traditional Chinese subjects. Dong Biwu’s studies at the school had included a mix of the classics such as the Zuo zhuan and Chun qiu, Chinese history, English, and mathematics.16 Only a year after graduating Dong participated in the revolt in Wuchang that became the Revolution of 1911. From that time on, this man who had been educated as a scholar, became a revolutionary activist, and revolution became his profession,17 even though at heart he always remained the scholar. After joining Sun Yatsen’s Tongmeng hui in 1911, and supporting Sun in the alliance’s revolutionary work he fled in 1914 to Japan with other Tongmeng hui members where he studied intermittently at the Tokyo Law College. After graduating, he returned to China to continue his support of Sun Yatsen.18 In February 1919, Dong was in Shanghai for a Guomindang meeting of activist leaders in the provinces. There he met Li Hanjun (1890–1927) who had just returned from Japan with detailed news of the Russian October Revolution and foreign language books on Marxism. As news of the revolution in Russia filtered into China there was a surge of interest in socialism among Chinese intellectuals.19 Dong and Li Hanjun, and others met together almost daily to discuss the current situation, to study books from Japan and current Chinese New Thought periodicals, and to debate intensely about what should be done in China. They were enthusiastic about the New Culture movement and the issues in the “democracy” and “science” discussions in the magazine, New Youth. But the question they constantly returned to in their discussions was, “Why was the Russian Revolution successful, but China’s revolution still continued to fail?”20 Slowly Dong concluded that “Contemporary society is flawed, the traditional ideas, morality and methods must be changed.”21 In 1919 even before the May Fourth incident, he had begun to say that “carrying out Russian Marxism,” as his friend Li Hanjun was advocating, was the best course for China.22 While at the time Dong’s intense interest in the alternatives that he and his friends were discussing was similar to many other people’s thinking about China’s situation, his decision that Russian Marxism held the answer for China was among the earliest. Once he came to this decision, Dong decided to begin to work toward the promotion of communism as the solution for China. He and his friends discussed what should be done and concluded that “they must establish newspapers and schools” to spread the Marxist “enlightenment movement” among the students and the masses of workers and peasants.23 Dong returned to Wuhan in late 1919 and opened the Wuhan Middle School as a revolutionary school, nontraditional in curriculum and responsive to the

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New Culture and New Thought. In the next years this school became a focal point in the province for progressive education. Dong Biwu’s conviction that the way to China’s salvation was through education and that his own contribution should be the establishment of an enlightened revolutionary coeducational school was influenced both by his ideas on revolutionary change and also by the earlier work of Zhang Zhidong. However, there was a crucial difference between Zhang’s philosophy of passive reform and Dong Biwu’s ideas of active revolutionary change. The difference lay in Dong’s policies encouraging students to do more than learn, to be actively involved in governance of the school and in political action outside the school. This school Dong founded played a key role in the spread of Marxism in Hubei.24 In July 1919, Chen Tanqiu (1896–1943), a young, recent graduate in English from Hubei Normal School, had met Dong Biwu in Shanghai after leading the Wuhan students in the May Fourth demonstrations only a few weeks before. Now, wanting to learn more about revolutionary experience and about Marxism he eagerly associated with Dong. Dong hired him to teach English at Wuhan Middle School and the two began to actively study the Russian October Revolution and make the middle school a stronghold for promoting and organizing their work. Li Hanjun was also teaching at the school at the same time.25

HUBEI WOMEN’S NORMAL SCHOOL AND THE READING SOCIETY In addition to founding this private middle school Dong and Chen Tanqiu soon were teaching at the public Hubei Women’s Normal School where the Yuan sisters were studying. In no way revolutionary, this school followed conservative ideas about women. The aim in educating girls, not only at this school but also in national policy at this time, was the traditional ideal of preparing them to be virtuous wives and able mothers. Teaching the classical literature was considered appropriate for them but some of the women students considered the old literature to be merely “dead books.”26 The girls in the school were tightly controlled, with no personal freedom. They were not allowed to read progressive books and magazines, not allowed to even move from courtyard to courtyard within the school walls and were not allowed out of the school on the streets. During Yuan Zhen’s first year at the Women’s Normal School, in 1921, Dong, Chen Tanqiu, and another young male teacher, Liu Zitong (1885– 1924), were teaching at the school. All three were to have momentous influence on the girls. Chen Tanqiu, very popular with the students, taught English but had no chance to promote revolutionary thought in his classroom. In the memories of the students, their best class was Liu Zitong’s Chinese

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language and literature (guo wen) course. First, Liu broke with the tradition that only classical Chinese would be studied and written and thus “liberated” the students from the literary language. A student recollected later how little they each had known when they began the class. The first time Liu taught he asked them “what year is this on the Gregorian calendar?” No one could tell him, all they knew was that it was the tenth year of the Republic (figuring the passage of time in the traditional Chinese manner—according to the dynasty’s founding date). He continued, asking them the year (in the Western Gregorian calendar) of the October Revolution, of the May Fourth Movement, and so on. They were unable to answer. In this atmosphere even the Western calendar became a revolutionary symbol. He soon began to use the new literature from the May Fourth Revolution entirely for teaching material. As soon as Liu had a chance he talked about the October Revolution in Russia and also about the problem of women’s emancipation. “Can women achieve liberation?” This question fell on very receptive minds—it was the issue most cared about, especially among those classmates who were older and those who already had arranged marriages.27 Liu Zitong was popular with the students because he talked about what mattered most to them in their own lives. Dong Biwu also taught Chinese literature (guo wen) at the school. In his classes he had no fixed texts but selected his own teaching material, in both the vernacular (popular) and the classical languages. He taught them to rely on their own judgment and urged them to read outside of class. One of the teachers assigned the students topics for essays such as “The Harm of Binding the Breast” and “Unbinding Feet,” both important issues in Chinese women’s lives, and also “Cutting Hair” which was becoming a symbolic gesture for women to signify throwing off the iron grip of traditional norms and making their own decisions freely.28 Some of the girls asked Dong Biwu to help them organize a reading group. With Dong’s help and sponsorship the Women’s Reading Society (Funu dushu shehui) was established. The girls who wanted to read more about politics and social issues could join the society, borrow radical books, and meet to talk over what they read. After you read a book, whatever questions you had or whatever ideas you wanted to bring up, Dong or Li Hanjun would discuss with them in their meetings. Yuan Fuzhi remembered, “Dong gave us books from Japan on revolution, and Bukharin’s book on Communism (The ABC’s of Communism).”29 This was the first simple, popularized, systematized statement of the basic tenets of Marxism that had been published and circulated anywhere. In the reading society the teacher-student talks together focused intensely on political ideas. Probably organized originally by the girls in the summer of 1921 when they had first asked the teachers to meet with them, they took this idea of a reading group from other study societies, especially the Benefit

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the Masses Book Society (Liqun shushe), organized in 1920 in Wuchang by the radical intellectual, Yun Daiying.30 The girls in the group were able to borrow books from the Liqun bookstore and began to learn about Marxism. The question of their own lives and of the overthrow of society’s restrictions on women seems to have been the single, most important theme motivating them although they saw the issue of their own equality in relation to the broader issue of equality for everyone. Among the women, those who were already married or had been promised in an arranged marriage especially felt the pressure. For the Yuan sisters, their sense of group solidarity with these women students in the reading group was similar to the solidarity they shared within the Yuan family. Xia Zhixu, one of the women in the group, later wrote about the spirit in the group: They were bound by feudal ritual, the lijiao, and were dissatisfied with their own situation. These young women were both pleased and angry; pleased because they understood that when women had achieved emancipation they could have a happy marriage, and angry because of the severe difficulties they encountered in the struggle and the recognition that when women were liberated they, themselves, might not have the strength to break out of the feudal cave.31

There were more than ten young women in the reading group from various classes at the Women’s Normal School. Most of these girls later would become active members of the Communist Party and marry men who became leading Communists. Besides the two Yuan girls in the society there was Yang Zilie who would marry Zhang Guotao; Xu Qianzhi, who married Chen Tanqiu and later was killed by the Guomindang; Chen Bilan, who married Peng Shuzhi; Xia Zhixu, who married Zhao Shiyan, and Li Wenyi, who married Zhou Xinmin. For each of them studying in the Women’s Normal School and especially being members in this reading society was a crucial watershed in their lives.32

STUDENT TIDE: MAY FOURTH REBELS The girls in the society particularly opposed the school principal Wang’s paternalism and objected to the tight control over them. To Wang, education to prepare women to carry out their duties as mothers and wives and opposition to foot binding were legitimate reasons for educating females. But beyond that, in conservative minds, political and social issues were forbidden territory for women. In the Normal School, women reading independently was considered wayward, rebellious, and completely inappropriate. The Principal Wang targeted their teacher, Liu Zitong, for criticism. Liu, a charismatic personality, was a great favorite of the girls. Yuan Fuzhi remembered that Liu antagonized the principal because “his thought was radical and his lectures filled with promoting radical ideas. . . . The conservatives in

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the school (leadership) feared his influence” on the students. The principal feared Liu, refusing to allow him to teach because he was “red” (chihua). This angered the girls, causing an eruption in the school. More than ten of the students responded to the firing of their favorite teacher by organizing a strike to support him. According to Yuan Fuzhi “This man was a great teacher. When he lectured he was especially stimulating, able to move people’s thinking. He had great support among the students.”33 One of the principal’s objections was the plan the girls had to cut their hair. In this May Fourth period, a time when any act to overthrow tradition was considered a radical rebellious action, for a woman to cut her hair became, in both her mind and the onlookers’ eyes, a radical action symbolizing rejection of the traditional Confucian norms for women’s subservience and chaste behavior. It was a direct act of social revolt. Fully aware of this symbolism and intending to use it, these young women had been talking about cutting their hair for some time. Once the principal learned about their plans he sternly ordered them not to cut their hair. Principal Wang revealed the depth of the fear of the threat Liu Zitong represented when he requested the provincial warlord, Xiao Yaonan, to order his troops to drive Liu away from Wuhan. To stop the revolt in the school, the principal next enlisted the political backing of the warlord to expel the five women who were the student leaders: Yuan Fuzhi, Yuan Zhen, Xia Zhixu, Xu Qianzhi, and Chen Bilan. With Xiao Yaonan’s encouragement, Wang expelled the five for supporting their teacher and for their rebellious behavior. When their expulsion was announced on the principal’s announcement board, the Yuan sisters’ close friend Li Wenyi, one of the other students in the reading group together with other students surrounded the office and smashed the board.34 Instead of removing the problem, the principal’s harsh attitude and expulsion of the girls had backfired. He had sparked a large demonstration among the students across Wuhan led by the radical Wuhan Student Union and members of the Socialist Youth Corps as well as several clandestine Communist Party members. They demonstrated at the school to express their solidarity with the five girls. A crowd of students from all the schools in Wuhan entered the Normal School and surrounded the principal’s office to prevent him from leaving. During the confrontation several prominent citizens and sympathetic people who were covert Communist Party members mediated a settlement that calmed the situation. The principal was forced to resign and the five girls agreed to leave the school temporarily. But they were allowed to retain their school status so they could come back the next year to complete their studies and receive their diplomas from the school.35 Once they were expelled for the year, the two Yuan sisters had to find another way to continue their studies. Dong Biwu welcomed them to come to his own school to see him. They continued meeting in their reading group and asked him and Chen Tanqiu to teach the group. Under Dong’s

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instruction they read Li Hanjun’s translation of Marx’s Wage-labor and Capital (Gongqian-laodong yu ziben). Yuan Fuzhi recalled “Li discussed why the working class was so poor; why the workers’ labor was exploited by capitalists. . . . He wrote that Marxism said labor was exploited by the capitalists.” During this time of independent study in the Reading Society, the girls, Fuzhi said “often went to see working people and went into their families to talk with them. The workers lived under extremely bad conditions, their children were often sick, so we collected donations from many people on the street and gave it to the trade union (gonghui) in Wuhan.”36 In early 1923, a year after the affair had begun, the five girls were finally allowed by the new principal to return to the Women’s Normal School so they could complete their studies and graduate. While they were absent from the school they had decided, under the influence of the New Thought, to carry out their plan to cut their hair short. Thus when they returned to school they all had bobbed hair, proclaiming themselves as May Fourth radicals. A striking photograph of seven of the revolutionary group including the Yuan sisters shows them, with their hair bobbed, sitting and standing defiantly, and quite unfemininely, around gigantic rocks as though they each were asserting their independence to the world.37

Figure 5.1. Yuan Zhen at fifteen in 1922: Student revolutionary commemorating her forbidden haircut

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Figure 5.2. 1922 student rebels: Reading Society members at Hubei Women’s Normal School, expelled for planning to cut their hair

When the Yuan girls and their fellow students were banding together in the reading society, they were not an isolated group influenced by radical ideas but a part of a broad and complex ferment in many parts of China. Although at the time they may not have realized the extent of the agitation in Wuchang that they were participating in, the harsh treatment their radical teacher, Liu Zitong, had received in early 1922 at the hands of the school principal Wang and the warlord Xiao Yaonan was directly related to an effort by the powerful warlords to counter the labor organizing in the Wuhan cities by Liu and his radical comrades, Li Hanjun, Chen Tanqiu, and others. Xiao Yaonan’s allegiance was to the powerful warlord, Wu Peifu in the struggle. In early 1922, the same year the girls’ school demonstration was taking shape, workers’ groups were being organized among all of the BeijingHankou railway workers by Communist labor organizers. By the latter part of 1922 disciplined strikes organized by the Communist Labor Secretariat occurred successfully all along the railroad line. However, in early 1923, just at the point a general railway union of the Jing-Han line workers was being formed, the warlord Wu Peifu, encouraged by Western governments, moved to violently crush the organizing efforts of the labor movement.38 At the same time the Yuan sisters, out of school for a half-year, used their enforced leave from the Normal School to actively support the union organizing their teachers were guiding. They handed out handbills describing how difficult the workers’ lives were, asking for help and support for them. They even spoke on street corners to groups about the difficult conditions in the workers’ lives. As the strikes were organized they supported them. When there were meetings the sisters gave speeches to the workers to help them understand why they were so poor and how they were being exploited by capitalists. They told the workers that “if the capitalist system wasn’t destroyed there was no way they could be liberated.”39 The girls’ idealistic convictions about the message were strong. Ironically, the school principal’s

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action, rather than stopping them had the unintended consequence of not only heightening their rebellious spirit but strengthening their interest in the ideas of communism. To them at this point the meaning of communism was related to the encouragement and support coming from their teachers who were Communists, that is members of the Communist Party. However, the content of the ideas about women which they absorbed from these teachers was not particularly communist, but rather derived from the New Thought Tide and May Fourth liberal humanist ideas about women’s status in society. The struggle to break the grip of the lijiao system of rites and neo-Confucian ethics that dictated women’s subservient position in the family predated the advent of Communism in China. Nonetheless, it is obvious that their teachers’ promotion of Communist ideas was important because it brought to them powerful new ideas about the relation of economics and people, about the structure of society, about the uses of political and social power for social and economic change. The empowering of the powerless spoke directly to them because women were powerless outside of the family in a traditional society. The very strength of conservative power pushed them toward organized Communism.

YOUNG RADICALS Yuan Fuzhi was frank to say many years later that “our relationship with the Communist Party came through these teachers.” The two sisters’ first venture into membership in a radical political group was to join the Socialist Youth Corps (Shehui zhuyi qingnian tuan) in Wuhan. They and their friends in the group of five in the Women’s Normal Student Tide were real pioneers when they became the first female members of the Wuhan Socialist Youth Corp in 1922.40 The formation of this Socialist Youth Corps (commonly called “SY” by its members) became a step in the transformation of communism in China from an intellectual current to a political movement. It was this group that soon evolved into the Communist Youth Corps (CY).41 By January 1921, eight branches of the SY had been organized in China with three hundred members but the membership was an ideologically heterogeneous bunch. The need for reform of China’s culture was an alternative motivation to political militancy for some who joined the group of people attracted to socialism and communism. Later in 1925 when the SY was transformed into the CY and Fuzhi joined it, Yuan Zhen chose not to join after careful consideration. Years later her two surviving sisters attributed to her choice not to join to her personal nature and manner of thinking. As a young girl she had been more cautious and reflective than they were. This attitude manifested itself in her decision not to join the activist Leninist CY deeply involved in radical political

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organizing. Nevertheless, according to both of her sisters, in the student tide in the school she had been at least as daring and committed as Fuzhi; also she had joined enthusiastically in the wave of labor organizing that developed in Wuhan in 1922. Her sister, Fuzhi, first joined the Communist Youth Corps when it was created from the Socialist Youth Corps in 1925; then later, in 1926 she and her cousin Yuan Xizhi, who later became their adopted sister, and their school friend Li Wenyi, joined the CCP. Although Yuan Zhen chose not to join either the Youth Corps or the Communist Party at this time many of her friends were members and the social milieu in which she was immersed was permeated with communist thought. After the two sisters graduated from Women’s Normal School in 1925, Yuan Fuzhi began to teach in Wuchang at the Wuhan University Preparatory School for a year. There were many Communists among the teachers in the school—later it came to be called the “Cradle of Communism.”42 At that time, the Hubei Communist Party Branch met in the school. Chen Tanqiu taught there as well as their own friend, Li Wenyi. Fuzhi and Li Wenyi had been students together at Women’s Normal and close friends since 1920. The girls had heard much talk about going to Moscow to study. It was an appealing idea to Fuzhi. At the end of 1926 she made the decision and left to go to Moscow to study at Sun Yatsen University to learn more about “developing peasant revolution and democratic revolution.” Although by this time she had joined the Communist Party, the United Front agreement established the basis for a cooperative relationship between the Guomindang (Nationalist) and the Communist parties. This meant both Guomindang and Communist people went to the Soviet Union together. With the help of Soviet Communist advisors, the Guomindang Party itself had been reorganized on Leninist principles as Sun Yatsen prepared for a national revolution. Under the United Front in July, 1926, the Northern Expedition, which Sun had long planned in order to accomplish national unification, was launched in Canton in the south of China with the newly reorganized military forces of the National Revolutionary Army which included people from both parties.43 In February 1927, as Yuan Fuzhi left for Moscow, the newly formed Nationalist government with a number of Communist dual party members in important positions, had just been moved to Wuhan in central China from Canton.44 The military successes of the northward drive of the Northern Expedition provided an optimistic atmosphere for the United Front of Guomindang and Communists. But by the time she returned to China the situation was vastly different. The United Front had been destroyed, Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang were in the triumphant position, and the Communist Party had been forced underground. The consequence for Fuzhi was that she was in constant fear for her life because she was known as a member of the Communist Party.

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UNIVERSITY STUDENT: COURTED BY A LOVER Yuan Zhen had followed a very different path in her quest for equality. After she graduated from Hubei Women’s Normal she made plans to enter Wuhan University. Since the Communist Youth League had emerged from the SY she had not been nearly as enthusiastic as her sister about radical political action nor about some features of men’s and women’s lives together. The iconoclasm of the post–May Fourth era sometimes led to casual liaisons, even free love, that grew out of both men’s and women’s reaction to the straight-jacket of the family system and the oppressive traditional norm of female chastity in the lijiao. The permutation of women’s emancipation into license distressed Yuan Zhen.45 Another factor that drew her toward contemplative academic study more than political activism was her deep interest in historical issues. She thoroughly enjoyed scholarly pursuits of research and writing and excelled at them. In temperament, her sisters thought of her, rather than impetuous or passionate, as “a deliberate person who didn’t rush into things, naturally careful and cautious. Her emotions didn’t sway her.” To some who knew her in later years her reserve made her seem almost cold. By nature it was difficult for her to reach out and relate easily to people. In contrast her sister Fuzhi, throughout her life, was very warmhearted and more apt to follow her emotions and impulses, a person who always openly reached out to others.46 After taking the entrance examinations at Wuhan University Yuan Zhen was admitted to study Chinese literature. Unfortunately within a short time, she had to go home to the family village to care for her father who had been stricken with tuberculosis. Her mother had died the year she started her studies at the normal school. After his death, she returned to Wuhan but unfortunately had already been infected with the disease herself. At this juncture of her life, just after graduating from the Normal School at nineteen and just after her father’s death, Yuan Zhen, a strikingly beautiful and very intelligent young woman, met a man, nearly ten years her senior, who fell deeply in love with her. Wu Zhichun, an official in the new Nationalist government and only recently returned to Wuhan from America where he had studied at Harvard Law School, was a secretary in the Foreign Ministry in the Nationalist Wuhan government in 1927. At the time that the insurgent Nationalist government had moved to Wuhan, Yuan Zhen desperately needed to find work to provide for her living as she began her study at Wuhan University. Believing strongly in the aims of the National Revolution, she took a job in the office of the Ministry of Education and lived in Wuchang. During the next two years she continued to be politically active in the left wing women’s group, although not a member of the Communist Youth League.47 When the strife within the Wuhan government and Nationalist Party spilled out in July, the result was the swift counterrevolutionary liquidation

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of the Communists within the United Front government and the Nationalist Party. Martial law was swiftly declared in the Wuhan cities and suspected Communist Party people hunted down without mercy. Known Communists went underground. This purge meant that Yuan Zhen’s friends and associates in the Wuhan area were targets. Both their uncle, Yuan Shutang, and his wife who had helped the girls when they first came to Wuhan had joined the Communist Party in 1925 and were deeply involved in Hubei Communist affairs. In 1926 when the Northern Expedition had reached Hubei, he had been appointed by the leftist “revolutionary” Wuhan government as County Magistrate of Puqi County, a strategic point in southern Hubei near the Hunan border and in the Northern Expedition path.48 The Yuan sisters’ teachers, Dong Biwu, Li Hanjun, and Chen Tanqiu, all were Communist Party members and in the United Front Wuhan government. Li had been made the head of the Hubei Provincial Education Department. Dong was completely involved in Communist affairs through participation in the Hubei Party branch and headed the Hubei Peasants and Workers Bureau in the revolutionary government.49 Wu Zhichun, who was courting Yuan Zhen, had been serving as a secretary in the Wuhan Nationalist Government Foreign Ministry under the foreign minister Eugene Chen.50 As the role of the Communists and the radicalism of the Wuhan regime came increasingly under fire from the right wing side of the Guomindang, the Comintern mission in Wuhan was told by the Guomindang to leave China. At this, Eugene Chen and Song Qingling, Sun Yatsen’s widow, accompanied by Chen’s aide, Wu Zhichun (with no choice but to leave), departed for Moscow via Shanghai and Vladivostok.51 With Yuan Zhen still very much on his mind, when Wu reached Moscow, he searched out Yuan Fuzhi at Sun Yatsen University and went often to the school to talk with her about his love for Yuan Zhen. Fuzhi could see he was infatuated with her sister.52

THE TIDE TURNS: HIDING FROM POLITICAL TERROR Yuan Zhen’s situation was more precarious because many of those she knew and were important to her were being hunted down in the purge. Probably the first person close to her she knew to be affected was her Aunt Wang Mu, Yuan Shutang’s wife. GMD agents arrested and imprisoned her in Wuhan and executed her immediately.53 Her husband, Yuan Shutang, a “revolutionary” county magistrate, had a grim experience. He had arrested and imprisoned corrupt local landlords (tuhao lieshen) who were oppressing peasants in Puqi and he had been involved in the Autumn Harvest Uprising.54 Knowing he could not be safe in Wuchang, in December 1927, he headed for his old hometown in Guanghua, Hubei, where he began to organize the peasants in a rising against the Guomindang government55 in accordance with the new

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CCP policy to organize peasant and worker uprisings. For a while Yuan was able to escape the reach of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces but in April 1930 he was killed by Guomindang people in the Yuan home village of Yuanchong, in Guanghua County. The terror and the Communist reaction to it came even closer to Yuan Zhen. Not all of her family supported the Communists in the Wuhan government. In fact, her elder brother, a Guomindang member, was executed by the Communists. Yuan Zhiying, who had studied in Japan and taught his younger sisters about modern thought when they were little, was a member of the Guomindang in the Wuhan government. In his sister, Yuan Fuzhi’s account, “When the Communist people were massacred in Shanghai in Chiang Kai-shek’s April purge, he was executed in retaliation by the Communists.”56 Chosen for death because he was a veteran union organizer who “had opposed the Communist Party’s domination of the unions in Hubei,” he was one of eight people arrested and sentenced to execution on 14 April by Communist labor leaders in the Hubei General Labor Union. Yuan Tzuying (Zhiying), her brother, was “executed by firing squad on the streets of Hankou” for a bloody revenge.57 The sisters’ teachers, Li Hanjun and Dong Biwu, had both gone into hiding in the Japanese Concession in Hankou, one of the tri-cities, when the Guomindang purged the Communists from the government. Because Dong was well known as a Communist leader and founding member of the Communist Party his name was high on the wanted list. At the point the concession was surrounded by Guomindang troops, Li was unable to escape arrest by the government forces who swiftly executed him. Luckily Dong Biwu got away, disguised as a sailor and fled to Japan, soon going on to Moscow where he found Yuan Fuzhi.58 As her family and teachers were hunted down and killed, Yuan Zhen’s personal situation had become more and more dangerous. So many of her family and friends identified as Communists became a great hardship for her. The atmosphere of the Wuhan cities was filled with terror everywhere in these days and increasing her own personal crisis was the contraction of tuberculosis. After her job at the Ministry of Education had vanished with the collapse of the government, she had found a job back at the Women’s Normal School keeping records in the principal’s office. But, a warlord’s wife, who had graduated from the school, recognized her and warned people at the school about her Communist family with the result that she was fired immediately and forced to leave the school. Due to the power of the warlord and people’s fear of Communists, it became impossible for her to find work.59 During these dark days, unbeknownst to her, her sister Yuan Fuzhi had returned from Moscow. One day her third (adopted) sister, Yuan Xizhi, came to tell her the news that there was an article in the paper about a woman Communist bandit who was in prison in Anqing, Anhui. The name

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of this “bandit” was that of her sister, Yuan Fuzhi. In fact, it really was Fuzhi, who had returned to China in December 1928, and been sent to work in the Anhui Provincial Party Committee at Wuhu. When a Guomindang police officer from Hankou recognized her she was arrested and imprisoned in Anqing. After being sentenced to death, she was sent to death row to await execution.60 Once Yuan Zhen heard that her sister was in prison on death row, she began to search for some way to save her. But unfortunately this attracted the Guomindang’s attention to herself and they started to hunt for her. Her bobbed hair, the mark of radical women who had been involved in political organizing in the women’s movement, drew their attention to her, making it almost impossible for her to move about freely. She was able to survive only because she had a very close girl friend, who hid her for a whole year in a little room in her home in the Wuhan area. In fact, this friend was the cousin of Wu Zhichun, the man who had fallen in love with her. By this time he had come back from Russia. Wu was very concerned about her and the situation she was in. He began to help her with money and helped his cousin to hide her. Soon, however he went to Beiping to take the position of administrative dean (Jiaowu zhang) at Qinghua University in the reorganized university but he continued to care for Yuan Zhen and send her money. He wrote to her every week about his love and encouraged her, telling her he hoped she would come to Qinghua to get away from the Guomindang agents hunting for her in Wuhan.61 Becoming convinced that Yuan Zhen’s sister Fuzhi’s life was in great danger, Wu Zhichun told Yuan Zhen that for her sake, because he loved her, he would try to help her sister, whom he had met in Moscow while he was taking refuge there. He thought that through a Harvard classmate who was now in the Guomindang Nanjing government perhaps he might be able to help Fuzhi. In 1931, when the government reduced some of the prisoners’ punishments, at the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, it became possible for him to find a way to help. First he got her death sentence reduced to seven years in prison; then the prison sentence was reduced to three years. Finally, in August 1933, she was released. Altogether, Yuan Fuzhi had spent four and a half years in prison.62

AUTONOMY AND LOVE For Yuan Zhen the chance to study at one of the very best universities in China couldn’t be passed up. She decided to go to Beiping to take the Qinghua examination and was admitted in the fall of 1930 as a transfer student in the history department. Wu Zhichun encouraged her and followed every move she made. He also probably helped her financially. This was a great opportunity for her to reach her goal of education and independence but his

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attentions conditioned that independence for her. Both of them were deeply imbued with ideas of equality for women and men, but these ideals meant quite different things to each of them. She expected autonomy, to control decisions that affected her life. His idea was more that of a guardian who treated his beloved with great respect and as an equal but paternally knew what was best for her and insisted she do as he recommended. In 1932, after she had been at Qinghua for some time and received a special scholarship, in order to sever the relationship she told Wu Zhichun she no longer needed his help. But he would not leave her alone even though she made it clear she was no longer interested. After she was hospitalized with TB he came to see her despite her telling him not to come. Her roommate Yang Jiang recalled how he had brought her oranges that were a great delicacy. This made Yuan Zhen very angry, especially when he told her he didn’t want anyone else to eat them. One day when Zhichun was there, Yuan Zhen cut up an orange and handed it to Yang Jiang telling her to eat it. Feeling embarrassed, Yang Jiang hesitated because she knew Wu had brought them specially for his girlfriend, but Yuan Zhen insisted that she eat every bit right in front of him. The younger woman felt very uncomfortable as he watched her but to please her friend she did as Yuan Zhen wanted. When he was gone, Yuan Zhen told her she wanted to show Wu Zhichun that he could not run her life. She had told him many times she was not interested in him, but he told her she didn’t know her own feelings . . . she really was interested in him but didn’t know it. Yang Jiang recalled that Yuan Zhen told him she was very grateful for his help but she did not love him. She was willing to marry him out of a feeling of obligation for his help but that was the only reason. Wu couldn’t accept this. At this point, he claimed he was going to die, but, Yang Jiang wryly commented much later, it wasn’t clear if this was a suicide threat.63 In desperation, in 1933, after her elder sister had been released from prison and had reached Beiping, when the two sisters were finally reunited, Wu Zhichun turned to Fuzhi for help. He played on her obligation to him for his help in her release from prison and on her responsibility to provide for her younger sister’s welfare. Nonetheless, in spite of the gratitude she felt for his help, Yuan Zhen, a very strong-minded person, was clear in her own mind about her feelings about Wu Zhichun’s place in her life. It was not to be. In the end, he gave up. Soon after this, he left Qinghua to teach at Nankai University in Tianjin. Yuan Zhen had studied two years in the history department at Qinghua when her illness became too severe to manage herself. Although she had only one year more to finish for her degree she had no choice but to withdraw and go into the tuberculosis hospital for about a year. Her closest friend and roommate, Jiang Entian, paid for her hospital expenses and stayed in the hospital to help her. By this time, Jiang had already graduated and was teaching in a middle school. At Qinghua, these two friends

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had shared a dormitory room with two other girls, one of whom was Jiang Entian’s girlhood friend, Yang Jiang from Suzhou. Yang Jiang became close friends with Yuan Zhen also, and maintained that close relationship until the Cultural Revolution in 1966.64 Yang Jiang recalled years later that Yuan Zhen was very beautiful when she was young, with a delicate complexion and very fine features. Her hands were beautifully shaped—she was very proud of her hands. She had a very good figure but when she stood and walked it was in peasant fashion, planting her feet firmly on the ground, never mincing along. Her ankles were thick. Her hair was short and straight; she kept it bobbed, never curled. There was an old-fashioned look about her, enhanced because she wore no cosmetics. Because of her illness she was isolated from other university people; only a few close friends came to see her. Jiang Entian’s new teaching job was far away from Beiping and she could not continue to care for her. When Wu Zhichun finally gave up his suit for Yuan Zhen and left Beiping, he asked his good friend the historian, Liang Fangzhong, to watch over her. This was just after her sister, Fuzhi, was freed from prison and came to Beiping to be with her. 65 In 1934, Fuzhi brought Yuan Zhen home from the hospital. The previous year at Xiehe Hospital, which was connected with Union Medical College, she had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, in addition to the TB she already had. The only known treatment for this dread disease was complete immobilization of the body. She lay in a plaster cast, unable to leave the bed, unable to bathe, to care for bodily functions, or to feed herself. The once active young woman had become totally dependent on other people’s assistance to live. The bed she must lie on now was very high so that anyone talking to her had to stand beside the bed. It could be rolled into the fresh air and sun when the weather was pleasant. A board was placed on the top of the bed and on the board lay the open cast with her body cradled in it with quilts covering her for warmth. Yuan Zhen had always looked very beautiful lying down—her roommates had often commented on this. Now in the bed when she slept she looked like a sleeping beauty.66 When Yuan Zhen learned that she had TB of the bone she became very depressed. Her fear was that she wouldn’t live long and if she did she might never walk again. To encourage her the doctor told her, “You mustn’t get emotional, keep your emotions calm. Try not to think about things that make you excited. Think of the past, about history.” Since she was a student of history, this wasn’t difficult so she read history and theoretical books, not fiction which might excite her. Any thought of her favorite novel, the Dream of the Red Chamber, and the story of the heroine, Daiyu, who died of tuberculosis, she pushed completely out of her mind lest it send her into deeper depression.67

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When Liang Fangzhong left Beiping in the summer of 1934, he thought that it would be a good idea if another man would watch out for Yuan Zhen who was just then leaving the hospital.68 Now that her elder sister was in Beiping after being freed from prison she had a close family member to look after her, but Yuan Zhen’s friends were afraid that Fuzhi might become a target of police attention again on account of her past history as a Communist. Official Beiping was not a safe place for known Communists or even for those who had Communist affiliations. However, although her family’s history had been a terrible liability in Wuhan, in Beiping academic circles such a history of Communist activism cast an air of political idealism and pathos about her. To help her before he left, Liang introduced his good friend in the Historical Research Association, Wu Han, and asked him to look out for her. Although Wu Han was just finishing his last year of studies at Qinghua, Yuan Zhen’s former roommate, Yang Jiang, remembered that at the time he was already well known as a distinguished person and a well-known scholar because of several important works he had written.69

FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE Wu loved to talk about history and could be irrepressible in his enthusiasm about the subject when he found an attentive audience. Yuan Zhen was interested in historical issues and also deeply serious about China’s present critical situation. Ill as she was, still she was trying desperately to hang onto the things that were important to her and to find a tranquil way in her thinking that would create positive meaning in the midst of her depression. When he first started coming to see her, Wu Han was far more interested in her than she in him. After he left, when she and her friend, Jiang Entian, were alone together with Yang Jiang and they were talking about Wu Chunhan, they teasingly called him jiang doufu, an expression meaning “pedant.” This was his friend Liang Fangzhong’s nickname for Wu when the two joked together. But, as time went by they drew closer. She began to like him more and more and take a real interest in him. The contrast between her former boyfriend, Wu Zhichun, and Wu Han’s outspokenness and the vitality of his thinking was appealing. For the next three or four years Yuan Zhen was unable to stand or to even leave the bed and her older sister was always there to care for her. Their younger cousin Yuan Xizhi, who they had adopted as a sister, also came to Beiping to live with them. Because no one in the city of Wuhan, where the Yuan’s were known, would hire the daughter of Communists who had been executed by the Guomindang, with no livelihood and no immediate family to help her, she came north to live with her adopted sisters. Fuzhi, unable to work because of her prison record, looked after Yuan Zhen while Yuan

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Xizhi, whose record was unknown in Beiping, worked. With her salary she supported the three of them.70 Wu Han’s life would be deeply influenced by Yuan Zhen. His new friend was different from other friends at the university. First of all she was a beautiful, intelligent woman. Until he met her, immersed as he was in historical research, he had little time for socializing and had shown no sign of thinking socially about any females, nor did he seem to have any serious interest in finding a wife. In the beginning, he had gone to see her simply as a gesture of friendly concern because his good friend Liang Fangzhong had asked him to look out for her. But very soon he found he was drawn to her like a bee to honey. Her beauty attracted him, her classic Daiyu-like situation (the heroine in the Dream of the Red Chamber) was appealing, and her penetrating thinking and daring independence often challenged his own sacred assumptions. The pathos of the tension between her obvious need for help in her present dependent state and her independent spirit and drive for equality with men was appealing to him. There was a common cord that connected them. Friends noticed that while he began by stopping by casually to ask how she was he soon was staying for hours standing by her bed deep in conversation, unable to tear himself away. For the next three years, until he left Beiping to go to Yunnan, he came at least three times every week to see her, regularly on Sundays and Wednesdays and whenever else he could manage the time. Whatever he was writing or researching they discussed together. When he was there Yuan Zhen’s spirits would lift and she became more optimistic about herself and the future. But the future was bleak. The tuberculosis bacillus had settled in her spine making the bone porous and soft, apt to bend and pinch the spinal cord in such a way that it caused great pain. She would often be feverish, especially in the evening, and was very weak. The only treatment was to rest in bed and have good food; the medicine she took was for pain. The open cast in which her body lay provided the immobility necessary for the soft vertebrae in her spine to strengthen. She knew that convalescence would be long and the disease was highly infectious. Having a child was out of the question—even if the patient recovered, the disease might cause sterility or, if a child were conceived, it might be born with tuberculosis. Although sexual relations might be possible, carrying a child in pregnancy would be dangerous because of the weakness of the woman’s body. Her sister Fuzhi recalled their relationship: When Yuan Zhen came to know Wu Han she told him she couldn’t let herself fall in love because “I’m ill and may hurt you,” but they could be friends. She asked Wu to forgive her. But, although they tried not to, they could not help themselves and fell in love. They came to know each other very well over a long time so it was natural for love to develop between them. After they understood each other, there was no way of holding back the love they felt.71

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From the beginning, if they were going to be friends the friendship had to be formed within the framework of her independent thinking. Yuan Zhen was not a woman to use feminine wiles or her own dependence to entice a man. For Wu Han her independent spirit was an attraction, not a threat as it might have been for many men. He knew well the need for personal autonomy from his own youth. He also knew well what it was like to be poor and without financial resources. As their mutual fascination with China’s history and culture drew them together a close bond developed around their common interest. But always conditioning their relationship was the terrible illness she suffered. It could not be wished away. During their three years together in Beiping, Wu never saw her stand or walk. She could do nothing but lie immobilized in her bed with only her mind moving swiftly over the landscape of history and contemporary affairs and her eyes watching those around her. The fact that she was strongly influenced by communism and her life was intertwined with political radicalism was not a problem for Wu. Even though he had no interest in political activism himself, he was not isolated from the political milieu. Actually he had long been surrounded by people who were politically active. His close friend Qian Jiaju had been strongly influenced by communism and repeatedly involved in Communist Party political organizing. There were also fellow provincials and relatives from Zhejiang who were Communists who brought him news of political affairs at home, as well as Wu’s own brother Chunxi, who was involved in a peripheral Communist group and participated in the December Ninth Movement in 1935. There were also Yuan Zhen’s two sisters, both radical political activists—actually Fuzhi was a Communist Party member—as well as their many friends. Yuan Zhen was simply one more person around Wu who was critical of the Nationalist government and interested in Communism. Although she had long since turned away from revolutionary activism before she came to Beiping and Qinghua University, nevertheless, she still identified with communist politics in her opinions.

ENTERING THE ACADEMY: BEGINNING THE LIFE OF TEACHING Wu Han was attracted by Yuan Zhen’s mind and her beauty, but pulling on his heartstrings at the same time was the plight of her helpless condition. He had been studying at Qinghua as a fellow student in the same department already for three years when his friend Liang Fangzhong, who had been looking out for her care, introduced Chunhan to her personally and asked him to look out for her now that he was leaving Beiping. Certainly they had been aware of each other before—they had actually both served on the editorial board of the Qinghua zhoukan, the student weekly at the university, but their first conversations alone together had begun the year he graduated.

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After graduation Wu Han plunged into life in the academy as a full participant without pause for either graduate work in China or study abroad. From then on there was a complex interplay in the matrix of his life among the three elements of family, the teaching and practice of history, and his relationship with the woman he was growing very close to. Even though not always evident to bystanders, the interweaving of the three was subtle and demanding, at times conflicting. Although the pull of commitments was not new to him, now it often seemed to work more insistently and in complicated ways. Competing demands of family and the practice of history faced him first, at the close of his last year as a student when he suddenly had to return to his home village, Kuzhutang, for his father’s death and to be with his mother and family. As he returned from the south and his family, he stepped into the next stage of his life, the beginning of his career as a teacher at Qinghua University. Since his first year at the university he had known that the history chairman Jiang Tingfu planned to appoint him to the faculty after he graduated. After a short transition as an assistant teacher, by the beginning of the fall term of 1934 Wu Han became an instructor, a very junior member of the Qinghua Department of History faculty.72 At that time in Chinese academia this appointment, backed by such powerful mentors as Wu’s, at the well-financed prestigious national university of Qinghua was a permanent appointment to the university history faculty. Even though he had already gained fame and attracted the esteem of academic circles with his researches in Ming history, Wu’s appointment was a lucky thing for him because jobs were hard for graduates to find. Trying to encourage new graduates in their search for jobs that spring while speaking to Nankai University graduates, Hu Shi had held up Wu and his friend, Qian Jiaju, who had gone to work at the Central Research Institute the previous year as examples of what university graduates could be doing if they were diligent. In actual fact, Hu was misleading when he talked about the way the search for good jobs worked since actually both of these bright young scholar paragons had benefited from the influence of an elitist scholarstudent guanxi relationship with Hu Shi himself. This relationship insured that as favored students of a famous professor they would be privileged in the job market. Since they were both exceptionally creative, hardworking, and deserving young scholars they were, in fact, not diminished by benefiting from the system, but brought luster to their mentor’s reputation.73 Ironically, at the very moment of actually taking up his first academic post Wu Han had been confronted with a tantalizing choice between two jobs he was offered. One other alternative Wu did not consider at all was the possibility of going abroad for more study and research. Although both of his mentors, Hu Shi and Jiang Tingfu, had studied abroad themselves and stressed the necessity of Western methods in Chinese scholarship, neither had encouraged him to leave China, nor had he considered going

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abroad to study himself, since his specialty was Chinese history. Jiang had learned from his own experience in the United States that the American libraries lacked Chinese textual materials and he saw no reason for historians of China to go abroad. This was especially true just then as rich documentary collections were being opened in China for scholarly use. There was comparatively little available outside of China, while in China there were mountains of documentary materials, unsorted and uncatalogued, slowly coming to light and available for scholars to mine. In Jiang’s own words there was “nothing of Chinese history a student could carry back to China from the United States, even if he had wished to.”74 Travel abroad would be pointless and self-defeating for a Ming historian. The Qinghua position Professor Jiang had counted on Wu filling in the history department beckoned to Wu Han. But that spring Fu Sinian, director of the Central Research Institute, also offered him a position at the Institute as he graduated from Qinghua. This position was attractive to Wu because of the special opportunity for research—the institute had a treasure trove of newly available documents. However, salaries were much better at the university because Qinghua finances came both from the remainder of the Boxer Indemnity Fund and the Chinese national government whereas the institute depended wholly on Chinese funding sources. At first, Wu had been torn between the two; had he only himself to think of, he might well have taken the institute position.75

THE WEIGHT OF FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY His decision, however, was that he could not afford to pass up the Qinghua position. His father’s death a month before graduation had removed any possibility that he would take the institute job. From the time his father had contracted tuberculosis, Wu had been sending money home to pay for his medicine. The death of his father had far reaching effects in Wu Han’s life. A failure as an official because he wouldn’t take bribes, a poor businessman, heavy drinker, and opium smoker in the last years of his life, Wu Binyu had left his family 30 mou of land, his reputation as a responsible, well-liked local gentry and a legacy of debt. The store in Wudian, started by a group of local men including his father, had closed in bankruptcy soon after his father died. Now the family leadership fell on the shoulders of his eldest son, Wu Chunhan. Along with the responsibility came the burden of his father’s debt; to clear the family name he could not walk away from it. Wu Han’s mother decided that she and his little sister Puxing born only seven years before her father died, would stay in the village in the family home. She would look after the farmland and live off its production. Chunhan, her eldest son, now head of the family and the landowner, had become completely urbanized and had not the slightest interest in farming. His

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mother, daughter of a peasant farmer, admired locally as a fine weaver, understood farming and worked in the fields when it was necessary in later life as she had as a child with her parents. Only now it was alongside the hired man. His younger brother, Chunxi, was already in school in Beiping. The older of his two sisters, Puyue, was in Hangzhou in higher middle school and the youngest sister, Puxing, would stay at home with her mother. Any possibility of taking the lower paying job at the Central Research Institute simply vanished when he confronted his new family responsibility and considered his new found relationship with his very special friend, Yuan Zhen, and the loving concern he felt for her. She needed his help. That was clear to Chunhan. In words that starkly describe his situation and reveal the difficult conditions his new responsibility created for him he later wrote: I took the burden of providing the money for my younger brother and sisters to go to school, to pay for Yuan Zhen’s illness, for the funeral arrangements after my father’s death from tuberculosis, and for the debt of several thousand yuan due to the bankruptcy of the general store. The only thing I could do was take one year’s salary in advance and also mortgage the building in Wudian to raise money. For all of the living and school expenses for myself, Yuan Zhen, and my brother and sisters I had to depend on writing fees.76

In consequence, at the moment he began his working career he was shouldering a full set of family responsibilities. His reputation in Chinese academia was already established as a brilliant young scholar whose star was on the ascendant, but as a teacher as yet he had no experience. His friends and colleagues knew him as a friendly, often outspoken young man whose intense seriousness about what mattered to him sometimes brought him their teasing for being pedantic. Not the least of the major changes in his life, during his first year of teaching was his growing fascination with the young woman he wanted to help. When her sister, Fuzhi, came to Beiping Wu Han helped them with money to live on, as her friend. Every month he brought them 40 yuan to help with for living expenses and Yuan Zhen’s medicine. In return Fuzhi did work to assist him, copying history manuscripts. His life was becoming entwined with the present and future of this beautiful and radical young woman.

NOTES 1. Qinghua daxue xiaoshigao (1981), 96. Interview 144. 2. Interviews 61 and 62. 3. This section relies on Interviews 61, 62, 144, and 145. The railroad only connected Xiangfan to the central Yangtze valley Wuhan urban complex in 1965. 4. Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankow comprise the modern city of Wuhan. 5. Interview 145. Ch’i (1976), 70, for Xiao (Hsiao) Yaonan.

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6. Interview 61. For the Wuchang uprising Esherick (1976). 7. Interview 145 for Chen Duxiu’s influence on Yuan Shutang. 8. Interview 62. Cf. Dirlik (1989) dismisses the importance of the October Revolution as a factor stimulating Chinese interest in Communism. While he may be right about the lack of immediate influence of the October Revolution, it cannot be ignored that at least in this family, when they heard about the Russian Revolution the next spring it stimulated their interest in a revolution opposing unjust political authority and this in turn contributed to their later interest in socialism and communism. 9. During this period they may have gotten the Pingmin (Plain People) from Wuchang. It was contributed to by Zhou Enlai and Deng Yingchao and Yuan Fuzhi talked about it in Interview 62. 10. Interview 62. 11. Interview 62. 12. Xia Zhixu (1959), 148; Interviews 61 and 62. 13. Xia Zhixu (1959), 148–19. 14. Xia Zhixu (1959), 149. Interview 145. Ida Belle Lewis (1919), 30–40. 15. Interview 61. Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985); BDRC, 3:341–44; Boorman (1964), 66–83. 16. Interview 61 gives the subjects Dong talked about studying in Wenputong. Ayers (1971), 220–21; CCP, 27–32. Zhang Zhidong, one of the main architects of the late Qing educational reforms, was instrumental in the abolition of the imperial examination system. 17. Wales (1952), 35–43. 18. Interview 18; Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 25–31. 19. See Dirlik (1989), 36–37. 20. Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 36. 21. As quoted from Dong Biwu, Yi youren Zhan Dabei, in Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 36. 22. As quoted from Dong Biwu, Yi youren Zhan Dabei, in Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 36. For a differing view of Li Hanjun’s thinking Wilbur and Howe (1989), 453. Dirlik (1989), 29–42; van de Ven (1991). 23. Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 38. 24. Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 39–43. 25. Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 44; “Chen Tanqiu,” in Hu Hua (1983) 9:5–9, 26. Xia Zhixu (1959), 149. Xia, a classmate of the Yuan girls at the school, is borne out by Ida Belle Lewis in Education of Girls in China, 34, where Lewis quotes the Republican minister of education on the official aim for educating girls with nearly the same words that Xia uses. Beahan (1984), 25–35. 27. Xia Zhixu (1959), 150; Interview 61; Croll (1978), 87–88. 28. Interview 61; Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 53–54. Croll (1978), 151, for these issues, especially cutting women’s hair. 29. Interview 61. Bukharin and Preobrashensky (1969). This work, The ABC of Communism, originally written in 1919 to explain the new program of the Russian Communist Party to members and recruits, was republished repeatedly and translated into many languages, becoming as important as Marx’s Communist Manifesto had been in the earlier period. 30. Xia Zhixu (1959), 149. BDCC, 1026–29. This kind of reading society had forerunners in the associations of late Qing and early Republican society.

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31. Xia Zhixu (1959), 150. The essence of the lijiao as it governed women’s lives was the absolute mandate of chastity. The word lijiao means the sense of reverence for the teaching of eternal principles, the principles being those of the Confucian canon, that is, loyalty, filiality, and the five bonds of subject-ruler, son-father, younger brother– older brother, wife-husband, and friend-friend arranged hierarchically. 32. Interview 61; Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 54. See Beahan, “One Woman’s View,” (1984) for Yang Zilie. Xia Zhixu writes about her own experience in “Wusi de langhua” (1959). Cheng and Cadart write about Chen Bilan in “Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan: The Lives and Times of a Revolutionary Couple” (1998), 30–35. The other girls included Chen Mulan, Ma Yucha, Zhou Yuehua, Qian Ying, Qi Yuande, Yuan Fuzhi, and Zhuang Youyi. 33. Interview 61. The label “red” was associated with radicalism of a socialist or Marxist flavor at this time, not exclusively with the Communist Party. The Guomindang was also referred to as “red” in the 1920s. 34. Interview 61; Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 55–56. The incident of the girls’ rebellion in the school became famous and long stood in people’s opinion for the revolt of women against traditional authoritarian control. 35. Interview 61; Hu Zhuanzhang and Ha Jingxiong (1985), 53–55. 36. Interview 61; cited in Wilbur and Howe (1989). The interviewee, Yuan Fuzhi, attributed the contents to Li Hanjun, indicating that Li and Marx were merged together in her mind on these issues. During this difficult time, the reading group often met in Li Hanjun’s house where he talked with them about women’s rights. “Li Hanjun,” in Hu Hua (1980), 11:109–50, esp. 127. 37. Xia Zhixu (1959), 154; Interview 61. The picture was given to me by Yuan Fuzhi. 38. BDCC, 498–99; Chesneaux (1968), 187–201, esp. 192–93, 208–9. 39. Interview 61; “Li Hanjun,” in Hu Hua (1980), 11:125–27. 40. Interview 61; Xia Zhixu (1959), 149. 41. Wilbur and Howe (1989), 473. Van de Ven (1991). In this chapter, the intention has been to not capitalize communism as a system of thought and to capitalize the political party. 42. Interview 144. 43. Wilbur (1984), 5–63. 44. Wilbur and Howe (1989), 360–63. “Dual” members in both Nationalist and Communist parties. 45. For the following section Interviews 61, 62, and 140. For attitudes toward male/female relationships Croll (1978), 148. 46. The present author, in oral history interviews, observed and enjoyed Yuan Fuzhi’s friendly, outgoing nature. 47. Interview 63. 48. Interview 61; “revolutionary” was used by the interviewee because his appointment had been connected with the Communist Wuhan officials. At this time the Communists controlled two ministries: Agriculture and Labor as well as being influential elsewhere. Li Hanjun and Dong Biwu, two people the Yuan sisters had been associated with were deeply involved in the Hubei “revolutionary” government. 49. See “Li Hanjun,” in Hu Hua (1980), 11:132. 50. Interview 144. Wu Zhichun was apparently not a Communist but must have been very progressive since he worked for Eugene Chen.

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51. Interview 144; BDRC3, 144–45. Song Qingling had become pro-Communist and anti–Chiang Kai-shek. This was also the year that Song Meiling married Chiang. 52. Interviews 144 and 145; he stayed in Moscow at least until 1928. 53. Interview 145, an interview of her daughter. Wang Mu was only thirty when executed. For background Wilbur (1984), 141–46. 54. Hofheinz (1967), 37–87; “Hubei nongmin baodong jingguo shi baogao” [Report on the Events of the Peasant Insurrection in Hubei], no. 11 of Zhongyang tongxun [Central Newsletter]. Wilbur (1984), 150–52; Hofheinz (1967), 37–87. 55. Interviews 61 and 144. 56. Interview 62. 57. For his execution see Chesneaux (1968), 326, and Wilbur (1984), 112. 58. Hu Hua (1980), 11:150; Hu Zhuanzhang citing Dong Biwu, “Yi youren,” 120; BDCC1, 499; Wales (1959), 42–43 59. Interview 62. 60. Interview 145. Her arrest was in February 1929. 61. Interview 140. 62. Interviews 61, 62. 63. This account is from Interview 140 with Yang Jiang. The situation between Yuan Zhen and Wu Zhichun was corroborated in Interview 61 with Yuan Fuzhi and Interview 145 with Yuan Xizhi and also in several interviews with Wu Han’s relatives. 64. Interview 140. Yang Jiang became a well-known playwright in the 1940s, a literary critic, and the author of Six Chapters of My Life “Downunder.” 65. Interview 140. 66. Interviews 61, 140. In Interview 12 with Dr. He Mu, noted authority on tuberculosis and physician in Yan’an, he explained the difficulty of treating this disease and the rarity of a patient having both tuberculosis of the spine and tuberculosis. 67. Interview 62. 68. Schwarcz (1986), 116, discusses aspects of the male need for taking responsibility. 69. Interview 140. 70. Interviews 61, 62. 71. Interview 61. 72. For Wu Chunhan as instructor (jiao yuan) see Qinghua daxue yilan (October 1935). 73. See Hu Shi (1934); Qian Jiaju (1986). 74. TTF, 130. Li Xiaolin and Li Shengwen (1988), 14–16; Franke also comments on this. 75. Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, in English: Academia Sinica. Wu on the difficult choice in “Wu Han zizhuan.” 76. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.”

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n Wu Han’s first years as a professional historian and university teacher his friendships and family relationships were influenced, even shaped, by the central love of his life: history and its study. Each day for him was a venture in the exploration of historical events and contexts that had not yet been studied by modern historians trained in analytical methods. The ready access he had to the abundant documentary sources rapidly becoming available offered great opportunities for his work. Young as he was, Wu was already recognized by fellow scholars as a historian open in his judgment, whose work set a high standard of excellence. Beyond Wu’s part in the opening of modern Ming historical studies, his historical work was at the forefront of shaping the new historiography for the twentieth century.

QINGHUA HISTORY DEPARTMENT The history department he joined as a junior faculty member had been reorganized in the last five or six years under Jiang Tingfu’s guidance.1 Although Jiang’s education was in Western historical methods and New History at Columbia University he had not been subverted by adulation of Western thought. He returned to China deeply committed to the creation of a Chinacentered New History. Jiang was convinced this history should be firmly grounded in studies of the rich historical materials extant in the archives that were beginning to open to contemporary scholars. From these records historical trends and themes in the broadest expanse of the whole society could be identified and analyzed.2 As the chairman of the history department at

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Qinghua University he was in a key position to influence and shape history education and the construction of this “new history.” By the time Wu joined the faculty, the history curriculum had already been established. In Jiang’s plan, Wu would teach and research the history of the Ming era as one of the “new historians” who would go far beyond the documents to ask penetrating analytic questions about the past. By displacing some of the traditional scholars and turning to younger men, giving them freedom to develop their courses and encouraging their original thinking, Jiang established a vibrant history department. In Jiang’s words Qinghua had a “curriculum suited to China,” as the history curriculum had not been before in Chinese universities. It has been said the Qinghua History Department under Jiang Tingfu was the “best balanced” history department in the country.3 He was particularly interested in the construction of modern general histories for students to learn about their country’s past in its broadest scope. There were “enormous accumulations of material, but there is no agreed synthesis, except in dates and places. In the past, one could not be a student of the general history of China (Zhongguo tongshi). Instead, one was a lifelong specialist in some particular period or book,” in his words. Even in the Qinghua catalog, the university announced its goal to train Chinese historians for the present and future to create the “New History.”4 Among the young historians Jiang Tingfu gathered into the department several were particularly interested in the construction of China’s general history including Lei Haizong, Zhang Yinlin, and Wu Han, as well as Qian Mu as an adjunct lecturer.

Figure 6.1. Wu Han, instructor in Qinghua University History Department, Beiping, 1934

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This department that Jiang shaped prepared students in both Chinese and non-Chinese history. Among the seven full professors, Jiang taught Chinese diplomatic history, Chinese modern history, and the history of international relations; Lei Haizong taught Chinese general history and a course in historical methodology, Chinese ancient history (Shanggu shi) as well as Qin-Han history; Chen Yinke taught a course in Jin, Nanbei chao, and Sui-Tang history and a research seminar in the same subject. Several other professors taught the courses in European, Russian, and American history. Zhang Yinlin, a special lecturer, was one of the young historians whom Jiang had especially fostered. Zhang’s subjects were Chinese intellectual history and Song history. Qian Mu, an adjunct lecturer, taught Chinese intellectual history of the past three hundred years, and Wu Chunhan, instructor, was responsible for Ming history, Ming social history, and research in Ming history. In his first year, to allow him time to prepare his other courses, the only course Wu actually taught was Ming history. Unfortunately, this highly specialized set of courses and very light teaching load for such a young teacher roused the envy of some of the senior members of the department.5 Occasionally, Qinghua hired people from outside of its own faculty to teach a course. Zheng Zhenduo, had taught a literature course when Wu was a student and Qian Mu was now lecturing as an adjunct. In 1935, Tao Xisheng, the historian who had taught at China College while Wu was studying there, by coincidence also offered a course in Chinese social history in the history department, but as an outside teacher. It was Tao who had stimulated the debate over social history among Marxists a few years earlier.6 Now the two, Wu Han and Tao, were each teaching courses in social history at the same university. The course descriptions of the two reflect their differing conceptions of social history and the level of the courses determined the comparative level of difficulty. In the précis of Wu’s advanced 200-level course on Ming social history, there is no preoccupation with ideology. The plan for his course was “to explain the formation of the social organization, schools of thought, and the political system, and their evolution in the Ming dynasty and to point out the influence of these factors on later periods.”7 The objective of Tao’s 100-level course, through examining social organization by period, to explain the development of the Chinese political system and thought trends of each period. As in the social history debate, Tao’s preoccupation was with the periodization of society in historical time. His précis outlined his periodization scheme.8 The popularity of social history in the campus curriculum was partly related to the broad conception of society that had been fostered by Liang Qichao as early as 1904 in his New History and more recently in the history course Liang had taught right there at Qinghua in the 1920s. This interest in social history was also reinforced by the current historical writing of many including Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang. Further, the approach recognizing that

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historical study must encompass all of society as its subject, echoed the underlying tenets of the materialist New History that was being absorbed from the West through the translations of historians such as He Bingsong as well as through study in Europe, America, and the Soviet Union by Chinese students. The historians involved in the Chinese Marxist social history controversy were a part of this redefinition and expansion of the parameters of historical inquiry. In contrasting the objectives of Wu’s and Tao’s social history courses a characteristic in Wu’s conceptualization of social history stands out. The development process of society for Wu was not driven by social structure but was more complex, nor did he use periodization as a universal pattern into which all aspects of society must be fitted. This did not mean that he devalued the issue of social organization, but rather that he considered it coequal with political, economic, geographical, and intellectual factors in social history. Wu’s historicist emphasis was on the process of change, not on structural pattern in the past as was Tao Xisheng’s.

CULTURAL HISTORY AS THE BASIS During Wu’s last student year at Qinghua a Japanese historian’s earlier effort to write a cultural history of China had attracted his attention. Although interest in Chinese culture was great, at this point in time cultural histories of China were relatively rare. The exception was the work of Liu Yizheng, first published at about the same time as Takakuwa Komakichi’s cultural history of China. Wu Han himself was interested in the construction of China’s history in a modern synthesis, particularly as cultural history and also in the construction of general history. In 1924, Takakuwa had published a history of Chinese culture, which was released in Chinese translation by the Commercial Press the following year.9 After it had been reprinted several times, Wu wrote a long review article on the book using the review to air his own ideas about history in general and cultural history in particular.10 The scope of the cultural history both Wu and Takakuwa are talking about, and indeed that Hu Shi had lectured on at China College, extends far beyond a history of the Chinese arts, to include the entire expanse of culture of society, history in its most inclusive form. In Wu’s opinion, the need for this broad conceptualization of the history of Chinese culture had not been met by historians in the past in spite of the abundance of historical records. Wu’s highly critical article on the Takakuwa cultural history is an early manifestation of this emerging interest in cultural history and the creation of modern general history (tongshi). In Liang Qichao’s lectures at Qinghua on cultural history in the 1920s he had pointed to the need for a cultural history of China. This was only a few years before Wu came to the school and at about the time that Takakuwa was giving his lectures in Japan. Liang’s col-

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lege lecture notes on cultural history had been published some years before Wu published his review.11 At China College in 1929, when Wu took Hu Shi’s basic course in Chinese cultural history there had been no single text for the class. In 1934, expressing his conviction that cultural history was the way to conceptualize the past, Wu wrote in his review that there was no general history or cultural history “which had been written by our own people,” neglecting to mention the cultural history by Liu Yizheng, of National Central University, already serially published in the magazine Xueheng. In this current of interest in cultural history, the following year another article was published by Chen Dengyuan.12 Confirming the trend, the year after Wu’s review article the Commercial Press, the major publisher of modern educational material and publisher of Takakuwa’s cultural history, inaugurated a comprehensive series of eighty volumes on cultural history.13 In his review of Takakuwa’s book, Wu stressed that Chinese historical writing in the past had been constricted by the historical records that were available and by the accepted notion that defined history’s content to be rulers and ruling groups, unlike the viewpoint of the contemporary time which looked at the breadth of society. In Wu’s view, distinctiveness and variety in the nature and context of the culture was of prime importance: Writing cultural history is not like writing other history. The main task of cultural history is telling us about the special culture of the particular situation of each region and each period. Cultural history not only must tell us clearly about a culture’s characteristics and inherent nature according to the period, it must further tell us about the sources of the culture, the direction it is going, the time and space it exists in, and the relationships among its people, especially the factors of economic background and social structure and their conditions. To say it another way . . . it must tell us why the situation was the way it was at that time and place and why the situation at another time and place was not this way.14

Wu not only promoted cultural history as a historical genre but also was making a statement of what history in his time should be doing. He was using his discussion to write his historiographic manifesto. Wu Han’s demand was that cultural history not only descriptively characterize history according to time and space, its cultural sources, economic factors, and social structure but it must discover the causal particularities of the historical situation that distinguished it from another situation at a different time and place. It was indigenous context, not global generalities that interested Wu. In other words, he saw cultural history as comparative on the basis of the distinctive, inherent nature of each particular situation, not as the result of some relatively “advanced” civilization providing the normative standard. He found that in the old histories, by contrast, the people, events, material objects and places were generalized and abstracted, separated and disconnected from the particular historical situation in its time with the result that there was no view of historical change. This led to the fault that the old histories were static, they

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did not “have a deep understanding of the culture and civilization inherited from the past and leading to the future.”15 Wu’s idea was that the task for the new cultural history was to link context with events and people to construct the full historical narrative. In this he prefigured by many decades the later Western cultural history interest in contextuality.16 In Wu’s critical view, Takakuwa made a great mistake in his construction of China’s cultural history, when he focused on heroic actors as the creators of the historical situation. Wu dissociates himself, on the one hand, from the view that binding natural laws govern the formation and changes of history and also from the view that history is nothing but the product of willful human action by heroic actors. It is his idea that “from the point of view of the environment the heroes are only the lucky fellows of the period.” That heroes create the situation and the situation creates the heroes cannot be disconnected. Stressing the importance of contextuality, both geographical and social, Wu says: In the cultural history of China the merits and shortcomings of some of the great emperors as well as the successes and failures and the characters of Huang Chao and Li Zicheng were far less important than the changes in the course of the Yellow River, the change of soil and climate in Northwest China, and the development of the Han nationality gradually toward the Southeast region.17

He found Takakuwa’s cultural history lacking because it gave far too much emphasis to the emperors and bandits while ignoring the social and economic context. In his critique of Takakuwa’s even greater fault of insisting on the arbitrary division of the past into discontinuous cultural periods, Wu added to his credo as a historian of the New History. His idea was that development of a particular culture generally is due to accumulation. The culture of a time and place rarely appears and disappears suddenly. Over time in the Chinese past origination and change in culture didn’t simultaneously accompany a particular dynasty’s birth and death. For Wu the identification and separation of periods was no simple thing because change was so complex. He illustrated his idea with the example of Manchu rule: “The Manchus invaded and ruled China as a foreign nationality. As for the cultural aspect, they inherited the culture left by the Ming dynasty. For example, the official system, the legal system, the education system were almost completely the same. The academic thought transmitted was consistent with the past style.” In spite of this, Wu said, the author of this so-called cultural history emphasized the importance of the imperial families, dividing Ming and Qing into two discontinuous cultural periods with no theoretical explanation. Wu proposed that “the task of the cultural historian is to explore the regularities governing the evolution of the patterns of history, to point out precisely the traces of the transmission between the old and new.”18 Not only did Takakuwa fail to

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explain the reasons for “the atmosphere of the Song people, but the Dali yi at the beginning of Jiajing (in the Ming) and the Donglin Party in the middle of Wanli are narrated in a void with no sense of relationship to anything.”19 For Wu this author completely lost the continuity of history, but it was this very continuity within the time and space of history, from the historical past to the present and “leading to the future” that was the responsibility of the historian to investigate and make manifest. For him cultural history had to be the history of dynamic relationships contextually located.

ZHANG YINLIN: FELLOW TEACHER AND CLOSE FRIEND On the history faculty there was another young historian, Zhang Yinlin,20 with whom Wu quickly became close friends. Zhang had a joint appointment in the history and philosophy departments. In history, like Wu Han, he taught only advanced courses—Chinese intellectual history and Song history. In the philosophy department his course was the Selected Readings of Modern British and American Philosophers on the pragmatists, including Bradley, Bosanquet, George Edward Moore, Alexander, Peirce, and John Dewey.21 Zhang Yinlin had just returned from study in the United States at Stanford University. He had been a student of Liang Qichao’s at Qinghua before he left in 1929. Singling Zhang out as specially talented, Liang had encouraged him even in his first year at Qinghua in 1921 when the school was still an academy preparing students for study in the United States.22 Another teacher, Wu Mi, had also praised Zhang’s brilliance. As a student, Zhang had published extensively, contributing several essays to the discourse in the Gushi bian symposium of senior scholars organized by Gu Jiegang to critique classical history.23 As soon as Wu Han came into the department Zhang reached out to him. Since their offices in the library were side by side it was easy to stop by each other’s study. Although ordinarily reserved and usually apprehensive about social intercourse with other people, yet Zhang loved to discuss with Wu. Unsociable and eccentric by nature, he was known to avoid greeting acquaintances when he ran into them but Wu was a tolerant, forgiving sort of person and didn’t mind Zhang’s eccentricities. Habitually careless, Zhang always left a messy pile of books and papers on his desk. When he came to Wu’s room, Wu recalled later “he sat on the desk or leaned back in a chair with his feet propped up on the desk puffing on his cigarette, filling the room with smoke while he talked freely and eloquently of big and little things, of living and dead people, of strangers and friends and of philosophy and history.”24 There was nothing they didn’t talk about. Zhang would get very excited, sometimes even forgetting to eat. Occasionally, when Wu Han was weary

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of poring over his writing and Zhang Yinlin was bored, he would come to Wu’s room and take up a pen to correct Wu’s essay. With a little knife and a bottle of glue he would cut and paste the draft together until he was satisfied and then send it off to the History and Geography Supplement of the Dagong bao where he often published himself. Zhang paid no attention to whether or not Wu wanted him to do this. Even when Wu would “become angry with his tampering and make a fuss he still paid no attention to his complaints.” When Wu poked fun at his love of being a teacher, Zhang only laughed in response and said that if Wu had chosen his class the year before when he was still a student then he would really have been Wu’s teacher and Wu would have had no way to argue with him over his editing corrections. Before Zhang had left China he worked in both Chinese and Western literature, in history and in philosophy as well; but when he came home from his studies at Stanford the focus of his interest had shifted. He turned to specialize wholly in history and talked of his life’s ambition being the study of China’s history. When they talked together he explained to Chunhan that his past studies in America and China had laid the foundation for him for study of China’s history. For him philosophy provided a broad, objective viewpoint and a consciousness of method and sociology provided an understanding of the arrangement of human affairs. He took his model for writing history from a Chinese, not a Western work, the Supplement to Zi zhi tong jian by Li Tao,25 and in his own work he turned to the Song period in China’s past. Wu was deeply influenced by his conversations with Zhang during these years together at the university. The two talked often about history and politics. As a student during the immediate post–May Fourth years, Zhang’s political view had been nationalistic and related to his idealization of the national culture (minzu wenhua), contrary to many of the iconoclasts who tended to yearn for China to be more like the West. He was strongly opposed to the Westernization of China and to Christianity’s influence in the country but after the Guomindang Northern Expedition the extremes of his nationalism had moderated. His shift was toward ideas similar to Fabian socialism, advocating improvement of the economic life of the poor classes. Studying with Liang Qichao had influenced him to see the needs of the whole society. In a sense Zhang Yinlin was a reformer at heart, encouraging people around him to read socialist books and look at practical applications, not merely theory. In those years Zhang’s ideas about society began to influence his writing. A common bond developed between Wu and Zhang, based on ideas and attitudes. They both were intensely serious. Although uninterested in personal political activism, both were increasingly concerned about the country and Chinese society. History was the lens through which each looked at the world. Their anxiety over Japanese aggression and conviction that China’s history had lessons for the present made their concern for

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the practice of history more acute. They also shared the common bond of being very young relative to their colleagues at Qinghua. Both had been singled out for praise and support as brilliant intellects by nationally famous senior scholars who were their mentors. But this only attracted the attention and inevitably the jealousy of senior Qinghua colleagues. Both of them were independent and blunt in speech, difficult to intimidate. This nature they mutually admired in the other. Some of the self-satisfied older faculty felt threatened by such precocious talents. This antagonism, in turn, bonded them even closer together. Zhang found in Wu a fellow practitioner of his interest in New History mixed with pragmatism. There was a wide range of historical thought among historians in Beiping in the thirties, extending from a narrow textually based evidential research (kaozheng) emphasis, to the bibliographical style of Xie Guozhen, and to a more ideological framework such as the work of Tao Xisheng and Guo Moruo. Wu Han and the cohort of young New Historians in the research association around him was attractive to Zhang Yinlin. Their ideas of history were compatible with Zhang’s ideas on the subject matter and purpose of history. It was the mix of social, political, economic, and intellectual history, the use of analysis and generalization, combined with careful use of documentary sources and lack of any rigid structured ideology that was employed by all of these historians that created a common purpose among them and separated the New Historians group, both from Hu Shi’s stress on modern evidential research and Western influence on the one hand and from the Marxist historians on the other.26 At the time Zhang and Wu became friends, Wu Han and his other colleagues were busy organizing the Historical Research Association. After the group was formed Zhang joined the association and published with them in their publications.

WRITING THE NEW HISTORY It was about the time Wu had published his major essay on Hu Weiyong, when he began to explore Ming social history issues. He had finished the article, “The Life of the Late Ming Official Class,” as he published his work on the novel, Jin Ping Mei and Wang Shizhen. His critical characterization of the lifestyle of late Ming officialdom, built around the four character description “Proud, extravagant, dissolute, and indolent” grew out of his work on the social background of the novel. This kind of critical evaluation of the traditional scholar official class (shidaifu jieji) was popular in post May Fourth iconoclasm; Wu had indulged in it before and his historian friends also eagerly played on the theme of criticism of the elite. From Luo Ergang came an essay on the Shidaifu (The Scholars), about this time. The opulent life of the wealthy and powerful ancients made an easy, even comfortable, target for the pens of these relatively poor modern scholars. Nonetheless,

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Wu evenhandedly also pointed out that this group promoted important developments in literature, arts, handicrafts, drama, bronze and stone inscriptions, and wood block printing.27 The ideas about class that had begun to appear in his studies of the late Ming setting he found in the Jin Ping Mei, he articulated more clearly during the summer of 1934 in “The Social Background of the Late Ming Wandering Bandits.”28 This essay, on the surface about the so-called bandits, actually is about deep-seated social problems and the abuse of power that led to the collapse of Ming rule. Here again he characterized the “dissolute, indolent” class of officialdom but this time his judgment was harsher and more focused by historical materialism. They were the oppressing class of aristocrats, eunuchs, gentry, and officials who were overthrown by the class they trod upon. Nevertheless, he did manage to find a few good officials in the Ming. Notably, he pointed to one as an admirable model—Hai Rui, whom he would make the central figure in a play he authored more than two decades later when he was an official himself in the People’s Republic. This man, Hai Rui, did not grow rich and take advantage of his official status, but died so poor that his family could not even afford a coffin in which to bury him. Woven into Wu’s analysis of the period was the common interest he saw between the helpless peasants and the expanding, roving bands who strengthened resistance to the exploiting ruling class. However, it was in the internal collapse of the ancient society and its economic system under the pressure of the insurgents, rather than the agency and intrinsic merit of the rebel bands as leaders of the peasants that Wu found the primary reason for the end of the Ming period. The rebel Li Zicheng had represented the farmers’ interests. In Wu’s view this was an obvious symbol of the farmers’ “revolution,” but the rulers, not understanding this, drove the people into more resistance and alliance with the insurgents. When the ruling class collapsed under the insurgents’ attack the rule of the Ming ended and the Manchu were able to overthrow Li Zicheng and come into China from the north. Deeply interested in the distortions in later orthodox historical constructions that portrayed Li Zicheng as evil, Wu sees the need for in-depth analysis of the social streams of the past and the interaction of those streams: Had the Man tribes from Jianzhou to the north not attacked at this opportunity, the new rulers (Li Zicheng) who had fought against the eunuchs, the rich gentry and the examination system would have given history new significance and structure. But they were smashed by the vigorous tribes, transcending Li Zicheng’s new rule, as transient as a flower that blooms for only one night. His power was destroyed. This provided the opportunity for the old group of undestroyed eight-legged essayists, landlords and merchants to rise again. . . . From this time one-sided biased histories decided the negative significance of the events of the “so-called” roving rebel bands.29

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FILLING THE EMPTY SPACE OF JIANZHOU HISTORY: BEGINNING A LIFELONG PROJECT These Nuzhen forerunners of the Manchu clan in Jianzhou to the north during the early Ming period were of great interest to Wu.30 The Nuzhen were the ethnic group (the Man people) who founded the Manchu’s Qing dynasty under the leader Nurhaci in the area north of Ming China’s borders. Due to the lingering effects of the later Qing dynasty’s control of historical sources for the Ming period, until the 1930s the narrative of this pre-Chinese Nuzhen Qing period had been suppressed and overlooked.31 Wu knew the investigation of the Qing forebears, the Manchu Aisin Gioro clan, was one of the most neglected areas of Qing history. In the aftermath of the anti-Manchuism expressed in the run-up to the 1911 Revolution, the little Ming history that was undertaken was still in the tradition of the late Qing anti-Manchu, preRepublic revolutionary atmosphere.32 In the pre-Qing stage of their existence the Nuzhen, or Jurchen (later to be called Man), tribes were sovereign nomadic people coexisting with the Han. Wu’s studies in the 1930s of the Nuzhen as non-Han peoples coequal with the Han ran counter to the Nationalist Party’s politically laced stress on Great Hanism (Da Han juyi) in the 1930s. He began what would become almost a lifetime compilation project excerpting from the Veritable Records of the Korean Yi dynasty the sections pertaining to China and to the Nuzhen in the Jianzhou area. north of China. This key Korean source dealt in great detail with the Nuzhen/Man government and the Manchu relationship to the Ming dynasty because the Korean dynastic government of that period had no choice but to deal with the Man as an independent state. In the years following World War I as Japanese pressure began to threaten China in successive surges of aggression, people’s awareness of the Northeast (Dongbei) had become more acute. The history of the Ming had been constructed officially by their historians during the Qing dynasty to establish the Qing story and their position as China’s supreme rulers. Library collections were controlled by the Qing rulers to substantiate the narrative, according to the long-standing custom in past dynastic history writing. However, as documentary sources became available after the collapse of the Qing in 1911 it gradually became possible to freely investigate the predynastic period of the Manchus. Meng Sen, a scholar and a political figure in the constitutional movement before and after the 1911 Revolution, had begun to specialize in the Ming Qing transitional period.33 For historians like Wu Han interested in this period the new availability of the archives was very exciting. Wu’s work in the Qinghua archival collection while he was a student had opened the possibilities to him. In the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, their attack on Shanghai in 1932 and the very real threats to Beiping in 1935, the past of this

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northeastern region was no longer a remote historical issue, but became immediately relevant to the present impending crisis. Although culturally the Manchu ruling class and commoners had assimilated into Chinese society, the territorial claims to and political identity of the land in Northeast China became an immediate, critical issue for them to exploit in the light of the Japanese ambitions in Manchuria. Furthermore, the very curtain the Qing ruling dynasty had drawn around their homeland while constructing their historical narrative to serve the purpose of their dynastic legitimacy and by maintaining territorial exclusion barring Chinese settlement at least until the mid-Qing had created a vulnerable space in the narrative of the Chinese past which the Japanese now attempted to exploit to legitimate their aggression in the Northeast. The urgency of this immediate situation reinforced the rising interest of historians in the transitional period from Ming to Qing. As documents became available, the preconquest history of the Nuzhen before 1644, the rise to leadership of the Aisin Gioro ruling clan, and the genesis of the Manchu polity in the pre-Chinese-Qing period drew the historians’ attention.34 By 1931, Meng Sen had already begun a multivolume predynastic history of the Qing covering the period from 1371 to 1524, basically describing the rise of Manchu power and its effect on the Ming empire.35 Wu Han had already been involved in this area of investigation during his systematic study of the Ming History, when he began to delve into the effect in the Qing period that Qianlong’s Siku quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) revision and compilation project in the late eighteenth century had on availability of early historical records of the pre-Qing Manchus. As he realized the gap this imperial censorship had imposed on the study of the history of the Nuzhen people in the area the Chinese called Jianzhou during the Ming period, Wu had decided he wanted to participate in “filling the blank of this period of history.”36 This was the kind of research Jiang Tingfu and Hu Shi had encouraged him to delve into. Through his work in the archival materials he discovered a copy of the Veritable Records of the Korean Yi Dynasty, a particularly important source for this early period of the Jianzhou area history that had previously been unavailable. While some might ask what Korean historical records had to do with the Jurchen forerunners of the Manchu, Wu was very excited to find this source. For one thing, as the historical record of the independent kingdom of Korea it had always been beyond the reach of Imperial Qing rewriting and control. Furthermore, because Korea had been deeply involved in parallel relations with both the Nuzhen and the Ming it was an important, abundant source not only for the Nuzhen but also for the relationships among these three sovereign states. Luckily for Wu, a photocopy of the Korean Shilu was held at the Beijing National Library. In 1932 after he learned of it’s existence he began to go the long distance into the city every Saturday and Sunday to read it. In the library reading room he worked alongside the older scholar, Meng Sen,

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reading the volumes. The two figures, one old and one young, in their scholar’s gowns were often seen by those who lived in the neighborhood walking down the lane to and from the library where they spent long days hunched over the volumes.37 After Wu began the work he made a decision to undertake a major project to further the study of this area for himself and other researchers. He would compile and publish all that the Yi Veritable Record contained on China and on Jianzhou. Altogether over the next five years he filled eighty notebooks with three million characters from the Korean Veritable Record. When the compilation was finished he planned to go on to study the history of the Man people, their social, political, and economic conditions and write a history of the area called Jianzhou. These goals, which he worked on for many years and still talked of carrying out even in the 1960s, were unfulfilled at his death in prison in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. Only in 1980 was Wu Han’s extensive compilation from the Korean Shilu published posthumously. Unfortunately, it had been ready for publication by Zhonghua shuju before 1962, but he had not seen his way clear to have it published.38 The first article Wu published on Jianzhou was a path breaking work published in 1935 in the journal, Yanjing xuebao. With a second article finished two years later, it created an outline of the general development of Jianzhou history and presented the starting point of an outline for his projected history.39 Wu divided Jianzhou history in two periods, each with a leader. The Nuzhen chieftain, Li Manzhu represented the earlier period and Nurhaci the later period. During the Ming emperor Yongle’s reign in 1403, this early Ming ruler, to co-opt the Nuzhen to the north into the Ming orbit, had established the Jianzhou Guard (wei) in the area north of the Ming territory, and made the Nuzhen chieftain, Eha or Aqacu, the commander. Eha’s grandson, Li Manzhu, the successor leader of the guard, was a very strong, independent leader who, under his own rule, united all three guard posts of the Jianzhou region by 1440. According to Wu, because Li Manzhu’s power became so strong and independent that it threatened the Ming court’s hold on the area, in 1467 the Ming and Korean dynastic governments united to attack Jianzhou, the third power. When Li Manzhu was killed, burning, killing, and plundering in the area was widespread with the result that the Jianzhou tribe was scattered in a great disaster. In Wu Han’s view, the basic strength of the Nuzhen people continued to exist, however, and the memory of their success under Li’s leadership lived on in the collective memory. A hundred years later they created the Later Jin dynasty under their leader, Nurhaci.40 This was the Nuzhen ruling order that took the Han Chinese name of Qing even before it launched an effort to conquer the fading Ming dynasty to the south. Wu’s presentation of the rise and unification of the Nuzhen/Manchu tribes as essentially the rise of an independent sovereign power, an indigenous regional group that gathered its strength and unified around its own

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purposes, is a notable departure from the construction of the orthodox Chinese historical narrative of this era as it had been previously constructed in the late Qing and as it has generally been perceived by Western interpreters until recently.41 This is especially true when the climate of Han nationalism that had flourished during the late Qing and strengthened under the sway of the Nationalist Party in the 1930s is considered. This narrative perspective of Wu Han’s was forerunner to later historical work on non-Han groups that treats them as equal peoples or ethnic groups. Certainly Gu Jiegang’s approach to what can be called ethnicity (minzu) in today’s parlance was influential in the changing viewpoint on cultural differences.42 In Wu Han’s view the key to the development of the Nuzhen strength was their move southward and the creation of a strong internal alliance. As their contacts with Han culture increased, their economic development accelerated. This in turn accelerated development of the Nuzhen-Manchu internal political structure. Even though the Ming chose divide and rule tactics that had worked in the past they were unable to stem the early Nuzhen unification begun by Li Manzhu. In Wu’s interpretation, in spite of their defeat, the traces of this earlier Nuzhen experience remained in the collective memory of Nurhaci and his people to serve as a template that provided the basis for the later Man unification that challenged the Ming. In his New History interpretation Wu’s narrative did not reinforce muscular nationalism but rather presented a complex picture of coexistent political cultures that responded to changing conditions. In Wu’s second essay, “The Rise of the Later Jin,” on Jianzhou in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, he lays out the establishment of the Man dynasty, which they named “Qing,” in their homeland as it coexisted with the Ming. He recounted in broad outline the unification of the tribes by Nurhaci, his methods of leadership and internal governance of the unified area, the central importance of the distinctive Manchu military system based on tribal banner military organization and the corresponding establishment of the civil political administration that in Wu’s words “fit like the lining of a coat.” He pointed out the impotence of the Chinese dynastic rulers in the face of the powerful Manchu challenge and Nurhaci’s splendid battle command and brilliant victory. In the 1930s climate of opinion, with the rising sense of Great Han nationalism fostered especially by Guomindang conservatives, Wu’s analysis and conclusions were definitely not the approved historical view. Nonetheless, publication of his unorthodox interpretation of the Nuzhen/Man peoples was not prevented by historical convention and the contemporary orthodox Nationalist political attitude.43

THE NATURE OF POWER: MORE DEEPLY INTO MING HISTORY Wu Han’s total work on the Ming era has been considered a major contribution to the opening phase of modern Ming history by specialists as diverse

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as Wolfgang Franke in 1954, Fang Chao-ying in 1976, and Ming specialists in China in the 1980s and 1990s.44 Although Wu perhaps can best be described as a social historian, his diverse works include studies on social, economic and intellectual issues of Ming and pre-Ming society, on the establishment, development, and abuse of political power and rule, and on the relationship of the Ming territorial domain to the spaces on the borders of the Ming, as well as studies on the historiography of the Ming. The end of the Yuan and the beginning of the Ming was the time frame that attracted him the most. As with many Chinese and Western historians, the topics he chose often paralleled contemporary issues. His choice of narrative language reflected the May Fourth preference for the simple vernacular, even in scholarly work, whereas his earlier work, particularly the “Hu Yinglin nianpu,” had shown the influence of classical Chinese. As he worked in social history issues, Wu became intensely interested in examining Ming use of political power and its relationship to the social context. In “The Ming Dynasty ‘Embroidered Uniform Guard’ and the ‘Eastern and Western Depots’”45 he dealt with the relation of the rulers to the high social strata. Here he argued that because imperial power represented only the special interests of the emperors’ own group and not the interests of other classes, the maintenance of the imperial clan’s authority rested on its ability to suppress the people. To put it simply this meant terror as a way of control. The Ming rulers “needed to create a special organization which created the atmosphere of terror and needed special prisons, special secret police to spy on every suspicious person and suspicious official.” He observed that imperial control and suppression of political and religious thought was begun in the reign of the first Ming emperor, Ming Taizu, and continued.46 Throughout the dynasty, the guard, as well as the court, was used to control unorthodox writings. In the waning years of the dynasty the powerful, corrupt eunuch, Wei Zhongxian destroyed the dissenting reform officials in the Donglin Party. Power in the polity, the subject of this article of Wu’s about the Ming methods of terror was part of the intense contemporary discourse among intellectuals and leaders in the 1930s. In fact, he was working on the subject during the public discussion on democracy and autocracy between his two professors, Jiang Tingfu and Hu Shi, in The Independent Critic.47 Their debate was part of a wider public discussion on the relevance of totalitarianism for China. Widespread interest in the discourse on autocratic political power and its means sprang directly from recognition of the continued weakness and fragmentation of the Chinese state under the Nationalist regime. The persistence of powerful warlords, and the existence of the Chinese Communist Soviet in Kiangsu on the one hand and on the other the threatening Japanese encroachments during the previous three years, as well as the Fujian Rebellion in 1933—all were understood as threats to the attainment of state stability.48 In the midst of this debate over the kind of political leadership the country needed in this dire situation, Wu’s study of the issue of Ming suppression of opposition and heterodoxy placed him within the parameters of the

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discourse. He was unquestionably opposed to the excesses of the terrorist methods of Ming autocracy and to the restriction of thought. But it is worth noting, Wu does not oppose the exercise of autocratic imperial rule itself. Working in the unstable atmosphere of the 1930s, he seems to have recognized the need for security. Zhu Yuanzhang in the Ming, he points out, was unable to count on firm support from the people. Wu makes no argument against the intrinsic legitimacy of the autocratic ruler’s power, nor against the legitimate role of the officials in the polity, but he uses the horror of the tortures inflicted on the officials to speak against the abuses of autocratic rule. For him it was uncontrolled, corrupted autocracy that didn’t work for the Ming, not autocratic power itself. Even though Wu Han did not participate directly in the debate in the Independent Critic, he entered the broad public discourse on totalitarianism with his historical essays. In Hu Shi’s idealist’s view, during the long expanse of Chinese history, despite Qin totalitarianism, government by nonaction (wuwei) in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy had prevailed. On the contrary the realist, Jiang Tingfu, advocated the intentional establishment of dictatorship in present China as a step to achieve national unification. Thus Jiang addressed the immediate problem of political disorder, particularly the destabilizing nature of the warlords who still controlled large sections of China in the mid-1930s. According to Jiang, without a unifying dictatorship first, a true revolution of national reconstruction could not happen.49 Wu Han’s independent point of view published simultaneously with the Hu/Jiang debate, brings into question the validity of both Jiang’s and Hu’s extreme positions, although he doesn’t directly confront either view. That is, when these Ming events Wu discusses are considered, we see that Hu Shi seems unrealistic in claiming China’s past governments behavior as “nonaction,” and Jiang does not confront the terrible question of totalitarian power’s excesses and abuses which Wu Han demonstrates in his historical exposition of the Ming to have existed in abundance. Whatever Wu thought of the debate between his mentors in the Independent Critic, in his own paper he participated in the broader discourse on autocracy without making explicit links between past and present. This was precisely the idea behind the writing of New History; it ought to provide perspective but not prescriptions, for the present through analysis of historical example. Wu followed his article on the Ming secret police with a stream of papers opening historical study on many other issues in the Ming period: after the article discussed above on the Nuzhen leader he published “Ming Chengzu’s Natural Mother”; “The Revolt of the Prince of Yan and the Movement of the Capital to Peking”; “Peasants in the Ming”; “China and the South Sea Islands before the Sixteenth Century”; “The Collapse of the Weisuo System at the Beginning of the Ming Dynasty”; “Flogging in Court”; “Society in the Yuan Dynasty”; “The Collapse of the Yuan Dynasty and Founding of the

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Ming.”50 From the first article to the last, in less than a year Wu had published seven major papers in Yuan Ming social and political history. But that wasn’t all. In addition, under Wu’s editorship the first issue of the Historical Research Association’s bimonthly publication Shixue, the Historical Studies supplement, had finally been launched in the elite Tianjin (Tientsin) newspaper, the Tianjin Yishi bao, in April 1935. This paper had a readership far beyond North China. He was kept busy finding historians to write for the Supplement and editing the articles. At the annual meeting of the Historical Research Association in the summer of 1935 he read his own paper on “Ming Chengzu’s Natural Mother.” Xia Nai, Wu’s close friend who became a well-known archeologist, had returned from the Shang dynasty archeological diggings at Anyang in central China in the early summer and attended the association meeting. 51 Xia remembered years later that at that time the Japanese, having set up the deposed Qing heir Puyi as the puppet emperor of Manzhouguo in the three Northeastern provinces, already were aggressively extending their control right up to the former Qing capital, thereby creating a tense, threatening atmosphere in Beiping. At the association annual meeting everyone was “sad and anxious.” When the meeting closed, Xia remembered that as he shook hands with Wu Han and said good-bye: “neither knew when the next annual meeting of the association would be but they guessed it wouldn’t be in Beiping.”52 That was the spring of 1935. However, the association continued publishing the biweekly Shixue supplement in the Tianjin Yishi bao for two more years until May 1937, and the people in the group were still living in Beiping. In 1936 they expanded to publish also in the Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao), in the capital city of Nanjing. After the Japanese invasion compelled them to flee Beiping in 1937, they were able to resume publication in Kunming, Yunnan, when the universities relocated and reformed in the southwest. Actually, Wu’s paper on the mother of Ming Chengzu (Yongle), the third Ming emperor, was his contribution to a complicated and symbolically important academic debate with serious contemporary political overtones at the time. This contentious debate had been started earlier by Fu Sinian, and was joined by Wu Han, Li Jinhua, and Zhu Xizu over the next four years. The controversy was over the Ming Emperor Yongle’s mother’s identity and consequently the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. The four historians divided into two camps with Wu Han supporting Fu Sinian. The key question at the core of the controversy was whether Yongle’s birth mother was a Mongol or a Han. 53 Although this issue couldn’t be resolved in this debate, there was another level of significance to the argument. The possibility of Mongol blood being a part of the Ming imperial family background introduced national and international implications. While on the surface the debate seemed to have the character of “putting in order the national history” or guoxue, the controversial questions of the purity of Han national identity and

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the content of Chinese culture in a multiethnic society were far-reaching. These were controversial issues in the mid-1930s political climate when Great Hanism was the theme of the Nationalist Party government. If, as Fu Sinian and Wu Han claimed, the third emperor’s mother was not Han, the purity of the Ming line could be questioned, a direct challenge to those latter day Ming loyalists and Han nationalists who upheld the Ming as the last true example of Han purity. IDEAS IN NEW HISTORY AND THE RISE OF THE MING STATE Among the most important of Wu Han’s works on the Ming were several on the dynasty’s rise and consolidation of power. In “The Jingnan Campaign in the Ming Dynasty and the Movement of the Capital to the North,” it was the problem of location of the new dynasty’s capital that he focused on.54 The first ruler, Zhu Yuanzhang or Ming Gaozu, had chosen to establish the capital at the center of the realm, in Nanjing on the banks of the Yangtze River. However, the third emperor, Yongle, known as the Prince of Yan because his territorial base was in Yan in the north of China in the area of the present-day Beijing, chose to move the capital from Nanjing (Southern Capital) to the north and call it Beijing (Northern Capital). This had actually been the location of the previous Yuan dynasty capital. In Wu Han’s view the capital’s geographical location was the key to the broad issue of the control of state power by the Ming rulers. Placing the concept of spatial control in the Ming polity at the center of his essay in this way pointed to the centrality of space in Chinese political theory.55 For Zhu Yuanzhang, coming from an unorthodox background as a peasant vagrant and an outsider to the world of orthodox power, there were crucial factors in locating his capital. Wu identified many of the major problems of the Ming state: the location of the political center and its relation to the economy and defense, external threats to the polity’s security from beyond the borders, the establishment of legitimacy by a former insurgent, nonelite ruler and the accompanying problems of the secure establishment of his dynastic house and the loyalty of his descendants to his founding policies, the relationship of the ruler to his ministers, and the source of opposition to court policies. All of these Wu hung on the framework of the spatial location of the capital in relation to the ruler and his policies. There was an outline here in Wu’s discussion of these issues for a major work on the Ming period. ANALYZING MING SOCIETY: CREATING A SOCIAL HISTORY COURSE The broad society was a major focus in Wu Han’s Ming studies. The publication of “The Social Background of Late Ming Bandits,” and “Peasants in the

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Ming Dynasty,” together with an earlier paper on the life of the late Ming elite provides a general idea of his view of Ming social structure.56 A major theme in his work is the tension between the needs of the peasants and the demands on the peasants by the upper classes. The peasants’ dissatisfaction wrecked the political equilibrium. Their exploitation and oppression by the upper classes, the imperial court, central government officials, local officials, gentry landlords, even the yamen runners, left the peasants with only one way out—to flee, to become migrants. In his view, land distribution was the basis of the peasants’ problems. The inequitable distribution of taxes put the tax burden mostly on the poorer peasants with natural disasters increasing the suffering. To escape inequitable taxes often the only solution was to migrate. Their strategy was to leave their old land, find virgin land, leave behind the heavy tax burden and government control, and become free farmers. However, the landlords and government officials did not want the peasants to flee from their control because they relied on the peasants’ labor. As a result of ever more unbalanced land distribution and the desperate conditions among the peasants several large peasant rebellions destabilized the Ming and led to its downfall. His essay on Ming peasants was followed immediately by “Society in the Yuan Dynasty” finished on the eve of the December Ninth student movement in Beiping. But Wu was much too busy tracing the condition of the Yuan peasants and the fall of the Yuan dynasty to participate in the demonstrations as he worked on the next essay, “The Collapse of the Yuan Empire and the Founding of the Ming” on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1935.57 While his friends and his brother were out on the streets demonstrating against the government, he was totally wrapped up in dealing with the social reasons for the fracture and collapse of the Yuan polity. This outpouring of social history in Wu’s published research was stimulated by the Ming social history course he was preparing to teach the following year at Qinghua. With no available published monographs to turn to for Ming social history, not only must he prepare his lectures, but first he had to do the research and analysis from which the synthesis of Ming social history that would be the core of the course could be drawn. Thus Wu was creating the course from his own original analysis of the society and politics in the Yuan-Ming–early Qing era. The outline of his course can be drawn out of the works he published. The basis of the preceding Yuan social structure, the collapse of Yuan dynastic rule and the effect of this on Yuan society and on the founding of the Ming, the collapse of the Yuan military colony system, the elite society which developed in the Ming, the Ming peasant class, and later studies on Ming artisans, on weaving factories—these all became elements of his course on Ming social history. Undoubtedly, Wu saw in the era of collapse of the Yuan empire and the rise of the Ming a situation analogous to the era he was living in.58 His choice of the phrase “national revolution” (minzu geming) to characterize

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this era was inspired by the political conditions of the 1930s in which he was living and writing. After twenty years of conflict during the collapse of the Yuan rule, the ruled were finally united by a strong revolutionary leader, Zhu Yuanzhang, and drove the foreign Mongol rulers out. “Zhu Yuanzhang very clearly advocated national liberation as the purpose of this revolution. The Han must be governed by Han. This obvious change stimulated national revenge for the exploitation and oppression of over a hundred years.” Intellectuals, commoners, and landlords all supported Zhu Yuanzhang’s mission and “in ten years (he) . . . liberated all of the Han from the iron rule of the Mongols.” But beyond the issue of national identity there was another side to the early Ming period because “hidden class consciousness (jieji yishi) divided the masses (qunzhong) into two parts.” From the perspective of national revolution it seemed successful, yet since the economic and social organization in society hadn’t changed, there was the continuing land distribution problem. In his words: “The background reasons for the occurrence of the revolution and the social symptoms pointed to at the beginning were neglected. It was a serious failure that they were unable to find a thorough solution to the essential land problem.”59 National revolution wasn’t a simple panacea—the national revolution had failed to carry through on its promises of a better life because the most powerful of those supporters, once they were successful, assumed the role of a new aristocracy, perpetuating the problems of the old society. Wu Han’s persistent focus on land distribution as the fundamental problem is consistent with Sun Yatsen’s idea of “land to the people” as the basic problem in Chinese society. On the other hand Wu’s view on land distribution was contrary to Marxist theory which insists that the peasant’s access to land is determined by particular social relationships, and the peasant’s participation in economic and social life basically depends on the fixed features of the social formation and of the class struggle within that social formation.60

JAPANESE AGGRESSION AND THE CRISIS IN THE UNIVERSITIES While Wu was wrapped in Ming history, North China was under increasing pressure from the Japanese pursuing their imperialist ambitions. After grabbing Manchuria in 1931 and establishing the puppet state of Manzhouguo in 1933 in the three northern provinces of China, Japan commenced to extend its influence south of the Great Wall. By the next spring, the deposed Qing dynasty heir had been enthroned by the Japanese as the puppet emperor. This move was buttressed by the claim that Manzhouguo was a spontaneous free development of the Manchu’s. This was followed in the summer of 1935 by another aggressive push into the heart of North China—into the Tianjin-Beiping region. At this, Chiang Kai-shek, convinced that the

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Republic of China was too weak to face the Japanese, from his own capital of Nanjing in central China directed his emissaries to negotiate a modus vivendi with the Japanese. The resulting Ho-Umetsu Agreement of 6 July 1935 deeply shocked the people in Beiping by providing for the withdrawal of Chinese Nationalist government political authority and military forces from the region and for the suppression of anti-Japanese activities. To those who lived in Beiping their own government had traitorously succumbed to the Japanese demands without a fight. Japanese troop movements and overflights of bombers brought home to the anxious people living in Beiping the threatening presence of Japan in their homeland right on their doorstep.61 That summer of 1935 when the Historical Research Association met in its annual meeting, among the young New History scholars gathering to hear their colleagues give and discuss papers, the talk was of impending disaster. The year before Qinghua president Mei Yiqi had told the students and teachers at the beginning of the fall term that “we must all knuckle down to work and apply ourselves with all our might to study for the day when we wipe clear our nation’s shame.”62 But for the young scholars in the association there was no need to urge them to work hard in research. The writings of Luo Ergang and Wu Han’s prefaces to work Luo published show an ardent belief in the importance of their writing China’s history.63 Among the New History group little time was spent on discussing Western culture; nor was there any special antipathy toward Western culture. Matter-of-factly accepting what they saw of the West, they read the Western books that were available but didn’t particularly yearn for or magnify the relevance of Western culture. None of them shared the orientation of the earlier May Fourth Western worshipers who Wu had ridiculed when he first came to the Yanjing and Qinghua campuses. In the 1930s these young historians were too busy drawing on ideas from many different places in the world in writing the “new history “ of China to fawn over an idea or fashion simply because it came from the West.64

DECLARING CHINA’S “MAINSTREAM CULTURE” Despite the Japanese threat in North China in the mid-1930s, the Beiping academic atmosphere had a lively ambience. Convinced of the need to refocus the perspective of current thought on their own Chinese culture, a number of senior professors in Beiping who had become alarmed at what they saw as excessive fascination with Western thought and objects formed a group and drew up a manifesto, “A Declaration on the Construction of China’s Mainstream Culture” in 1935.65 The aim of the “Ten Professors,” as this group was known, was very close to the aim of the cohort of young historians around Wu Han who held the fervent desire to write the history of the country for the modern China that was emerging from the dynastic

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state of the past. Both of these groups were intent on creating a dynamic new synthesis for the present and future based on China’s past culture and history. From their perspective, China and its people needed knowledge of their past and cultural heritage to live in the future. One of the principal leaders of the “Ten Professors” group was He Bingsong, a student of Hu Shi’s, who had been a student of Robinson’s while he was at Columbia. He had translated some of the Western New History works on methodology and theory into Chinese. After the “Ten Professors” manifesto was circulated Hu Shi, inveterate promoter of Westernization for China, published an article loudly disagreeing with them.66 Hu’s assumption was that Chinese learning was tied to and limited by the past. For him it was difficult to perceive China’s capacity to absorb culture, to see that there were a variety of ways that Chinese and Western culture could combine. He also did not grasp that the ground of the discourse on tradition, modernity, and Westernization had begun to change in the course of the late 1920s and 1930s in the post–May Fourth era. In the face of criticism of his ideas on “complete Westernization” Hu had dropped the slogan, but he continued to think that China was dead and needed an infusion from outside, specifically from American/Western European culture. Hu Shi’s thinking expressed Western oriented cosmopolitan ideas fashionable among the internationalist liberal elite in the West, thought which had assumptions of intellectual imperialism or hegemony. The “Ten Professors” and those who agreed with them were speaking for a China-centered culture, but not one that represented conservative reactionaries or xenophobes. Furthermore, the last thing they wanted was to see China walled off from the rest of the world. They had all been influenced by Dewey and the pragmatists, some of them perhaps at a deeper level than Hu Shi. Their position was that Chinese culture must have integrity that grew from China’s own situation, not simply echoing or adopting other cultures. In the contemporary scene, when there was so much veneer from the West they feared this integrity was lacking. To a great extent this was what Wu’s friend, Zhang Yinlin, was expressing when he turned away from exclusive study of Western thought to delve into Chinese history after returning from study at Stanford University. He was not turning away from Western thought per se but wanted to absorb it fully into modern Chinese historical understanding. The poet Wen Yiduo, who later became Wu Han’s close friend and fellow activist in Kunming went through a similar, even more intense, transformation when he returned from the United States.

ON THE SIDELINES OF THE DECEMBER NINTH MOVEMENT While Wu was immersed in teaching and research, North China was rent by patriotic reaction to Japanese pressure. The university world, already appre-

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hensive about China’s future as a stable sovereign state, was shaken out of its deceptive calm by what came to be called the December Ninth Movement in the fall of 1935. The Japanese presence around Beiping had made the students realize that North China might soon become another Manzhouguo. At Yanjing University, not far from the Qinghua campus, there was a hotbed of student organizing.67 Beyond the immediate fear of Japan, in a wider sense the December Ninth Movement was part of the extended discourse on autocracy in the Chinese polity which Wu Han was participating in with his research on the Ming. Once again the students demonstrating turned to collecting signatures on petitions to the national government at Nanjing. In the first lines of one petition the students’ fear of the threat of autocracy in the modern Chinese state was forcefully voiced: The Chinese people have been suffering from autocracy over a long period of time. Since the establishment of the Republic, since the change in the form of government, the citizen has been given first place. We, the people, have welcomed this, considering it our emancipation. But because of the maneuvers of the politicians, the fighting of the militarists, and the aggravation of the situation by the Imperialist intrigues, in the last decade or so we have had no peace and the sufferings of the people have been as in the past.68

The students invoked the symbolic image of the Qin dynasty emperor Qin Shihuang’s suppression of literature and the scholarly elite—the “burning of books and burying of scholars”—more than 2,000 years before to convey their apprehension over the present Nationalist regime’s policy of repressive censorship. Those in the December Ninth National Salvation Movement were convinced that the censorship was weakening the country’s will to oppose the Japanese. The petition demanded that “the spirit of the Provisional Laws be respected and the rights of free speech, press, assembly, and association be put into effect and the illegal arrest of students be stopped” by the Guomindang Central Committee.69 On December 9, 2000, college and high school students demonstrated in response to the Japanese creation of the East Hebei Autonomous Council with a puppet chairman. Hebei is the north China province surrounding the capitol city district of Beiping. Half of the December Ninth demonstrators came from Qinghua and Yanjing Universities located beyond the city walls on the northwest of the city in the village of Haidian; the others were from Beijing University and other schools inside the city walls. Columns of students from Qinghua and Yanjing marched toward the city center to protest at the local Chinese general’s headquarters only to be met by police and locked city gates. Finally, after penetrating the city walls the demonstrators were scattered by police near the Legation Quarter in the center of the city not far from Tiananmen.

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Wu Han didn’t join in the students’ mobilization efforts to influence government policy. However, his younger brother Chunxi, by now a student at Qinghua in the economics department, was a real activist. He was also a good friend of Chunhan’s radical friend Qian Jiaju. Chunxi was idealistic and patriotic. Both Chunxi and his wife, Ye Meiying, took part in the December Ninth demonstrations. He soon joined the patriotic group Minxian, the National Liberation Vanguard.70 The Vanguard was a part of the National Salvation Movement, and also a Communist peripheral or “front” organization, organized on Leninist, democratic centralist principles in cells of three to five people supposedly with no horizontal relations to other cells. In these days the Qinghua campus was excited—politicized and tense. Generally less Americanized and more nationalist oriented than the neighboring, American founded Yanjing University, it soon became a center for mobilizing the December Ninth agitation. This meant more conflict between students and police. In spite of this tense situation which he knew about from his friends and brother, Wu Han remained aloof from the campus agitation, buried in his work. Hu Shi had published an article in Dagong bao in December, just days after the first demonstration, supporting the students verbal protests, but opposing mass action.71 Hu’s idea was that in such a crisis students’ responsibility was to develop their knowledge and abilities. His article caused considerable debate and opposition from radical student leaders who made the point that “study as usual during national crisis would lead to national enslavement.”72 Surrounded by the surging event, Wu was completely buried in his heavy program of research, only taking time out to be with Yuan Zhen, with the social history course he was preparing to teach uppermost on his mind. In a very real sense Hu Shi’s influence continued to affect him. In the midst of the December Ninth agitation Qian Jiaju left for Nanjing and a new job despite already having strong ties to the National Salvation Movement. However, being in Nanjing was no handicap at all for Qian. He soon developed a close relationship with Shen Junru, leader of the National Salvation group. For Wu, his anxiety over the future, the intensity of the movement and the anti-Japanese nature of the demonstrations, all served to reinforce the urgency he felt to investigate and teach about the founding of the Ming dynastic order, the condition of the society and the nature of the Ming polity. Many of the historical issues he probed had modern analogical counterparts or were the historical antecedents of the current situation, such as the plight of the peasants and the weakness of the Ming state, the genesis of the Manchu state in predynastic Jianzhou, or the role of the elite vis-à-vis the ruler of the state. Wu Han no longer needed to write letters to Hu Shi asking what a student should do while watching his country succumb to foreign invasion. Now for him the research and writing of history had relevance to the current political situation; through his work he had the opportunity to inform and influence opinion.

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MISFORTUNE: ILLNESS, FILIALITY, AND CONFLICT Although Wu’s frenetic pace of research and writing had never wavered during the December Ninth agitation surrounding him, it came to an abrupt halt three months later in March 1936, when he was suddenly hospitalized with tuberculosis. Confined to total bed rest for five months, he had no choice but to put down his research. Luo Ergang visited him often in the Longevity Sanitarium to cheer him up and bring news of the world outside. In Zhejiang, when his mother learned of his illness she came immediately all the way from Yiwu to look after him. It was only two years before that his father had died of tuberculosis. Now she worried about her eldest son’s life. When she arrived she already knew about Chunhan’s girlfriend and had felt happy and relieved that finally he had found someone he wanted to marry. But once in the city she became very upset when she learned that Yuan Zhen had the devastating disease of tuberculosis of the bone. His mother knew there was no cure and that it was very unlikely that there could be children from such a union. Even earlier his brother Chunxi had told Wu he opposed Chunhan’s relationship with Yuan Zhen and several of his closest friends as well had advised him against this marriage.73 As for his mother, her eldest son was already twenty-seven. It was time he was married, but not to a woman who was an invalid, who might never walk again and would probably never be able to bear children. She made up her mind to stop the love affair, trying every way she could think of to break up the relationship. But although Wu Han was deeply troubled at disappointing his mother, he was completely unwilling to obey her dictates. This, of course, was not the first time he had gone completely contrary to his parents wishes. The friendship of Luo Ergang and Wu had been very close ever since Wu’s arrival in Beiping. Luo’s close relationship with Hu Shi as his assistant had helped to open the way for his friend Wu to gain Hu Shi’s mentorship. Later Wu had helped Luo and stood by him: he had gone counter to Hu Shi when Hu had frowned on Luo and refused to help him find a better job. Hu Shi, as university president, had even gone so far as to deny Luo’s request to be released from his low-paying job at Beijing University when he was offered better positions. When Luo was “sick and poor and doubted if he could continue his work,” Wu Han had encouraged him and helped by coaching him and giving him the courage to go on.74 Now Luo, who had already told Wu that he thought he should stop his relationship with Yuan Zhen, went to the hospital to see Wu and again urged him to stop seeing her. Wu lay in bed motionless, listening to Luo with his eyes closed without saying even a single word in answer. When Wu said nothing, Luo went one step further to draw a parallel between his own marriage situation and Wu’s relationship with Yuan Zhen, reproaching Wu for not taking into consideration his mother, heartbroken with grief, as he had

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done himself when his own mother had asked him to give up the woman she disapproved of whom he had loved.75 At this Wu opened his eyes and looked at Luo through tears. In a low voice he said, “Our two situations are different. The woman you knew was not sick. Yuan Zhen has a serious illness. You could follow your mother’s commands, but I cannot follow my mother’s wishes.” Luo Ergang had always assumed “Wu’s love for Yuan Zhen and his opposition to his mother was only due to his love for an exquisitely beautiful woman” but now he suddenly realized that beyond this “the most important reason that he could not follow his mother’s wishes was that Yuan Zhen’s illness meant that she needed to have someone to care for her.” He understood that Wu saw her need and wanted to be the person who cared for her, that he actually needed to be the person who cared for her. This was far more than the physical love of a man for a woman. In Luo Ergang’s words, “it was a wholly honorable decision based on morality and justice in a human relationship, it was his completely honest upright conduct.” In this paradoxical situation one morality was pitted against another, forcing Wu to go contrary either to his filial duty to his mother and family or his sense of devotion and commitment to the person he loved and to the modern values of equality and freedom. In Wu’s relationship to the woman he loved there was a very real parallel to the hero, Wen Suchen, in his favorite boyhood novel, Yesou puyan (A Rustic Talent’s Idle Talk). This insight was shared with the present writer by Wu’s very close boyhood friend, Qian Jiaju. Wen needed to care for the intellectually brilliant, but dependent woman whom he loved.76 The essence of the each man’s relationship with the woman in his life was intimate companionship of a spiritual, not merely physical, nature. This was the nature of Wu’s relationship with Yuan Zhen. As the doctors let Wu begin to move about, Wu’s mother went home to Zhejiang thwarted and despairing, without a promise from her son. In a few months Chunhan was out of the TB sanitarium and back on his feet, able to work and spend time every week with Yuan Zhen.

LUO ERGANG AND “TIME, PLACE, AND MAN” Despite the increasing tension from the national insecurity, these were very fruitful times for Wu Han’s friend Luo Ergang also. His pioneering research on the nineteenth-century Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was beginning to bear important results—he had finished two manuscripts in the project. While Wu was still in the hospital Luo had brought to him the manuscripts for his Research Notes on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Outline History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and asked Wu to write prefaces for both.77 Wu used his preface to Luo’s Outline History to discuss the nature of the historians relationship to his contemporary situation and its effect on his-

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torical writing. For Wu the most essential conditions for the production of a good historical work are “time, place, and man”; that is, the historian and the spatial and temporal context in which he writes. This was an important contribution Wu Han made to the understanding of the nature of good historical writing. Beyond the “talent, study, knowledge, and integrity” required traditionally of the historian, Wu insisted on the importance of the subjectivity of a good historical work when he wrote about the relevance of the context of the time and place in which the history is written. Here he was expanding on the ideas about the importance of the context of the historical subject that he had discussed in his critique of Takakuwa Komakichi’s cultural history two years before. Wu had come to recognize the subjectivity of all historical writing. From his own research on the Ming period, working as he was just after the Qing control over Ming history had been broken, he knew the importance of time and place in determining the historian’s capacity to accomplish his task. Likewise, the writing of a history of the Taipings, due to the attitude and control of the Qing dynasty had awaited a later time to be freely written because of the necessity of free access to local historical sources and of understanding of the geographical area. Writing as he did during a period in which the Taipings were no longer considered evil, and having been born himself in the area where the movement arose, Luo had both. When Wu says, “the ideal writers of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history ought to be Liangguang people, especially those scholars who came from the place where the Taiping army arose,”78 he is arguing, not so much for the particularity of the historian, as the idea that the more intimate the historian’s knowledge of the locale, the better his understanding of the indigenous society at every level. Although Wu doesn’t use the term “culture” here, there is a definite ethnographic, anthropological implication in his argument.79 Both Wu and Luo were familiar with Gu Jiegang’s research in historical geography and minority ethnic groups. Gu Jiegang was leading his students into the field to tramp the fields and hills and deserts to understand the geographic locale of human events.80 The counterpart of this in historical studies was the kind of local knowledge that contributed to Luo’s successful history of the Taipings. As Wu well understood from his own childhood experience listening to local legends of historical Ming figures like Qi Jiguang in his home area, Luo’s childhood hours spent listening to the elders’ legendary tales of the Taipings was an invaluable aid to interpreting the period. Another interesting aspect of Luo Ergang’s Outline History of the Taipings was, according to Wu, this outline history published at the urging of Luo’s friends in the History Research Association was to be the first volume in the general history series the group was planning.81 There was an unexpected sequel to the publication of Luo’s Outline History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In the spring of 1937, together Luo and Wu stopped to visit Hu Shi at Beijing University, soon after Luo had sent

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him a copy of the newly published Outline History. The visit was described in Hu’s diary. When they arrived Hu launched into sharp criticism of Luo’s revisionist history, telling him he found it too subjective because it presented the favorable side of the Taipings and left out the chaos that they had created.82 In his diary Hu cryptically noted for the day that Luo was mistaken in his assessment that the May Fourth Movement had been influenced by the new cultural movement of popular literature advocated by the Taipings. However, in fact Hu Shi’s negative view of the Outline History was not shared by other critics. Soon after publication it was honored by the “Readers Supplement” in Dagong bao as “one of the great works which cover the conditions of time, place and people.” Several other periodicals commented favorably and recommended the book.83 The necessity of taking the specifics of the time, the place and the people into consideration in writing history in order to provide a full view of what conditioned the stream of events was well understood by the commentators. The special attribute of Luo’s book which Wu Han had praised in the preface—the cultural insight that comes to those who are familiar with a locale—Hu Shi ignored and for good reason. This idea Wu was praising was contradictory to Hu’s own opinion that China did not need to look to its own culture but would benefit from spending its energy to know and absorb worldwide universal (Western) culture. Luo’s New History historical materialist perspective focusing on emphasizing the indigenous social, economic, historical, and geographic causes of the Taiping uprising itself Hu Shi viewed as distorted. In his criticism, Hu did not take into consideration that it had never been Luo’s purpose to write on the broad sweep of the Qing and on the Taiping’s place in the Qing firmament from the Qing viewpoint. Rather Luo was giving a broad view of the “crucial facts” of the Taiping movement itself as it had occurred in its context as a part of the Chinese experience. He aimed to present a more comprehensive picture of the many sided rebellion than had been available previously. In his Outline History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Luo had set out to fill in this historical gap kept empty even until then by the after-effects of Qing control of the archives and of written history. In Luo’s polite, but rather sardonic phrasing he described that his teacher, Hu Shi’s “regular instruction was that you make conclusions on the basis of corresponding evidence. One conclusion on one piece of evidence, three conclusions on three pieces of evidence.”84 But this kind of exclusive emphasis on rigorous evidential research which puts amassing evidence as the defining factor in the writing of history meant the need to comprehend and analyze the complexity of the context and the subjectivity of the historical point of view, of the historical process was not only de-emphasized, but was not even really possible. Hu Shi’s recommendation for the practice of history increasingly seemed an exercise that could not serve the need of the times

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to analyze events in the past and in the present that were directly related to current rapid change and to complex subjectivity.85 Another issue was also motivating Hu Shi’s negative assessment of Luo Ergang’s work. Hu indicated to Luo that he thought Luo’s history of the Taiping could be used to agitate revolution. This insinuation bothered Luo greatly, especially since Hu implied this was bad scholarship. Hu’s critical reaction to Luo’s work in this instance in 1937 prefigured his rebuff later of his student Wu Han and his work in the 1940s, as Wu began to link the practice of history with contemporary political themes. In his stance, Hu simply ignored the reality that history had from long in the past been used in China as an instrument of social control and that in fact he was himself attempting to insure that history would not encourage certain ideas or movements by what he said to his students, Luo Ergang and Wu Han. In the premodern histories the forces that had challenged the orthodox power holders had always been characterized as heterodox, as bandits, disrupters of order, and such types. In fact, Hu Shi’s own standards concealed a political agenda that opposed rapid social and political change. During this time Wu Han had been trying to help Luo Ergang with his job situation. Luo’s salary was low and his work heavy in his research position at Beijing University. Many of their friends like Tao Menghe, Liang Fangzhong, Tang Xianglong, and even the senior scholars Jiang Tingfu and Feng Youlan, tried to help Luo, well known as a talented historian, find a better position. Wu found an excellent position at Qinghua for him teaching the courses Jiang Tingfu had taught before he left the University to take a position in the Guomindang government. Inexplicably, Hu Shi refused to release Luo from his position at Beijing University. These people who were trying to help him became angry with Hu Shi for mistreating Luo; within days his predicament became the talk of academic circles. After being offered positions at three of the most important research institutions in China, Luo was told by Hu Shi that he wouldn’t let him go because Luo Ergang wouldn’t be able to do a good job at these institutions and would fail.86 Under Hu’s control as he was Luo was helpless, there was nothing he could do. Finally, a year later Hu Shi allowed him to transfer to the Central Research Institute after Luo had gotten the work in the Beijing University Archeology Office going smoothly. Apparently Hu Shi thought Luo would be unable to survive beyond his own paternalistic shadow. It also seems probable that he didn’t want to lose a good assistant. No matter how unreasonable and unfair Hu was toward a rising, young scholar, national events were soon to push all of them into the situation of having to survive without this kind of dependent-exploitative student-teacher clientilist relation.87 Although Wu maintained a close relationship with his teacher Hu Shi without being intimidated by Hu’s attitude, he continued to help his friend Luo Ergang for years to come.

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WU HAN, ZHANG YINLIN, AND GENERAL HISTORY EDUCATION During these years at Qinghua, Wu and Zhang Yinlin began to collaborate on planning a long-term project writing history. In thinking of constructing a Chinese history to meet the needs of people in the present and future, they were talking about a New History, new in content and writing style. They would call it a Chinese tongshi (general history), the name that had been given to the traditional genre of history that was thought to provide a holistic understanding of past events over long periods of time in the world of dynastic rule and Confucian orthodoxy. The best-known example of the past form of tongshi was the Zi zhi tong jian of Sima Guang (1019–1086). But in the modern era, implicit in the word tongshi, as they used it for the new genre that historians were creating, was the idea of a general history of historical events involving the breadth of Chinese society with its changes over time, situated in a global world. In Wu’s thinking, specialized essays such as he was writing on the Ming period—the building blocks of history, were the beginning. He wanted to go beyond these elements and construct a history that would bring the parts together in a whole narrative.88 Wu’s assumption was that general history would be for the broad readership of the expanding literate public, not only for the ruling and scholar-literati classes. It would educate the people about the past of their culture, about the country of China. There was no genre in traditional historiography that accomplished this or even aimed to do it. Zhang Yinlin was also thinking along this line when they first met. In 1935, Zhang had been asked to write a general history of China for middle schools by the Ministry of Education. While studying in America, he had turned to think more and more about China’s culture and history. Although he was studying Western philosophy at Stanford University he had sent several articles on Chinese culture and history back to be published to China. By the time he returned home to teach he had reached the decision to specialize in Song history. The current situation of rapid social change and political instability in China had convinced him that simply reordering China’s history, as Hu Shi aimed to do, was not enough. The past must also be analyzed and synthesized and made more accessible to the people. A national history (guoshi) must be written. It seemed as though his work at Stanford in Western thought had been preparation for this.89 About the time Wu came to know him Zhang had begun to consider how such a history might be organized. When the Ministry of Education asked him to be the chief editor for an Outline History of China for upper middle school students, Zhang asked Wu Han to join the project. Their first step was to make a plan for the work that divided the long duration of the Chinese past into specialized topics. The next step was to divide the work of writing. The first volume that would go to the end of the Han period Zhang would write himself. Although its not clear who would do the period from the

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Han through the Tang, we can assume it would be Zhang. Wu Han would write the section after the Tang. Other experts were invited to handle special topics: Qian Jiaju would do the social changes after the Opium War, Wang Yunsheng the Sino-Japanese War, and so on. Although never completed, in the final step the plan was that all of the sections would be combined into a whole general history. Their aim was for a readable and objective narrative to familiarize the reader with China’s history. Zhang finished writing the first section in two years.90 While making these plans for the general history the two talked over the whole history curriculum in the elementary and secondary schools. Their conclusion was that it was flawed. China had a national curriculum prescribed by the Guomindang Ministry of Education at this time. Thus, discussing the school history curriculum involved considering the public arena where politics was a factor and often exercised control. This was very different from the academic publishing sphere they both were familiar with. Together, they critiqued the past design of historical education pedagogy and developed a new comprehensive plan for teaching Chinese history in the schools. From their perspective there was a basic problem with the existing curriculum—the problem was repetition of the same historical content over and over again, returned to at each level as the child advanced in grades of school. It was Wu’s and Zhang’s idea that if people were to understand their culture, the contents of the history texts for each period needed to be basically changed: the arrangement of the curriculum should take into consideration the youth and their interests according to their age. Elementary school history should put people in the center with selected figures to represent the spirit of each age. Zhang thought that by using narratives of selected figures from Confucius to Sun Yatsen, the major events could be thrown into sharp relief for very young children.91 In lower middle school the major historical events should be central in the course taught, divided into two volumes, the first to tell the narrative of the Chinese nation and the achievements of the forefathers, but “eliminating the whole set of themes of Great Hanism.” This meant representing legendary culture heroes as just that, legends, and no longer treating them as having actually existed. In the second volume the narrative would be of the gradual evolution of the whole institutional system, socially, politically, and economically, the progress in life, and the mutual interconnections of the beginnings and ends of events. The third segment of the curriculum for upper middle school would take the time periods in order, summarizing, differentiating, and linking the people, places, and events. This last series would be the general history Zhang and Wu were beginning. In Wu Han’s words it was to be a “new Chinese general history to help the (people in the) nation to know themselves in this period of unprecedented change.”92 This was a curriculum based on a conception of history education and pedagogy that Wu Han completely subscribed to. He had formulated his

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ideas on cultural history and general history earlier at the time he was writing his review of the Japanese Takakuwa’s cultural history of China in 1934. Now in the discussion of the development of this curriculum with Zhang he was able for the first time to actually work out how Chinese history would be organized in a pedagogical situation. The general history course which Wu Han would soon be teaching at Yunnan University and later at Southwest Associated University in Kunming incorporated this approach to history education. By 1937 Zhang had almost finished writing the first volume of the upper middle school series, but their situation in Beiping was to change suddenly. In July after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident when fighting erupted outside the city, Zhang panicked and frightened, fled the city in a rush to leave before the Japanese shut off movement. In his fear he left behind with Wu Han the manuscript of his book along with his other papers.

GU JIEGANG AND THE YUGONG SOCIETY In the mid-1930s a society of historical geography, the Yugong Society, was organized by Gu Jiegang and some of the people around him. In the 1920s Gu’s interest in folk customs (minsu) had grown from his thinking about early culture while he was teaching the classics. From this he became interested in minority ethnic groups and began to organize field study projects for his students. Out of this fieldwork he developed a course in “Changes in China’s Borderlands” and began the periodical Yugong to publish the papers of students from Yanjing, Qinghua, and Beijing universities on historical geography. Then two years later he organized the Yugong Society. This group became the focal point for historical geography in China. Among other articles, the journal Yugong published translations of Owen Lattimore’s Mongols in Manchuria and Sven Hedin’s work on Central Asia. The general aim of the Society was to study the classics that dealt with the historical political geography of China, especially the political boundaries and to carry out scientific fieldwork to learn about China’s geography through firsthand field observation. When Wu Han joined the Yugong Society Gu asked him to be the Qinghua campus representative for the journal. In an article “Southerners and Northerners” published in the Yugong journal Wu looked at the northern and southern regions of China corresponding to the river systems and discussed the past inability of political union to overcome this regionalization, especially under foreign dynasties. In Wu’s view the present unity of China was the result of modern transportation which overcame natural barriers. He concluded that consequently the differences between northerners and southerners were disappearing. 93

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Gu Jiegang, at this time, was focusing in his scholarship on understanding the scope of the past and the present through consideration of space as differentiated from time. From Gu’s study, both historically and contemporaneously, of the cultural variation among the ethnic (minzu) groups in China came the perspective on which his contributions to historical geography were based. One of his aims, according to his student, Hou Renzhi, became “the creation of an historical atlas to give an idea of how the country had been formed and developed. . . . His idea was chiefly to provide a reference work for studying Chinese history.”94 It was Gu Jiegang’s opinion that for the full understanding of China’s past, maps depicting both time and space must be drawn so that people could visualize the historical and the geographical dimensions of the past. Although Wu never formally studied as Gu’s student, he was in fact a student of Gu Jiegang’s in the true sense of learning from him. Further, the two shared their interest in popular education and in ordinary people. Wu Han, in his work on several subjects with spatial dimensions, shared Gu Jiegang’s perspective on the importance of space historically. Among these his work on the Queen Mother myths and his studies on Jianzhou and the Manchus stand out.

YUAN ZHEN: HISTORIAN During these days, whenever he could Wu spent as much time as possible with Yuan Zhen. She was the person he had come to care for the most deeply. Still confined to bed she had to rely on her sister’s care. When Wu came, the three of them often talked for hours about the political situation and about historical research issues. In later years he realized that he had been influenced by their ideas about communism. His brother too came occasionally and although Chunxi didn’t say much about his activities in the radical Minxian he belonged to, they often discussed the political situation of the country and the encroaching Japanese military pressure.95 During these months Yuan Zhen had gained enough strength to be able to begin to work on her own research. Although her close familiarity with communist thought might suggest that she would be apt to choose social or economic historical issues, she chose traditional national heroes as her subjects. All four of the men she wrote about: Yu Qian, Zong Ze, Meng Hong, and Wen Tianxiang, had resisted foreign invasion in their time and had, symbolically, represented resistance to foreign invasion for hundreds of years.96 Despite Wu’s lack of interest in political ideology and action and her own interest in communist ideology, ironically it was Yuan Zhen who was more formally traditional in her scholarship and Wu more at ease in historical social and economic issues. Methodologically, Wu Han was thoroughly

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at home synthesizing and analyzing a breadth of topics, whereas hers was an expository style stressing nationalistic themes. In his historical judgments he was generally balanced and reflective, considering the evidence and opening new territory, following no accepted pattern in his interpretation of issues. Yuan Zhen, on the other hand, tended to make judgments that affirmed stereotyped patterns. There was probably more than one reason for this. She had not had the chance to finish her studies and graduate before her illness had knocked her down. Although she was well read and knowledgeable about historical sources she hadn’t yet formulated independent historical thought. In the 1930s nationalism had become a basic issue for many intellectuals. The immediate atmosphere of their lives was dominated by the rising threat in North China of the Japanese military presence and political pressure. Even in her girlhood, Yuan Zhen had been especially patriotic in her thinking. When she and her sister had joined Dong Biwu’s group in the Hubei Girl’s School, patriotism and nationalism—the support of national unity—had seemed to attract her far more than the Marxist ideology of class struggle which her sister, Fuzhi, found most important. Wu’s open admiration for his teacher, Hu Shi, in these first years of their relationship seems to have been a thorn in Yuan Zhen’s side. Their friends remembered her gently mocking Wu’s admiration for Hu: “You bow down three feet before Hu Shi” to which Wu retorted, “Before Yuan Zhen I bow down three yards.”97 From the patriotic nationalism of her essays it seems her disapproval of Hu Shi for his support of Chiang Kai-shek’s cautious, appeasing stance toward Japan fueled her mockery of Wu’s loyalty and admiration for his teacher. Hu’s open disapproval of Communism must have also contributed to her negative opinion of him and of course she knew well of his unreasonable treatment of Luo Ergang.

OPPORTUNITY FOR ADVANCEMENT IN A FAR AWAY UNIVERSITY Wu Han’s appointment to the Qinghua History Department as a full faculty member was a rare opportunity that seldom came to new graduates. But his rapid rise promoted by Jiang Tingfu led some of the senior professors to see him as a threat. The jealousy because he taught an advanced course in Ming history was only increased by the acclaim that came to him over the work he was publishing. This tension in the department made university life difficult. His friend, Zhang Yinlin, felt the same sort of animosity, undoubtedly reinforced by his having studied at Stanford University in the United States. He had been forewarned about the situation at the university. Friends concerned about Wu and his future had warned him in advance that he was too young for Qinghua, that to be famous and to be so young at Qinghua where seniority was important would be a problem. Advancement on the

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academic ladder could be difficult in this situation. His frank, open manner coupled with the fact that his iconoclastic scholarship, rather than following in the track of the accepted premises of a senior scholar or school of thought, was opening fresh ways of thinking and making original assessments of historical issues—was a challenge to some of the older scholars on the faculty. Frustrated, he was ill at ease in the tense atmosphere when suddenly in the winter of 1936–1937, an unexpected opportunity to improve his situation opened for him. In the southwest of China a new national university was being formed at this time in the province of Yunnan. Professor Xiong Qinglai, chairman of the Qinghua University Mathematics Department, had been appointed to be the president of National Yunnan University by the national government. The Ministry of Education had asked Xiong to develop the school into a full-fledged national university. This was part of the developing national educational policy of the Guomindang government. To attract outstanding faculty to the new university in the remote southwest corner of the country, newly appointed President Xiong on leave from Qinghua, set about hiring young academics from the premier coastal universities who were well trained and brilliant and would like to have a boost in their careers. Chinese academic institutions have always been dominated by powerful elder professors who control the academic scene to reinforce their own prestige. Xiong knew firsthand that Qinghua was no exception to this hierarchical situation. When Xiong offered Wu a position as full professor at Yunnan University he explained that if he took this post he would be able to “jump over a step” at Qinghua University when he returned later to teach at the university. Happy with the opportunity Wu had asked Qinghua authorities to release him. They refused to let him go permanently from his university position, but granted a leave of absence that allowed him to teach temporarily at Yunnan University.98 Because of this invitation, even before the outbreak of war in North China in July 1937, Wu had already made plans to go to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Although no one could possibly have known with certainty what the future held, as it turned out, the later move of Qinghua University to Kunming where Wu Han was already teaching in the city was pure luck for him.

MARCO POLO BRIDGE: CRISIS IN BEIPING As anti-Japanese popular feeling surged across North China, Chiang Kaishek’s government finally began to strengthen its stand against the Japanese. During the spring of 1937 General Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army had to contend with frequent provocative thrusts by the Japanese in field maneuvers near the city, often at night with live ammunition. On 7 July, when Japanese soldiers on night maneuvers near Marco Polo Bridge twelve miles southwest of

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Beiping were fired on, fighting broke out between the two armies.99 At first, people inside the city took little notice of what seemed to be yet another incident that would fade away. But five days later gunfire could be heard even from inside the city walls. Martial law was declared and this time it began to take its toll on normal life. The great city gates in the outer wall closed, to be opened only to let farmers with food for the markets into the city. Food prices rose sharply and hoarding began. Everyone became anxious. The curfew forced people indoors by seven o’clock in the evening. Street barricades prevented free passage in the city. Within days, by 12 July, the Japanese Guandong and Korean armies were pouring into North China. The sound of artillery and rifle fire grew louder and louder, even at noon over the sound of noisy midday traffic the sounds of battle could be heard from inside the walls as the Japanese aimed to isolate Beiping by cutting the railway lines to Tianjin and to Shanghai and Hankou. Everyday there were Japanese warplanes overhead dropping propaganda leaflets. At this point Chiang Kai-shek changed—he was no longer willing to passively let the Japanese grab what they wanted. He had finally made up his mind to fight and began moving armies northward from central China. However, the city of Beiping was not to be the place were Chiang would dig in to resist. Because it was China’s historic “museum-city” the Chinese troops withdrew, marching out of the northern and northwestern gates of the city at two o’clock in the morning of 29 July, to do battle with the enemy in the surrounding areas.100 Since no Japanese army units had yet entered the city, it was difficult for those inside the city to comprehend that, in fact, Beiping had fallen, and even more difficult for them to know what to do. There were frantic streams of refugees everywhere; some were trying to leave to return to their villages, some trying to get into the city away from the fighting in the surrounding countryside. Beyond the city walls the two armies engaged with horrible bloodshed. A fierce battle was fought near the Summer Palace, not far from Qinghua University, outside of the city wall. Here units of the Chinese army made a last stand. On 8 August the Japanese army formally entered the city parading down the streets with troops, trucks, and tanks. The atmosphere inside the city walls was sullen hostility and on the Qinghua and Yanjing University campuses outside the walls there was despair.

QINGHUA: REFUGEES FROM WAR Qinghua had just begun summer vacation when the Marco Polo Bridge encounter occurred. Many of the students were in the Western Hills Miaofeng Shan region doing their military training. Most of the faculty was still on the university campus. By the time the Japanese occupied the city the long-

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range need to plan for the evacuation of the universities to safer locations had been faced by the national government. Orders had been given to faculty and students at Qinghua to move south into central China and plans, actually begun some time before by the Qinghua leadership itself, had been put into action. Some of the scientific equipment had already been shipped to Hankou. On 29 July when Beiping was occupied by the Japanese army the students and teachers began to move inside the city walls for protection from the battle raging in the countryside. The campus could not be protected, located as it was in the countryside, several miles beyond the city walls. The buildings and library were abandoned to the occupiers. After the Japanese entered the city the Chinese Ministry of Education ordered Qinghua, Beijing University, and Nankai University in Tianjin to form a temporary united university to be located in Changsha, in central China.101 The evacuation to the city of Changsha was soon begun and Qinghua president Mei Yiqi left for Changsha to make arrangements for the school’s arrival. With the help of the Qinghua student associations in Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hankou faculty and students undertook the long arduous overland move to the south. By October 1937, the Associated University in Changsha had been opened.102 The university campus in the countryside outside of Beiping was empty. To passersby it seemed to be abandoned, although a Qinghua protection association remained to guard it.103 In September the Japanese entered the university campus, wantonly seizing the library and equipment. In a few months Japanese troops were quartered in the buildings and the university protection group driven away leaving the campus completely at the mercy of its Japanese occupiers for the next eight years.104 Wu Han did not leave Beiping until late summer. The campus was deserted. His new job at Yunnan University waited for him in Kunming but it was difficult to arrange to leave in the midst of the collapse of the city and the fighting in the countryside. For him there were many complications to leaving. His life at Qinghua had been a period of great energy and intellectual excitement as the world opened out ahead of him with great promise of important historical studies to come. He had a multitude of projects underway at various stages of research, among them: the compilation of excerpts from the Korean Shilu, plans to write a history of Jianzhou already sketched out in two articles, collaboration with Zhang Yinlin on the general history project, planning for a history of the Ming period, and not least continuation of taking part as a leading member in the Historical Research Association and the association’s publishing, not to mention his university teaching obligations. How difficult sustaining solid historical research in the Southwest without adequate libraries and archival collections he could not even imagine.

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And there was Yuan Zhen; Wu was deeply concerned about what would become of her when he left Beiping. Because she was still unable to stand, much less to travel, when he left it was without any certain plan of how they would come together again. For the present, she was going to stay on in Beiping with her sisters, Fuzhi and Xizhi, both of whom had been members of the Communist Party. This was a great worry as it would expose them to real danger under the Japanese occupation of the city. If their records as Communists were discovered by the Japanese it would be very difficult for them. Another anxiety for Wu was his friend, Luo Ergang, who was suffering from neurasthenia during the Japanese invasion. Because he feared that Luo could not endure the tension of the enemy occupation without help, when he and his brother Chunxi and his cousin left the city on the first leg of the trip by way of Tianjin, Wu arranged to take both Luo and his eldest son along. The two Wu brothers saw to it that all of Luo’s family followed when they got as far as Tianjin.105 After making whatever arrangements could be made he left in September with Chunxi, Luo Ergang, and his cousin, Wu Bida, who had been living in Beiping since 1935 when he came from their home village in Zhejiang.106 Bida had been working at a job Wu Han had gotten for him in the Beiping library sorting out the late Qing archives, a dusty job among piles of documents. From Beiping they managed to get to Tianjin, despite the pandemonium caused by the bombing of the railroad and refugees moving in all directions. From Tianjin some went on to Yantai by boat. Shanghai, especially the crowded Chinese section of Zhabei, had come under severe attack in midAugust and the Japanese campaign in North China was spreading out in all directions, making travel to Shanghai very uncertain. After reaching Tianjin, Wu Han and his brother had no money for expenses and no one to borrow from. Hu Shi and the other teachers who might have helped Wu had already left for a meeting at Lushan to plan for the universities in the emergency. Wu Chunxi, a second-year student at Qinghua, had been out in the Western Hills at Miaofeng shan in compulsory military training when the crisis broke out. Because of the training his head was shaved. In Tianjin he was arrested by the Japanese suspecting he was a soldier. After Wu Han tried unsuccessfully to get him released from jail he was finally freed through the help of some foreigners in the Qinghua Student Association in the foreign quarter. They were helped by the Beiping Tianjin Organization for Refugee Students which was providing lodging and food for fleeing students and staff who had no money. Together, Luo Ergang and Wu continued overland to Xuzhou, in northern Jiangsu, where they separated. Luo went on to Changsha where the university was relocating and Wu took the sea route to Kunming and Yunnan University by way of Haiphong in Vietnam.107

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When he fled Beiping Wu Han left behind most of his books and a very happy, golden part of his life, a time of energy and innocence when he had graduated from the university to become one of the major young historians writing a new history for the emerging modern China. Ahead was uncertainty for himself and the nation was at war.

NOTES 1. Jiang (1931), 172–73. Qinghua presidents Luo Jialun and Mei Yiqi guided these reforms. 2. TTF, 129–34. 3. TTF, 131. BDRC, Chen Yinke entry, 259. 4. TTF, 130. Qinghua daxue xiaoshi gao, 173. 5. Qinghua daxue yilan (1935). 6. Dirlik refers to Tao as a “Marxist” historian but in an interview for this biography a contemporary of Tao’s who was a Marxist (Qian Jiaju) strenuously objected to classifying him as “Marxist.” In any case, the labeling of historians as “Marxist” is a mushy question. For example, Li Xiaolin is eager to push the labeling of various historians of the Ming as “Marxist” back indiscriminately into the 1930s and 1940s. 7. Qinghua daxue yilan (1935). 8. Dirlik (1978), 212–13 and 221–25 Dirlik discusses Tao’s “academic Marxism.” 9. Takakuwa (1925). The book was based on Takakuwa’s lectures. Liu Yizheng’s Cultural History of China was first published from his lectures serially in Xueheng (1925–1929). 10. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 434–41. 11. Liang Qichao (1922, 1930). In these two volumes of his Qinghua College lecture notes, Liang wanted to encourage historians to turn away from old Chinese historiography and learn from Western historiography, to compile monographs on special subjects and to write an overall cultural history of China. For a contemporary discussion of Liang’s importance to historiography see Su Chi [Zhang Yinlin] (1929). 12. Liu Yizheng (1935). Originally published serially in Xueheng (1929); then in 1932 as a two volume book. Chen Dengyuan (1935). 13. Wang Yunwu, ed., Zhongguo wenhua shi congshu, vol. 1 (1936). Only forty of the eighty volumes were published by the Commercial Press before the outbreak of war stopped the press. 14. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 434–35. Italics added. Wu’s ideas are similar to the Annales school. 15. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 435. 16. For the Western discussion of contextuality and cultural history see Hunt (1989); Perry (1992), 1–13. 17. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 436. 18. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 436–37. 19. Wu Han, “Li Jihuang yishu de Takakuwa Komakichi Chugoku Bunka-shi,” 436–37. In the Dali yi incident the Jiajing emperor, incensed at the open criticism of

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scholar officials, had many of them executed and beaten to death. See Ci yuan. The Donglin Party was a group of dissenting officials who attempted to warn of the decadence of the autocratic Emperor Wanli, and the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian. For their pains they were executed. These two cases have come to stand for political courage by pure officials trying to correct ineffective and unjust rulers. 20. Born 1905, died 1942 of chronic nephritis. 21. Qinghua yilan (1935). 22. He Lin (1944), 3. 23. Gu Jiegang, Gushi bian, (1927–1941), 7 vols.; Zhang’s three essays are found in vol. 2. See also Wu Han, “Ji wangyou Zhang Yinlin xiansheng (1905–1942)” written 24 October 1946, Ren wu zazhi 1, no. 11–12 (December 1946) and republished as “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” Tianjin gongbao (31 December 1946).TQJ collection used here. 24. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” TQJ, 257. 25. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” TQJ, 253–54. For Li Tao, Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian, see Wilkinson (1974), 70. 26. The Marxist historians are discussed in Dirlik (1978). Li Xiaolin and Li Shengwen (1988) make an effort to claim Wu Han, Liang Fangzhong, and so on, as Marxist historians in the 1930s because they write about social class and the economy. Li’s prime example is Wu Han who comes out sounding like a would-be Marxist who hadn’t quite figured out how to use Marxist analysis yet and thus made some mistakes, a sort of closet Marxist. It is about as sensible as saying that if I write a biography of Wu, I am ipso facto writing under the guidance of the Communist Party or am influenced by Marxism. Wu’s historicist writings in the 1930s and in the 1940s show no sign of systematic Marxism, but he was certainly influenced by Western historical materialism, as were many, if not most, historians in the West as well as China. 27. Although Wu does use the word jieji, class, the essay lacks any analysis of the shidaifu as an economic or political class. He treats them as moral delinquents, consumers, and artistic patrons. None of these are basic economic or political characteristics. 28. Wu Han, “Wan Ming liukou zhi shehui Beijing.” Later rewritten in 1944, published in Chongqing Xinhua ribao (1945), 2, 12, and in LSJZ (1946). WHSX1, 481–94, pagination used here. 29. WHSX1, 494. Italics added. 30. Yang Dehua (1962); Zheng Tianting (1979), 453–56. 31. Franke (1954). 32. Li Xiaolin and Li Shengwen (1988), 15. 33. Meng Sen, Qingchao qianji (1929); Meng Sen entry in BDRC3, 32–34. 34. The Nuzhen, also called Jurchen, were the ethnic group that took the name “Manchu.” Aisin Gioro was the Nuzhen clan that attained supremacy in Jianzhou, later conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. Jianzhou is the Chinese name given to the region that was the homeland of this group of Nuzhen to the northeast of Ming China and which was delineated as a Ming administrative area. 35. Meng Sen, Mingyuan Qingxi tongji (1930). Meng made his defiance of the Japanese invaders explicit in the “Hai ning chenjia” (August 1937) where he made it clear that the Japanese occupation of Beiping of July 1937 would not stop his research. Unexpectedly, he died 14 January 1938, leaving his work to be finished by Zheng Tianting and others. See BDRC3, 34. 36. Yang Dehua (1962). For Qianlong’s project see Guy (1987).

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37. Zheng Tianting (1979), 454; Yang Dehua (1962); Interview 48. 38. Yang Dehua (1962). The posthumously published collection is Wu Han, comp., Chaoxian Li chao shilu zhong de Zhongguo shiliao [Sources on Chinese history in the Veritable Records of the Korean Yi dynasty] 12 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980). For recent work on the Manchus: Crossley (1997), Wakeman (1985), Gertraude Roth Li (1975). Wu Han’s studies on the Nuzhen/Man seem not to have been used by American scholars even though the Dictionary of Ming Biography (1976), 1:839–41, cites Wu’s article on Li Man-chu as the earliest work. 39. Wu Han, “Guanyu Dongbei shi shang de yiwei guaijie de xin shiliao Lichao shilu zhong zhi Li Manzhu,” later published under the title “Chaoxian Li chao shilu zhong zhi Li Manzhu,” DSZJ, 50 used here; Wu Han, “Hou Jin zhi xingqi,” WHSX2. 40. Wu Han, “Hou Jin zhi xingqui,” WHSX2. Li Manzhu was the Chinese name of the first strong Nuzhen leader. Dictionary of Ming Biography (1976), 1:839–41. 41. Most scholars until recently have agreed with John King Fairbank’s interpretation of Chinese foreign relations as essentially tributary relationships with barbarians. For a view that differs critically from Fairbank and is compatible with the issues Wu Han raised in the 1930s, see Millward (1998), especially 4–19. See also Crossley (1997). Prasenjit Duara, in Sovereignty and Authenticity; Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, seems within the Fairbank school, by limiting the scope of his view of the Manchus to their Qing period. 42. Although often translated as “nationalities,” I translate minzu here as “ethnic group” or “ethnicity.” Gu Jiegang had been interested in the non-Han “nationalities” as they were called since the early 1920s. In an early general history written as a middle school text, Benguo shi [Chinese history] 3 vols. (Commercial Press), 1st ed. 1932, he spent a significant portion of the book on seven major non-Han ethnic divisions he identified. He continued this interest with the organization of the Yugong Society in the mid-1930s. Wu Han was affiliated with this group as well as personally with Gu Jiegang. For another view of Gu’s work on folk culture see Laurence Schneider (1971). 43. Wu wrote one more essay on the Jianzhou history in the 1950s, “Tan Qian he Guoque.” In 1956 he gave an advanced course at Beijing University on Ming history, where he stressed the rise of Jianzhou and its importance to the collapse of the Ming. 44. Franke (1954); Goodrich and Chaoying (1976), 478–79; for the evaluations of historians in China see Zheng Tianting (1979); Li Xiaolin and Li Shengwen (1988). 45. Wu Han, “Mingdai de Jinyi wei he Dong Xi chang.” 46. Ming Taizu was Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founding emperor, also known by his reign name, the Hongwu Emperor. 47. Hu Shi (1935e), 111–15 and 131–32. Grieder (1981), 345–50. Jiang Tingfu’s view on the threat of disorder and disunity was similar to the fear of turmoil held by the Dengist regime after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. 48. Kirby (1984). 49. Hu Shi’s preference was laissez-faire, or nonaction for which see his articles on wu-wei government in The Independent Critic, 7 May 1933 and 25 February 1934. Jiang Tingfu (1933a), 2–5. 50. Wu Han, “Ming Chengzu shengmu kao,” “Mingdai Jingnan zhi yi yu guodu bei qian,” “Mingdai zhi nongmin,” “Shiliu shiji qianqi zhi Zhongguo yu Nanyang,”

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“Mingchu weisuo zhidu zhi bengkui,” “Ting zhang,” “Yuandai zhi shehui,” and “Yuan diguo zhi bengkui yu Ming zhi jian guo.” 51. Wu Han, “Ming Chengzu shengmu kao.” Xia Nai (1980). 52. Xia Nai (1980). Xia did not see Wu again until 1941 in Kunming when he, Wu and Xiang Da were reunited again. 53. Franke (1954), 140. For the papers in the debate, Yamane Yukio (1960), 3. Shaw (1937), 492–98. 54. Wu Han, “Mingdai jingnan zhi yi yu guodu bei qian.” 55. Farmer (1975); Wheatley (1971). 56. Wu Han, “Mingdai zhi nongmin” and “Wan Ming shi huan jieji de shenghuo.” 57. Wu Han, “Yuandai zhi shehui” and “Yuan diguo zhi bengkuei yu Ming zhi jianguo.” 58. “Yuan diguo zhi bengkuei yu Ming zhi jianguo,” WHSX2, 81–138. 59. “Yuan diguo zhi bengkuei yu Ming zhi jianguo,” WHSX2, 82. 60. Bottomore (1983), 118–24, 363. 61. Israel and Klein (1976), 21; Freyn (1939), 14–15. 62. Dagong bao, 18 September 1934. 63. “Wu Xu,” Wu’s preface to Luo Ergang’s Taiping tianguo shigang [Outline history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom] and Luo’s account of Wu’s organizing of the Historical Research Association. 64. Among these historians were Liang Fangzhong, Luo Ergang, Zhang Yinlin, Tang Xianglong, Sun Yutang, Shao Xunzheng, and Xia Nai. 65. Wang Xinming (1935); Guo Zhanbo (1935), 339; Chi (1986). 66. Hu Shi (1935c). 67. Wales (1973); Israel and Klein (1976); Freyn (1939). 68. Wales (1973), 13. 69. Wales (1973), 13. 70. Interviews 30 and 58. 71. Hu Shi (1935d). 72. Israel (1966), 133. 73. Luo Ergang (1984). 74. Luo Ergang (1943), “Zixu”; Luo Ergang (1958). 75. Luo Ergang “Huai Wu Han” (1984) for this section. 76. Interview 30. Qian Jiaju, recalling their close relationship at school in Jinhua, shared this memory and his idea with this author about Wu reading Yesou puyan. 77. Luo Ergang “Taiping tianguo shi congkao xu,” originally written 8 May 1936; Wu Han, “Taiping tianguo shigang Wu xu.” 78. Wu Han, “Taiping tianguo shigang Wu xu.” 79. Chinese sociologists and anthropologists often did fieldwork in their native areas for ethnographic data; for example Martin Yang (1945) and also Wu’s brother, Wu Chunxi’s study of his native area for data in agricultural economics. 80. Gu’s student, Hou Renzhi in a personal communication. 81. Wu Han, “Taiping tianguo shigang Wu xu.” 82. Hu Shi de riji, entry for 21 February 1937, 539. 83. For Luo Ergang’s point of view see Luo Ergang, Shimen (1958), 51. 84. Luo Ergang (1958), 51. 85. Yu Yingshi (1984), 55–56, uses Hu Shi’s criticism of another essay of Luo Ergang’s to make the point that Hu’s scientistic evidential research methodology was

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useful to criticize old traditions but not adequate to judge a whole situation nor to deal with a situation of rapid change. 86. Luo Ergang (1958), 52–58. 87. This Hu/Luo relationship is an interesting case for study of the psychology of the relationship of autocratic control between teacher and student in China. Luo’s vulnerability and his willingness and ability to express himself make the relationship accessible. A significant episode in the teacher-student relationship involved Luo’s writing the volume Shimen, an intimate and lengthy account of his relationship with his teacher and presenting it to him in 1937. Curiously, years later in 1958, when Hu was in Taiwan and Luo was in the People’s Republic, while Hu Shi was the main target of campaigns of vilification in the PRC and past relationships with him were dangerous liabilities, Hu chose to publish this remarkable account by Luo Ergang in Taiwan. This publication could not possibly have helped Luo’s situation in the PRC. To the best of my knowledge Luo on his part, loyal to the last, never participated in the criticism of Hu Shi. Thus, the nature of the relationship remained the same until the end. 88. The emphasis on narrow specialized studies had been Hu Shi’s view of what must be done to write modern Chinese history. Shying away from broad projects, Hu had warned Wu Han to avoid writing a whole history of the Ming. 89. “Jiben sheyou Zhang Yinlin xiansheng,” WHSX2, 429. Su and Wang (1982), 97–102, esp. 99. 90. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” TQJ, 254. 91. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” TQJ, 254. Wu Han returned to this part of their curriculum plan many years later in 1960 when he initiated and organized the Lishi xiao congshu, distributed and read all over China by many people. 92. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” TQJ, 254. 93. Wu Wuxuan [Wu Han] “Nanren yu beiren,” WHSX1, 646–50. 94. Interview 161. Gu himself did not accomplish the atlas project. However, in the 1950s Wu Han discussed the preparation of an historical atlas of China with Mao Zedong and with Mao’s blessing he arranged that Gu Jiegang’s student, Tan Qixiang, should undertake the chief editorship of the task. Contrary to Wen-hsin Yeh’s suggestion, this was not a case of an academic lineage loyalty to Yang Shoujing. According to Tan Qixiang himself, Wu Han recommended to Tan that he begin with the Yang atlas because this was the most competent atlas that had been done to date in Chinese historical mapmaking. However, he soon found it was inadequate for the base plates and began again by having new plates drawn. For this, see Interview 115, 18 April 1987, Anyang, with Tan Qixiang. See chapter 11 of this biography for further description of this project. The interviews 115 and 161 with two of Gu Jiegang’s students who became leading historical geographers provided the information about the atlas. Also see Zheng Tianting (1979). For an important study of the development of historical geography in twentieth-century China see Tang Xiaofeng (2000). 95. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 96. Yuan Zhen,’s essays included: Yu Qian,” “Zong Ze yu Meng Hong,” “Wen Tianxiang” (1936, 1937a, 1937b). 97. Interview 61. 98. Interview 35. Long Yun, the independent warlord/governor of Yunnan, was a key mover in building up Yunnan University.

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99. Graham Peck (1940), 293–367. Peck was a Red Cross worker in Beiping at the time. 100. “Museum city” was Peck’s phrase, see Peck (1940), 312. 101. Israel (1998). 102. Qinghua daxue xiaoshi gao, 289–91. 103. Peck (1940), 327, saw it days after the students had left as passing by on his way to Qing He to pick up wounded with other Red Cross volunteer relief workers. For the flight of the universities from Beiping see Israel (1998). 104. Qinghua daxue xiaoshi gao, 289. 105. Luo Ergang (1984), 8. 106. Interview 60. This interview included Wu Bida. 107. Luo Ergang (1984), 10.

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he route to Yunnan was long and difficult. Even before Wu Han left Tianjin, Nankai University campus had been bombed and burned out of existence by Japanese planes and soldiers mopping up to insure the university buildings were completely destroyed.1 At Hong Kong he boarded a ship to the port of Haiphong in Indo-China. The only way to reach Yunnan from the coast by modern transportation at that time was by rail from Hanoi to Kunming. Everywhere along the way there were throngs of refugees fleeing. On the ship Wu met another young academic who had been hired to teach at Yunnan University, Shi Zhecun, by coincidence also from Zhejiang. Shi had even studied at the Christian missionary Zhijiang University in Hangzhou Wu had attended before he went to Shanghai. On the same ship on his way to Kunming there was also a history student by the name of Li Yan. Li knew of Wu Han from his writings. He recalled how astonished he had been to find that Wu, already quite famous, was only twenty-nine, a mere six years older than himself.2 The three had plenty of time in the next days on the boat to talk—with the war situation and the Japanese takeover of Beiping uppermost in their minds they had a great deal to talk over. Years later, Li remembered vividly Wu’s anger over how Manchuria had been taken by the Japanese without resistance from the Nationalist government. And then how the government had allowed North China to be made a special case for the Japanese, still with no resistance. He talked bitterly about the “Japanese pirates marching ahead without stopping.” They all thought that Nanjing and Wuhan would soon fall into Japanese hands the way Beiping had. Wu said, as were many others: “all Chiang Kaishek does is fight the civil war against the Communists. He doesn’t care if the nation survives or perishes, that’s why today has happened.” 231

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As they traveled Wu talked to them freely about history. His general idea was that historically, the one and only way for a weak force to defend against a strong enemy is to arm the masses. He brought up the Song dynasty and then asked them, “Do you know Zong Ze, the Song defender?” Wu asked Li if he knew where Zong Ze was from. When Li confessed he had no idea, Wu said that Zong Ze was from Yiwu, his hometown in Zhejiang. The reason he had been able to confront the Jin army and defend the capital of Bianliang was that he unified and led a volunteer army of the people. The Song dynasty’s army had already lost its fighting strength at the time. Only a volunteer army was able to fight. He went on to explain that because Zong Ze understood people he had selected Yue Fei from the masses and promoted him. Yue Fei followed Zong’s program unifying the volunteer army and bravely fought against the Jin. He became an outstanding general and a great national hero. Being from Zhejiang Wu felt an affinity with his fellow provincials, Zong Ze and Yue Fei. At school in Hangzhou he had often gone to the Yue Fei temple, where he is worshipped as a heroic cult figure. Wu’s Yiwu native place tie to Zong Ze was even stronger. His admiration for Zong Ze was reinforced by his study, which had shown him the necessity of understanding pragmatic conditions in order to gain success. JOURNEY FROM HAIPHONG TO KUNMING From the Indo-Chinese harbor at Haiphong they traveled on to board the narrow gauge French train in Hanoi bound for Kunming. The land through which the tracks ran was mountainous with deep winding chasms and valleys threaded by one tunnel after another. After a tunnel the train often came out on a trestle, high over a breathtaking gorge with a river far below.3 As they rode watching from the window, especially when they reached Yunnan, Li was astonished to hear Wu Han talk about what they were passing and about the history of Yunnan society, customs, climate, and production. Li wondered how he could be so familiar with the countryside when he had never before been to Yunnan. Wu talked about historic events and military campaigns in Yunnan. He told them about an expedition by the Han Chinese to the Kingdom of Nanzhao in the Yunnan area in the Tang dynasty. Then he brought up the Ming Yongli heir apparent escaping to Yunnan and Burma after the fall of the Ming dynasty and Wu Sangui’s rebellion. Li was ashamed at how little he knew about the history of his own province. Wu even told him what to read about Yunnan to learn more of its history. The border province of Yunnan was high plateau and mountainous terrain at the edge of the Tibetan massif, very different from the dusty, flat ancient city of Beiping. On the southwest of China, separated by vast distances and difficult terrain, economic and political integration with the rest of the country was very difficult before modern communication.4 The provincial capital of Kunming was situated in a fertile basin in central Yunnan surrounded

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by mountainous highlands in all directions. The indigenous population of the uplands was diverse non-Han ethnic groups. Although the Chinese had claimed suzerainty over the region since the Han dynasty, it was only in the Ming period (1368–1644) that there was any substantial migration into the area by Han Chinese. As the settlements of the Han displaced the native ethnic groups from the fertile basins, the indigenous people had moved into the highlands. Although this meant they had been there some 500 years, even in the 1930s the Han Chinese were only about 50 percent of the Yunnan population.5 The rugged geography of the province and its distance from coastal China meant the late beginning of modern development. Until the late 1930s, Kunming’s only modern transport links to the outside world were by the railroad from the port of Haiphong and Hanoi built by the French in 1910 when Yunnanfu was in the French “sphere of influence.” There was also a primitive road east to Guiyang in Guizhou Province. The French had connected the Kunming commercial center with Indo-China and had introduced French influence. Even as late as the 1980s, long after Wu was there, a certain cosmopolitan air was still evident in the French-style buildings and streets in the center of Kunming where the occasional coffee shop and bread bakery could be found. It was only with the 1937 withdrawal of the national government into the interior of the country that Yunnan began to develop a modern economy. During the next eight years along with Chongqing and central Sichuan, Kunming was to quickly become a major national center for resistance to Japan. When Wu Han arrived in Kunming at the end of his long journey in the fall of 1937 the construction of highways in Yunnan by the Chinese government had already begun with the building of the Burma Road. The road was extended on to Guiyang, giving Yunnan Province overland access to Guizhou Province and also to Sichuan and circuitously to the whole of China, as well as to Burma on the southwest. Motorbus service was begun in November 1937 on the new motor road. This highway connection then became a main route for the flow of refugees into the area and made Kunming the strategic node in the southwest of China in the ongoing war effort, both as a resource for the country and as a target for the Japanese. It was this overland road that Qinghua University students and faculty took to Kunming from Changsha the next year in 1938. Between 1936 and 1945, deluged with refugee industries and institutions, the population of the charming sleepy provincial city of Kunming doubled from 147,000 to 300,000.6 LONG YUN’S YUNNAN The political and economic situation in Yunnan in the late 1930s and 1940s had a distinctive nature differing from other areas of China. The characteristics of this independent base provided an arena for civil activity quite

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independent from national authority that allowed freedom for a distinctive atmosphere to develop for the refugee intellectuals moving into the area. At the time Wu Han arrived in Kunming, neither the political situation nor the provincial government in Yunnan was controlled by the national Guomindang government. In 1927, a local commander in a regional civil war, Long Yun, had defeated the local warlord, gradually strengthening his position by using his blood ties to the Yi (Lolo) ethnic group as well as by forging links with the landlord bureaucracy. The Chiang Kai-shek national government was willing to recognize Long Yun as the chairman of the provincial Government Committee in 1929, thus granting him national political legitimacy that acknowledged his de facto military and political legitimacy on the ground.7 In 1935, when the Long March of the Communist Red Army “bandits” had passed through Yunnan, although the national government had sent in a large force, the central armies did not disrupt Long Yun’s control of the province as they had elsewhere. Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang armies soon withdrew without causing problems because the Yunnan provincial forces were under the powerful administration of the provincial center.8 Although opium had been the major cash crop in Yunnan in the early twentieth century, it was wiped out in a campaign in the mid-1930s. The bulk of the trade was halted with the result that by 1937, when the refugees began to arrive, opium was no longer a major portion of Yunnan commerce.9 The opium prohibition campaign had not caused major problems in the provincial economy because a local leader of vision, Miao Jiaming, with Long Yun’s blessing, had already begun to institute industrial development policies.10 Miao promoted the introduction of Western methods of tin smelting in production in the provincial mining and smelting companies. Then he went on to manage the provincial bank and create the Yunnan Economic Commission to start other companies. Miao’s program for the province was based on state control of industry. His farsighted industrial and financial policies allowed Long Yun to move away from complete dependence on the landlord bureaucracy and the army for power and retain Yunnan’s independence from the Guomindang. In the coming years this autonomy is a major reason there was a great deal of freedom in the atmosphere of political discussion in Yunnan. Although Long Yun was not a major political power on the national scene in these years, these policies aided his government’s semi-independence from the national government. Long apparently held no particular personal liking for Chiang Kai-shek. Nor did he have reason to, since Chiang was trying at every possible point to bring him within the orbit of the central government. It seems that Long was contemptuous of Chiang’s failure to fight the Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931.11 Nonetheless, Long Yun saw Yunnan as an integrated segment of China and made proposals in early 1937 to the Guomindang center that would strengthen China as well as Yunnan. He seems to have understood prior to the Japanese invasion, should China become involved in a foreign

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war and the coastal ports be closed, that Yunnan would be vitally important to the future of the country. His proposals for aiding industrialization, promoting railroad building to link Yunnan with Burma and with the interior of China, and improving education in Yunnan were all related to the key nature of Yunnan’s place within the Chinese nation.12

YUNNAN UNIVERSITY: PROVINCIAL UNIVERSITY FOR THE FUTURE As a part of the province’s development Long Yun had established a provincial university from the private Donglu University in Kunming, but he wanted to go further and upgrade the university to provide nationally recognized, advanced education for Yunnan students. In early 1937 he announced an expansion plan to improve the facilities of the university in order to improve its academic standing and proceeded to seek an academic leader of national stature. By July, the Central Political Council in Nanjing announced that the university In Kunming would become a National University. In August Xiong Qinglai was appointed to the office of president of Yunnan University. A renowned mathematician, native of Yunnan and French returned student, at the time Xiong was the chairman of Qinghua University’s Mathematics Department.13 To strengthen Yunnan University, in the spring of 1937 Xiong had begun hiring new faculty before he returned to Yunnan. With the Japanese invasion in North China and in the eastern coastal areas in July 1937 Yunnan had suddenly been thrust into a key position in China. No longer was it merely a remote, border province. Now strategically crucial to the nation, it provided an opening to the outside world on China’s southwest border, which Japan would find very difficult to control. Its secure location meant that it would become an essential rear area in the war against the invader. The university’s expansion suddenly took on new strategic relevance to the country’s educational plans in what was obviously going to be a protracted wartime struggle. The Ministry of Education had already laid plans that the coastal universities would be evacuated inland. Part of Qinghua’s books and equipment had been shipped to Changsha in Hunan even before Wu Han left Beiping, for it had been ordered that the three: Qinghua, Beijing, and Nankai universities would move to Changsha and amalgamate into one school, Changsha Linshi daxue (Changsha Temporary University).14 By the time Wu arrived in Kunming, the city was already experiencing the beginning of wartime expansion with the initial influx of refugee institutions. Among the earliest, instructors and students of the Central Aviation Academy at Hangzhou had arrived by bus. The 4,000 or 5,000 people that came in the first wave caused an immediate housing shortage and the cost of living to

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rise. At the end of October the city’s first air raid drill was held when Aviation Academy planes simulated a raid with mock bombing runs.15

NEW BEGINNINGS IN WARTIME When he reached Kunming Wu Han lived for a short time in Yunnan University’s faculty dormitory, a large courtyard house, near the side of Green Lake at the edge of the university campus. Now a full professor, Wu taught Chinese general history (Zhongguo Tongshi) and Ming history (Ming shi) in the combined literature and history department for the next two years. Li Yan, the student he had traveled with to Kunming, took his class in Ming history. It was Li’s first experience studying Ming texts and he often came to Wu for special help. Wu gave him friendly advice and made suggestions about studying. One day Wu told Li Yan that he wanted to go out into the countryside to find some of the historical spots. The two, professor and student, rented horses because there were no public buses. Li recalled that on a Sunday they rode through the city gate past the examination building where the prefectural examinations had been held in the Qing dynasty, far into the countryside only returning to the school late in the evening. While they rode Wu talked about his family, his study at Qinghua, his illness with tuberculosis, and even about his love affair with Yuan Zhen.16 In some of their talks Wu spoke of his study of history and how he had begun. He told Li that generally when people begin their study of history they start with the official histories, but when he first started he didn’t follow any one school of learning. He had begun reading novels and notes (biji)

Figure 7.1. Wu Han, professor at Yunnan University, 1938, in Kunming

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when he was in school in Jinhua. He recalled to Li that he had liked reading the notes and novels of the Song and Ming people. After he had read a lot he began to think that some of the historical cases would be interesting to examine. As time passed he began to read historical texts more systematically and started to make notes and write papers. He was recognizing the early link between his interest in fiction and biji and his later ideas of historical texts. Apparently Wu Han’s ideas about the interrelationship of history and fiction began to percolate at an early age; his interest in evidential research as a method came later. Even at twenty-nine, in his description of his own development, Wu didn’t acknowledge being a part of any particular group of modern kaozheng scholars. Later he recommended to Li how to do research from his own experience. Drawing on the Jingnan campaign in the Ming as an example he got out his note cards on the project. Li asked him how he knew that these particular texts had material related to the Jingnan campaign. Wu responded that you need fundamental knowledge about the political situation at the beginning of the Ming. Then you must read the historical texts, but to have these materials doesn’t equate with knowledge. You have to go further and study the materials thoroughly, check which is true and which false, eliminate the contradictions, analyze and select what is relevant, then finally lay out a plan to explain and organize the materials and only then write the paper. Wu gave Li his essay on the Jingnan campaign to read and let him look at his note cards to see how it was done. He told Li: you don’t need to seek again for these facts, but you can improve on the account in the article.17 The teacher-student relationship developing between Wu and Li had only a faint resemblance to Wu’s teacher-student relationship with his teacher, Hu Shi. On the surface it might seem the same, indeed it followed the classic teacher/student pattern in the culture, but there were real differences. One was the young teacher’s familiarity with the subject the student was interested in and the other was his personality. Wu was much more informal and down to earth in personal style than Hu Shi, due partly to his frank enthusiasm and partly because of his own youth. Although modern in his personality style Hu Shi, well aware of his own fame, spoke with the paternal voice of traditional authority that assumed unquestioned receptivity in the listener.18 Also Wu, by this time, was speaking as an experienced and proven Ming historian in his own field of historical inquiry and out of his experience in historical research in the field. When Hu Shi had advised both Wu Han and Luo Ergang on how to go about their respective studies of Ming and Taiping history, he was not speaking as a modern, scientific expert who had “fundamental knowledge” in either of those fields, but rather as the all around erudite scholar accustomed to receiving the respect accorded to traditional senior scholar-literati. At the end of this first year at Yunda, as Yunnan University was called by those associated with it, Wu Han moved to Baiguo xiang lane, in the

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Huguomen neighborhood of the city where he would live for the next two years. This was the spring/summer 1938. He wanted to prepare for his mother, brother and sisters, and perhaps Yuan Zhen’s coming so he rented a house. Altogether there were ten small rooms on two compact floors, but the whole house was not large. Baiguo xiang lane was in the center of the city. The house was down the little lane in a densely crowded neighborhood, near the river, and not at all close to the university. He kept the first floor for himself and his family; the second floor was for friends and colleagues who were coming to Kunming with their units that were fleeing from the Japanese occupation, such as the Changsha Temporary University formed by Qinghua, Beijing, and Nankai universities, and the Beijing Research Institute. Wu wanted to help his friends in these institutions whom he knew would need a place to stay in the overcrowded city when they arrived. With his full professor’s salary at Yunda now he had the money for the rent. He would rather be crowded together on the first floor with his family so that the second floor could be used by friends than keep it all for himself. Gu Jiegang and Zhang Yinlin, as well as others, lived there with him at various times.19 REFUGEE UNIVERSITY The Temporary University formed in Changsha by the three universities that took flight from the northeast had only started first-term classes in November 1937.20 The difficulties of gathering the refugee teachers and students together as they slowly straggled into Changsha and finding quarters for classrooms and living places for teachers and students had delayed the opening of the term. Only six weeks later the fall of Nanjing and the news of the horror of the Japanese treatment of the civilian population, now known as the Rape of Nanjing, filtered into the university causing tremendous anxiety and tension among the students and faculty. Changsha was too close to the areas occupied by the Japanese to be safe anymore. Many on the campus wanted to join the war to fight the enemy. Among the professors there were similar thoughts. Wen Yiduo, professor of Chinese literature and a poet, wrote about the turmoil in their minds: We had our heads filled with the European and American concepts of contemporary nations. We thought that once this kind of war had begun, the entire nation would have to mobilize. Of course we were not exceptions to this rule. So, many of us waited for government orders to go to the front or to apply ourselves to wartime production in the rear, or at least to exert a little effort to educate the soldiers or the general populace. The facts proved that this vision was, in the last analysis, no more than a vision. So we gradually sank back into the work appropriate to our station, preparing our lectures as before, teaching the same old stuff that we had always taught.21

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Consensus was developing in the government and the university that the most important purpose for the university was to preserve intact the prewar educational system of higher education so that it could educate leaders for the nation and be ready for the time when the war was over.22 The decision was soon made at the national level that the amalgamated university created from the three universities of Qinghua, Beijing, and Nankai, now the premier institution of higher learning in the nation, must move as soon as possible to a more secure spot. The location chosen was Kunming. In the early spring of 1938, faculty and students once again set out for the new location, many going by boat to Haiphong and train to Kunming, the route Wu had taken the year before. Some three hundred intrepid students and a few teachers set out by foot in a Long March of sixty-eight days of footsore hiking overland to Kunming. Among the professors who marched with the students was the poet Wen Yiduo.23 When these people reached Kunming by their various routes the institution took the name of the National Southwest Associated University (Guoli Xinan lianhe daxue), and became known simply as “Lianda.” The first year of classes opened in the fall of 1938. Wu Han’s brother, Chunxi, had gone to Changsha with the other Qinghua students and when the university moved to Kunming, he hiked overland with them to Kunming. Chunxi graduated from Lianda in the spring of 1939 in economics and found a job teaching in the university economics department as an assistant.24

REFUGEE FAMILY The rest of Wu Han’s family were in Zhejiang when war broke out in 1937. When Hangzhou was occupied by the Japanese his sister Puyue had been at middle school in the city. Terrified when she heard the Japanese soldiers were raping women in Hangzhou she fled home to the village to be with her mother. Chunxi’s wife, Ye Meiying, was also back in Kuzhutang village. Puyue persuaded her mother that they should all leave for Kunming to live with Elder Brother, Chunhan. Puyue herself had won a national scholarship to Southwest University (Lianda) and she was eager to enter the school. When their mother finally consented they set out on the long journey. Seven people in all: Mother, Elder Sister Puyue, Little Sister Puxing, Chunxi’s wife Ye Meiying and her two tiny children, and also a classmate of Puyue’s, traveled together by crowded, rickety buses overland from Zhejiang, across Jiangxi, Hunan, and Guizhou to Yunnan, finally reaching Kunming. It was a long, dangerous trip through bandit-infested territory over the narrow, winding road and mountainous terrain.25 Wu Han had space ready for them to live in his newly rented house by the river in the center of the city. It was the first time he had been together with his family since he had left home many years before and the first time

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ever under his own roof. Wu was very good to his mother when she came. He was very fond of her and spent time sitting together with her every day. She was very happy to be together with him, but it was a difficult situation for her. Because she spoke only the local Yiwu dialect, not understood by people from outside of the county, there was no one beyond her family for her to talk with in Kunming. Ever since he left Beiping, Wu had been sending money to Yuan Zhen who was still living in Beiping. When Wu’s mother learned this she urged him to have Yuan Zhen come to Kunming to save the money, since he had such heavy expenses with them all there. She assumed that of course Yuan Zhen was better and they would marry. Wu’s mother was a kind, friendly person but she could also be very stern. She was possessed with the thought that her eldest son must marry and have children to carry on the family line. While her second son, Chunxi, had two sons by this time, this did not satisfy the traditional family need for line of descent. Eldest Son, Chunhan, must marry and it was her filial duty to the family to see that he did.26 By the spring of 1939 Yuan Zhen’s spine had become strong enough that she began to move about a bit. Slowly, with her two sisters’ help, she began to walk. When she got Wu Han’s letter saying that he wanted her to come to be with him in Kunming, the sisters talked it over and she decided she would like to try to make the journey. For her to be with Wu would free her sisters to go on with their own lives. All three of them were very anxious to get out of Japanese occupied territory. Fuzhi, with her ties to Communists, was in special danger there in Beiping, constantly surrounded by Japanese. Having made the decision, the three set out together, traveling first to Tianjin where the French Consulate arranged their documents. They found passage on an English ship heading for Haiphong. When the boat docked in Haiphong Harbor, Wu Han was standing there on the wharf in Haiphong waiting for them; he had come by train all the way from Kunming east to the coast. This was the first time Wu had ever seen Yuan Zhen standing, or in any position but lying prone in bed. Wearing a body brace she moved very stiffly and slowly as she would for most of the rest of her life. They set out, back across the winding mountain route by rail. By the time they reached Kunming she was exhausted, very pale, and wan. The three sisters all settled in with Wu Han in his house in Baiguo xiang. Yuan Zhen went to bed to rest because she was not yet strong enough to move about freely. Wu was very happy to have her with him again, to have her by his side to share ideas and experiences with. At first, Wu’s mother was happy with the idea that Yuan Zhen, who she knew was very special to her son, had come. This was the first time his mother had actually seen her.27 She was a beautiful woman with an elegant air about her, but his mother soon saw how exhausted she was. At first Yuan Zhen seemed to be staying in bed to rest from the long trip from Beijing, but after several days passed, the mother noticed that she needed help with

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everything, even bathing. Deeply troubled by what she saw, she knew that an invalid wife was not what her son needed and certainly was not proper for a daughter-in-law who would bear her son’s children.28

CONFLICT OF LOVE AND FILIALITY Soon after Yuan Zhen and her sisters arrived in May 1939 the air raids increased and the danger from bombings grew worse. Japanese air raids had begun the year before but at first they were only scattered. After the spring festival in 1939 they were more frequent and casualties increased. Wu’s house was downtown in a densely settled area. Kunming’s high water table made it impossible to build bomb shelters in the ground which meant the only protection was to flee to the countryside until the all-clear sounded. Since neither his mother nor Yuan Zhen could move quickly, Wu remained with the two during the raids to be sure they were all right. While most of the time the planes were on their way to somewhere else, several times they were badly frightened when bombs fell nearby. In these months as the raids increased many people began moving to the countryside to be safe. Wu asked his old friends, Liang Fangzhong and Tang Xianglong, who were now in Kunming, to help him find a safe place outside the city.29 In the village of Luosipo they found a safe place in an old family temple compound that had belonged to the influential Tang family where all three of their families, the Tangs, Wus, and Liangs, could live in rooms around the same courtyard. The location was not far from Tao Menghe’s institute where Liang worked. The location in the countryside was very beautiful but far from the city. Wu had a long distance to walk into the city to the university to teach. Wu planned for the whole family to go the countryside. His mother went, and Yuan Zhen and her sister Yuan Fuzhi, as well as his sister, Puyue and Wu Puxing, his little sister. But not his brother, Chunxi, nor his brother’s wife, Ye Meiying. Her mother-in-law, Wu’s mother, was very traditional in the way she treated Meiying. The daughter-in-law had no freedom, but must obey the mother-in-law in everything. There was also the conflict between Yuan Zhen and the mother which Meiying didn’t want to get involved in. The only solution was to insist that she and Chunxi stay in the city. Wu’s mother was often very angry over Chunhan’s devoted attention to Yuan Zhen’s personal needs. She told all around her this was beneath him; an intellectual should not do this. She thought and she said to everyone who would listen the two must not live together because they were not married.30 One day his mother told Chunhan that she would sell the Yiwu land and give the money to Yuan Zhen so her illness could be cured and then he wouldn’t need to marry her. Wu told her with deep feeling, that money wasn’t the most important thing: “I cannot get along without her in my life.

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We need each other.”31 Wu was beside himself because he didn’t want to anger his mother but neither did he want Yuan Zhen to suffer. He went to talk it over with Meiying and ask for her help. It was a hard problem to solve; the conflict was unbearable to him. He wanted his mother to go into the city and stay with Meiying. After some thought Meiying agreed to help in spite of dreading her mother-in-law’s treatment. It was clear Wu’s mother wasn’t comfortable in the same house with Yuan Zhen. She had already directly asked Yuan Zhen to move out, but Wu would not countenance such a thing. He was caught painfully between his son’s loyalty to his mother and his devotion to Yuan Zhen—the tension in the house made life very unpleasant.

WEDDING FOR LOVE One day he suddenly told the family he was going to take Yuan Zhen into the city to see a doctor. They rented a horse cart and set off. The neighbors across the courtyard, Tang Xianglong and his wife, watched them go. As they saw the cart disappear they wondered where their friends were going. Instead of going to the doctor the two first went to a hotel where they booked a room. Then they went to the government office that took care of such things and got married. Afterward, they had their wedding photograph taken, a charming picture of the happy bride and groom. The next day the family and friends in Luosipo Village learned about the wedding from the announcement published in the Kunming paper. Wu Han was thirty and Yuan Zhen thirty-three when they were married. Because the conflict in the family was so strong they had chosen to marry secretly. In a culture in which weddings are great festivals in a central ritual position at the core of family existence the very choice of a secret, private

Figure 7.2. Yuan Zhen and Wu Han wedding portrait, 1939, Kunming

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marriage was rebellion against custom. It also reveals the nature of the bond between them as rooted fundamentally in the existences of their two individual selves, not in customary social patterns, nor in family loyalties. In a distinctively modern way the nature of Wu Han’s filiality was being shaped in the painful crucible of the conflicting needs of his own life. In a parallel sense Yuan Zhen’s long-standing need for autonomy, even in her early years, was being qualified by the dependence illness and poverty were imposing on her life.32 After several days, the newlyweds returned to their home in the Tang family temple. Wu’s mother was very angry but had no way of stopping it. Her first thought was that there was no way Wu Han could have children. After the wedding she chose to go to stay in the city with Meiying, Chunxi’s wife, in spite of the air raids. This whole situation produced a painful, open rift in the family that would affect family relationships permanently. The Tang and Liang families in the courtyard saw that the older of Wu’s two sisters was opposed to the marriage and that his brother was opposed also. Many of Wu Han’s friends had thought it was not a good idea and had told him so. After this Wu Han’s old friends who lived in the courtyard saw that the brothers did not seem as close and the mother and sister seldom came to see them. It was abundantly evident to his friends his family actively opposed his marriage.33 Wu and Yuan Zhen lived at Tang jia citang in Luosipo for almost a year. He did everything for her, bathed her, brought her milk, and special food. Sometimes he caught fresh fish in the stream nearby to provide healthy food. She needed special medicine which was very expensive. In the garden in the courtyard was a Yunnan flower tree that had large fragrant blossoms. He would arrange a chair for her and help her into the courtyard to sit in the warm sun. After a time, his mother decided she wanted to go back to Zhejiang. Although she told Wu she was afraid of the air raids, actually her decision was partly because she was so unhappy with his marriage and also partly because she felt so isolated in Kunming. She had learned from Kuzhutang the Japanese were no longer as harsh on the Zhejiang countryside at home. It would be good to be back in her home village where she could speak the language and talk with her friends and relatives. Her youngest daughter, Puxing, would return with her. Wu asked his brother and sister-in-law to take them back since he couldn’t leave his job. Although they didn’t want to leave Kunming they did it for the family. Thus in late 1939, Chunxi gave up his teaching position at Qinghua and with his wife and children and their mother and sister set out on the long journey to return to Zhejiang by bus through the Japanese occupied countryside. After he had seen that they were safely settled in the village, Chunxi went on to Shanghai and found a job where he stayed during the rest of the war.

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LOVE’S FABRIC What was so special about Wu Han’s and Yuan Zhen’s relationship?34 Because it was special. Wu was no iconoclast who needed to act out denial of his own culture and its patterns. Refusing an arranged marriage was a symbolic, negative action (and he had taken that negative step when he was a youth).35 Entering into a marriage relationship with someone for reasons of the heart, against the wishes of people you were loyal and close to, was far more complex, involving both affirmation and denial. In this culture, in these post–May Fourth decades the permutations of intimate relationships between men and women were varied and complex. The transformation of the character of male/female relationships was a central and sensitive experience in the lives of many intellectuals in these decades. His teacher Hu Shi, for all of his modern spirit of science and democracy and cosmopolitanism, had never forsaken his traditional arranged marriage. Yet, paradoxically, here was Wu Han, without any of Hu Shi’s Western flavor, joining with a woman in a very modern marriage for love that, by its very nature, flew in the face of the norms of Chinese society, both traditional and modern, and denied in a very unfilial way the wishes of his mother and family to whom he was intensely loyal. This was a far deeper degree of complexity than the essentially negating iconoclastic refusal of an arranged marriage. Here was a positive action, affirming both his love for a woman and his own values. Consideration of their relationship illuminates how Yuan Zhen’s influence was so important in Wu’s life. In the years since they had come to know each other their main contacts were intellectually based. Those closest to them watched them together forming their friendship as it grew into an intense, intellectualized love relationship. When he had come to her rooms in Beiping their contacts were always centered on issues in which they shared a common interest.36 Even when they started from different points on issues “whatever each discussed the other was very interested in. The more deeply they talked the closer they became.” When Yuan Zhen was a young member of the Socialist Youth League she had read Bukharin’s ABC’s of Communism, Li Hanjun’s essays, and other Marxist works that Dong Biwu had given the students. Her interest in socialism and in the problems of common people—the workers and the peasants had always been strong. While Wu had not read those works, he did know about Marx’s Capital and had discussed it at length with Qian Jiaju. But for him, more important than Marx, was his attraction to the history of the past that focused on the relationship of the rulers and their supporting officials to the people and the society and the relationship of this axis to the whole political entity that was coming to be called “nation” (guojia). They shared their interest in the common people in history. For each their interest stemmed from the same fundamental political and economic view of life, and particularly of history—his familiarity with historical materialism from New History and

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her ideas of the historical materialist viewpoint weiwu shiguan from Marx provided common ground. When they talked together everything was academic questions, historical questions, theoretical questions, “This is your viewpoint and here’s my viewpoint.” They had discussed the late Ming rebellion of Li Zicheng, labeled a bandit in the previous histories many times. Li was the peasant leader whose rebellion brought down the last Ming emperor and the Ming dynasty. Wu was writing an essay on Li and the peasants following him who refused to pay their rent with the rice they grew. Traditional scholar intellectuals had thought rebellions such as this were bad. But it seemed to both Wu and Yuan Zhen the peasants were forced by the rulers into uprisings with no other way to express their dire situation facing starvation. This essay of Wu’s37 was written at about the time they were becoming close friends when Wu had begun to listen to her ideas about history and Marxism and had found that from his viewpoint, materialist also, they made sense. His love affair with Yuan Zhen was an affair of passion of both heart and mind. Much later their friends, Tang Xianglong and his wife, who had known them well in Beiping and were close to them in Kunming, provided a glimpse of the interplay of intellect and personality when they recalled her beauty and popularity among men students on the Qinghua campus in Beiping back in the days before Wu had begun seeing her. For Wu it had been flattering and quite romantic for such a beautiful young woman to pay this special attention to him. A kind of electric spark was generated that provided the dynamic for their exploration of each other in the beginning. The depth of their bond was increased by empathy generated by common experiences of similar family households and family poverty.38 From his youth Wu was fundamentally humanitarian (rendau zhuyi de). Oppression of others was wrong; pragmatism and evolutionary thought influenced him. When the Yuan sisters were young and students of Dong Biwu, they knew the working class was oppressed and history materialistic and evolutionary.39 The similarity in their ideas served to strengthen Wu’s own views. As he talked with Yuan Zhen about research issues he became firmer in his own ideas. On the other hand, although she was influenced by him, in fact, her own articles written about this time are surprisingly simple and very close to traditional evidential research, kaozheng with a nationalistic, patriotic turn to them. Despite her being more immersed in Marxist ideas than he, in actuality Wu’s historical understanding was far deeper and more complex than hers. At this stage of his life, Wu needed the soul nourishment of this woman who was his kindred spirit, his “zhiyin,” very special intimate friend, infinitely more than he needed a wife who could provide the worldly comforts and a string of children. Only later as he grew older would he feel the absence of children and long for his own child. There was a dual nature to his devotion to Yuan Zhen, for along with the kindred spirit aspect of their

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relationship, his devoted care of her never faltered through his whole life. The sacrifices made were entirely on his side. It was the manifestation of a compassionate benevolent nature with an inner need to care for people, particularly a beautiful women whose brilliance he could enjoy, as had Wen Suchen, the hero in the favorite novel of his early years, Yesou puyan. In these decades the post–May Fourth male need to rethink the position of women in society and particularly their own male relationship to women had a great deal to do with every male’s response to women. Wu was no exception but Yuan Zhen’s health problems added complexity to the situation. The question can be asked but has to be left unanswered: if Yuan Zhen, being totally dependent, had not needed a compassionate man friend at just that time, would Wu have married someone else and what sort of woman?40 Before they were married, Yuan Zhen’s older sister Fuzhi who had brought her to Yunnan, had already left Kunming. The only other person in the city who was close to Yuan Zhen beside Wu was her adopted sister, Yuan Xizhi, who through Wu’s introduction had met and married Wu’s friend and fellow historian Rong Zhaozu. When Fuzhi left Kunming, she had no idea that a month later her sister and Wu would marry. Etched on Fuzhi’s memory for the rest of her life was the day she said good-bye to her sister, Yuan Zhen. It was September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland and the whole world changed. With Wu’s help arrangements had been made for Fuzhi to go by car to Chongqing since there was no connecting railroad. There she stopped to see Dong Biwu, the first time she had seen him since they were together in Moscow. Before she departed from Kunming she had told Wu Han she wanted to go on to Yan’an from Chongqing if Dong would help her.41

LIANDA: UNIVERSITY IN KUNMING National Southwest Associated University, Guoli xinan lianhe daxue, known as Lianda, had begun regular classes in Kunming in the fall of 1938. Some 600 of the 1,400 students of the united university enrolled in Changsha had already left the university for the war effort, some joining the Communist 8th Route Army in the second United Front. The move of the eight hundred remaining students and the faculty to this remote border province of Yunnan had been no small feat. One of the students, asked about the move by an observer, showed the determined sense of resistance of the refugee students and intellectuals when he answered, “of course we would like to go back to our homes in the North. But we don’t want to go back unless we can fly our national flag, unless our cities can be so fortified that they can never be invaded as they were in 1937.”42 For Wu Han, with Qinghua now established in Kunming as one of the three amalgamated universities it meant that when his two years leave to

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teach at Yunnan University was finished and the Qinghua authorities wanted him to return, the move to Southwest Associated campus to teach would be very simple. When Xiong Qinglai had hired him to go to Yunnan University, Qinghua would not agree to release him permanently. Now with Qinghua a part of Lianda, Lei Haizong, the history department chairman of the combined university, wanted Wu Han to return to teach general history. The university administration backed Chairman Lei and also asked him to return. Although many people thought of joining the army to fight the Japanese in the initial optimistic spirit of the United Front, Wu had no thought of joining in the physical defense of the country. For him the study of Chinese history, what he most loved to do, was the most important contribution he could make to his country. Like many other intellectuals, he assumed that continuing his role as a scholar studying, preserving, and understanding China’s past and the culture from that past was the most important contribution he could make to the country. While at Yunda he had shown no interest in politics. Although he deeply disliked the Nationalist Party government for its corrupt and disordered conduct of affairs, nonetheless, his dislike of the Guomindang for its dictatorial politics did not result in any expression from him of interest in joining the Communists. Wu was not alone in this. Among his fellow intellectuals, although some did become officials in the Guomindang government and some went to Yan’an to join the Communists, most remained on the sidelines like Wu. In October 1939, the month after he married, Wu gave up his professorship at Yunnan University to return to the faculty of Qinghua University, now a part of Lianda, to be made assistant professor and later full professor.43 Actually, the Lianda campus was close to Yunnan University—just on the other side of the road and down a bit. His courses were general history for freshmen and an advanced course in Ming history. Among the intellectuals taking refuge in Kunming were many of Wu’s academic friends from Beiping. Luo Ergang and Zhang Yinlin came in these early years. Zhang lived with Wu at the Baiguo Xiang house in the city and probably Luo also. Wu participated enthusiastically in academic activities and often provided his house as a place for events. His friends called it Wu’s “small salon in the simple, poor cottage.” The Historical Research Association he and others had organized in Beiping that had been forced to cease meeting after the July Seventh Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 now was revived by the members who had come to Yunnan. Besides Wu, Sun Yutang, Zhang Yinlin, Luo Ergang, and some of the other members had reached Kunming. The 1939 annual meeting of the association was held in Wu’s house and among the new members were Wang Chongwu, Li Yan, and Miu Lanke. The association resumed publishing the academic supplement series Historical Studies (Shixue), now edited by Sun Yutang, in the newly launched edition of the refugee newspaper, Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao) of Kunming and in the new Kunming edition of the Yishi bao.

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ZHANG YINLIN, WU HAN, AND GENERAL HISTORY Wu and Zhang Yinlin soon resumed their Beiping discussions of their joint general history project. Zhang had received a joint appointment at the professorial level at Lianda’s Normal School in the history and geography department and in Lianda’s College of Liberal Arts in the history department.44 When Zhang fled Beiping in 1937 he had panicked and carried nothing away with him. When the gunfire started beyond the Qinghua campus walls, after standing in front of the bookcases in his study and pacing frantically around the room agonizing over which books to take and which to leave, he had finally given up and left empty-handed, abandoning everything.45 But, fortunately before fleeing Beiping he had given into Wu Han’s custody the manuscript of the first part of the general history, Zhongguo shigang, they were collaborating on and Wu had carried it in his trunk with his own notes and papers all the way to Kunming. While Zhang lived at his house Wu urged him to publish it since there was a great need for general histories written from a modern viewpoint. Wu’s two years teaching general history at Yunnan University had given him definite ideas of the curriculum needed to teach students the basics of their country’s history. With Wu Han’s encouragement Zhang proceeded to select the chapters for the first volume of what they both assumed was to be their comprehensive general history which would have been completed had Zhang lived and the war not overwhelmed the project.46 For his volume Zhang wrote a long preface that is a statement of his philosophy of history and methodology of writing general history. The interest the two men shared in writing a general history was related to their common concern that Chinese people know about the nation’s past in such a way that the living relation of the past to the present is evident. History was not a dead issue for either of them. They had talked often at Qinghua about the need in the present twentieth-century era for the formulation of general histories written in the manner of the New History they were writing. Zhang Yinlin had been influenced by his teacher, Liang Qichao, during his undergraduate studies. Liang had a great ambition to write a cultural history of China that would be even grander than H. G. Wells’s general history, the Outline of History, even though when he came to write this history he rejected Wells as a model.47 As a result of their discussions, Zhang and Wu also began to develop a visionary plan for simple popular history for elementary school students and the broad popular readership. In the past, written history had been the precinct of scholars, both as authors and audience. Part of the twentiethcentury rethinking of the content and role of the present’s heritage of the past was directed at who the audience for the histories would be. Even the general histories that historians were presently creating were assumed to be for an elite reading audience of largely college and middle school students. However, this audience was only a small part of the literate population that

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would be created by the modern educational endeavor. In their vision of history and its relation to the Chinese people both Wu and Zhang saw a real need for good, well-written history that could be read and comprehended at a much simpler and broader level than college or middle school. Popularized history was a major goal of Liang Qichao’s which Zhang had absorbed while he was Liang’s student at Qinghua. They developed a list of historical subjects and made preparations to write a popular series. However, due to the stresses of the wartime period and to Zhang Yinlin’s untimely death this project lay unrealized until Wu returned to it in the early 1960s in the People’s Republic. With his influence in the educational and publishing offices in those years he was able to launch the publication of the Zhongguo lishi xiaocongshu that was distributed and read widely in China.48 Wu Han shared with Zhang Yinlin the conviction that historical writing is the expression of an art as well as the writing of history. In his preface to the general history volume he wrote Zhang had made a theoretical statement about the writing of such histories. He advocated writing in popular language, without the quotation of many sources (a common habit of former historians), without discussion of textual examination (he assumed such examination had already been done as a foundation but need not be endlessly discussed) and with a minimum of people and place names. Wu Han’s historical essays generally were in a vivid and graceful style, with narrative and analysis dominating and quotations and textual examination generally sparse in contrast to the more traditional style which relied heavily on quotations, often without attribution. Wu’s emphasis on historical writing as an art can be seen in the biography of Ming Taizu (Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan) which he was just beginning about this time. The two young historians also used similar styles of lecturing in their classes, born of their approach to history in terms of historical themes and issues. In Zhang’s pre-Han volume of the general history he had laid emphasis on society and economy and the influence of politics on society even in the earliest periods, de-emphasizing the standard, traditional focus on the ruler. Both of these men were profoundly influenced by the materialist ideas behind New History. The teaching style which Wu developed and which he became famous for among the students, he later said was strongly influenced by Zhang’s historiographic ideas and methods. In the preface to his general history Zhang explains that he chooses not to follow either the traditional explanation of the beginnings of China’s history with the early legends, nor to follow the style of the currently popular Western general history, as in H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. Wells’s history, widely read in China in translation, began with sixty pages of the geological beginnings of the earth and more than an additional one hundred pages of human prehistory before he even arrived at recorded history.49 In the 1930s the explanation of the beginnings of China in historical textbooks had become a sensitive litmus test, because of the Nationalist assumption that

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the traditional memory of the beginnings of true Han culture had central importance to the basis of the Chinese nation that was being formed. The Guomindang textbook censors such as the muscular ideologue, Dai Jitao, had implied a historian was unpatriotic if he did not conform by writing the ancient legends of the beginnings of the nation as fact.50 In 1929 Gu Jiegang had been harshly criticized by the new Guomindang government’s Ministry of Education censors because his secondary school textbook, Benguo shi, already in use for several years before the Guomindang came to power, had not paid proper attention to the legends as the authentic account of the true beginnings of China.51 However, when Zhang Yinlin wrote the Outline History of China to the End of the Eastern Han in the late 1930s, he begins with recorded history in the Shang period, as it was known in the late 1930s through texts and archeological data from Anyang and merely cites the legendary stories which he identifies as remote legend at the close of the first chapter. On the other hand he leaves out any global scientistic account of geological prehistory. Thus he finds his way between the rightist Great Han ideologues and the Western scientistic types. After Zhang Yinlin’s death, Wu wrote about the core of Zhang’s ideas about writing history. His cardinal principles were that the historian must begin by utilizing the four standards of distinctiveness, influence, value, and order, to address the process of change in history. For him there are four types of historical change: cause and effect, spatial development, evolutionary development, and the development of contradictions (dialectical development). According to Wu’s description of Zhang’s thought, when these four categories are used in conjunction in historical analysis they will reduce the random nature of change in historical understanding and provide an objective history.52 Not given to theory himself, Wu fully embraced these historicist ideas of Zhang’s about the dynamic of history and the process of historical writing. Zhang’s inclusion of contradiction as an agent of change opened the door wider than a crack for Marxist ideas of class contradiction for both of these men, although Zhang did not live to work out the relationship. Tragically, Zhang Yinlin died in 1942 of kidney failure at only thirty-nine, not long after he left Kunming to move to Zhejiang University, then in refugee status at Zunyi in Guizhou. Wu Han sorely missed his friend after his death. The two men, both mavericks, had enjoyed their friendship deeply and had been close intellectually and politically. They shared their commitment to the development of history for the current age and to the broadest definition of society and welfare of the common man. The two shared both an intense dislike for the Guomindang’s politics, and a lack of interest in personal political activity. Probably Zhang Yinlin more than any other single person came closest to being a true soul friend and peer of Wu Han’s. The balance in their relationship was entirely different from that of Wu’s with Yuan Zhen who, invalided as she was, was totally dependent on Wu for her existence.

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ZHU YUANZHANG’S BIOGRAPHY Sometime after Wu Han returned to teach at Xinan Lianda he began to work on a biography of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty. He already had constructed a foundation for the biography in his earlier work. The project was to extend over several years until it was finally published in 1944. One earlier essay from 1936 in particular on the collapse of the Yuan and the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang appears to have been almost a beginning sketch.53 As he began to develop the biography, he talked to various people around him about the project and his interpretation of Zhu.54 From the basis of his earlier research and also lectures in the Ming history course, Zhu Yuanzhang’s campaign to overthrow the Yuan, the establishment of the Ming dynasty, and the character of Zhu’s rule began to fit together as a larger work about the man who became the Ming emperor. In writing to Fu Sinian about the biography in 1942 Wu harkened back to a discussion he and Fu had when they were taking refuge together in the grass during an air raid outside of the north gate of Kunming City in 1939. While sheltering from bombs, the two had discussed a paper Wu was writing on Manichaeism and the name taken by Zhu for his dynasty. Access to the sources he would like to have used was a great problem for Wu because of the lack of archives or an adequate library in wartime Kunming, especially after the History Institute and its library was moved from Kunming to Chongqing.55 He was able to borrow a few prime sources like the Yuan Shi, the Mingshi jishi benmo, and Qian Qianyi’s Taizu shilu bianzheng, but only six or seven in all. Fortunately, he had been able to bring his thousands of note cards and all of his previous published works from Beiping, which gave him the benefit of a vast number of sources from previous investigations.56 Looking back later Wu observed that his emphasis on the nature of this period as a “national revolution” minzu geming in the biography of the Ming founder was related to his writing it in the context of the Anti-Japanese War.57 In Wu’s biographical narrative of the Ming founder, during the last years of the Yuan dynasty the Han Chinese had finally been united by a strong revolutionary peasant leader, Zhu Yuanzhang, to drive the foreign Mongol rulers out. Nonetheless, despite this retrospective comment of Wu’s, even five or six years earlier in his 1936 paper on the collapse of the Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Ming founder he had written about national liberation and identity. In that paper he had written: “Zhu Yuanzhang very clearly advocated national liberation as the purpose of this revolution. Han must be governed by Han. This obvious change stimulated national revenge for the exploitation and oppression of over a hundred years.”58 We can see that from his earliest work on the founding of the Ming dynasty Wu’s interpretation was in accord with the conviction endemic throughout China after the Qing were overthrown in the 1911 Revolution that national strength and unity under Han Chinese leadership was the only chance for

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China’s survival in a world of powerful states. This consensus had certainly been strengthened by the immediate Japanese wartime threat and the ineffectiveness of the GMD government in the face of that threat, but had been widespread for many years. The events since 1936 and the national crisis gripping the country had only served to deepen the strength of his view that the triumph of Zhu Yuanzhang over the Mongols had been a national revolution “led by a national hero driving out the invaders.” This view of the Ming unification as a war of national liberation was, however, only a part of Wu Han’s analysis. Another aspect of his interpretation of Zhu Yuanzhang in the biography was Zhu’s emergence as a harsh, designing, cruel ruler after taking the throne.59 Later it was this aspect of his interpretation of Zhu’s rule which Wu chose to emphasize more in a second version of the biography published in 1949 on the eve of the establishment of the new People’s Republic state. Even though Wu’s Zhu Yuanzhang in the original 1944 biography did have a dual character, it was a more positive than negative picture of the ruler and the regime he established that he presented. In fact, when Sun Yutang, also at Southwest United, read and commented on the book he told Wu that he thought the book was mistitled. It actually seemed to Sun to be a History of the Founding of the Ming Dynasty rather than a biography of Zhu Yuanzhang. This biography of the Ming founder was discussed at the time and rated as a brilliant new, modern biography. Although part of its immediate influence was because of Wu’s reputation as an established, well-known historian, it attracted wide attention because of its modern biographical style as well as the substantive interpretations. Wu had been attracted to the biography genre in historical writing from the time in his first year at Qinghua when he had written a fine chronological biography or nianpu of Hu Yinglin. Nianpu was the traditional biographic style. Hu Shi, attracted to Wu’s talents by this biography of Hu, made a point of discussing biography with him. Hu encouraged him to experiment with biography even while he was an undergraduate, Wu told his Qinghua roommate Zhou Fucheng.60 In those years the development of modern biography interested many, partly due to the emphasis in political interest that focused on the human leaders in the Chinese polity; this was a strong thread remaining from the Confucian emphasis on the centrality of the ruler’s moral obligation to his people. This emphasis was coupled with twentieth-century interest in the indigenous development of modern literary and historical genres. Both Hu Shi and Liang Qichao had advocated the importance of biography in the study of Chinese history, but their ideas of what biography should be went beyond the traditional forms. Biography, long an important genre of historical writing in China, had previously followed stereotyped forms such as the nianpu, which emphasized the subject’s public role and virtues as seen through the Confucian lens.61 Now there were new ideas abroad in intellectual thought.

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Liang Qichao, a promoter of biographical writing in the early years of the century, in the 1920s had developed ideas about types of biography that were “histories of men.” The most important of his types was the “special biographic narrative,” in which the biographical subject would be critically analyzed in terms of his social environment. Such critical examination stressing contextuality of an individual life was definitely a new introduction in Chinese biography. Liang’s ideas about biography had moved away from his earlier Carlylean ideas of great heroes as the makers of history and now came closer to the materialist conception of the importance of environment at the same time that he also saw the key role of personality. In the volume of his writings on historical theory published just before he died, Liang wrote, If the great men of history had lived in different surroundings, their achievements would not, of course, have been the same. . . . In writing history, we should neither neglect nor over-emphasize either the free will of great men or their temporal and geographic environment.62

Hu Shi also had ideas on the importance of biography. He wanted to see biographies written that were vivid and real to show historical figures in their real dimensions. Hu recognized: The most important condition for biography is recording the facts and giving a lifelike portrait, but we Chinese literary people still lack the habit of speaking honestly. We have taboos (about writing) on politics, taboos about contemporaries, and toward the deceased we also have taboos.63

He wanted the taboos broken and “whitewashing” of biographical subjects stopped, but on the other hand he was critical of the opposite tendency of demonizing enemies for political purposes as, for example, Wang Anshi had been slandered by his opponents in the histories. He called for “describing the person’s real personality, attitudes and opinions and thus making the reader feel as though he were seeing the real person.” Since there were no perfect heroes in history, for Hu Shi biographies should be written, not about flawless heroes, but about “failed heroes,” not because they were wrong but because they were real.64 Wu Han was undoubtedly one of the first, if not the first, to take up Hu Shi’s and Liang’s ideas of modern biography and utilize them with great success in writing his subject as a flawed hero who responded to his material and political environment within the characteristics of his personality, and in the course of events constructing the precursor of the unified Chinese nation. MODERN BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORICAL GENRE The penetrating view of the individual human personality in its social setting that was the mode of biography in the West, many Chinese intellectuals

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had been finding preferable to the presentation of historical figures in the formal fixed patterns that conformed to Confucian moral norms in the mode of Chinese traditional biography. This rising interest was fed by biographies translated from Western languages. One of the most popular was Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria which Wu had discussed with Fu Sinian and Qian Zhongshu and others. Wu had written to Fu Sinian he was going to try the biographical style of Strachey’s Queen Victoria in his biography of the Ming founder. In the preface to the first edition of the Zhu biography, From Monk’s Begging Bowl to Imperial Power (1943), Wu relates how after he read both Queen Victoria and Andre Maurois’s works (likely his Biography of Voltaire and Biography of Dickens), he wanted to follow their style in his biography. He modestly feared that although “he tried to draw a tiger it had turned out to be a sort of dog.”65 Strachey’s vivid narrative of the self-transformation of the maternally dominated young princess Victoria in her protected setting into a young queen with brilliant presence and independence of mind through his authorial use of descriptive material about both mundane daily life and high matters of state presented a biographic model far different from the moral roles played out in traditional Chinese biography. Wu used the new genre with great skill to write a powerful narrative that fulfilled the need in Chinese historical thought for biographies of key figures. The biography wasn’t finished until the close of 1943 when he published it under two separate titles, From Monk’s Begging Bowl to Imperial Power, and the other, Ming Taizu zhuan. Comparison shows the only difference to be that Wu added a chart of the Ming emperor’s chronology to Ming Taizu zhuan. Later, after the war was over, when he returned to Beiping and its libraries and could use the sources fully he revised and expanded the biography. The revised version, with a somewhat different emphasis, was published in early 1949 on the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic. It is this version that has been called by some the greatest modern Chinese biography.66 Nonetheless, once again he wasn’t happy with it after the founding of the new People’s Republic state and went to work to rewrite it again. After circulating this new manuscript to associates in 1955, he decided he wasn’t ready to publish this third version at that time. The last revision he completed in 1964 and published in February 1965, only a few months before he was attacked openly in a Shanghai newspaper. It would become, in fact, a part of the reason for Mao Zedong’s attack on him at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.67 In the end, without knowing more about Wu Han’s thoughts, we can only speculate on why he continued his search for what he considered the appropriate biographical interpretation. This must be one of the most striking examples of the interrelationship of past and present and the relationship of the changing viewpoint of the historian to his subject in any historical writing.68 When the biography was first published in 1944 it was acclaimed and widely read in intellectual circles. The very beginning of the first chapter

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plunges the reader straight into the peasant world of the late Yuan period with a vivid description of the local conditions and the people coping with drought, starvation, and pestilence. The young boy, Yuanzhang, and his brother try to bury the corpses of their dead parents but have no land to bury them in and no money to buy the coffins. Finally they are helped by a poor friend who gives them a bit of land for a tomb to bury their dead but when they try to dig the graves a mudslide off the mountain buries the corpses while the two boys watch helplessly as though watching a burial by heaven. Symbolically, the landlord will not help but a fellow povertystricken farmer does. The author uses the stylized factual material he finds in the sources to create a sympathetic human picture of the young Zhu. The chapter closes with the young man in the monastery as an acolyte, sweeping, lighting incense, striking the bell, beating the drum, cooking the food, washing clothes, all as his daily lesson, yet thinking of his former life and his brother and his friends who have gone off to find a different life. In this way the reader is carried along into the coming events, already inclined to understand this human subject positively, no matter what vicissitudes will happen in the next pages and the next years. The narrative follows Zhu Yuanzhang through his rise to power, his reign, and his death, situating his life in the context of the conditions around him. His fears, his harsh suspicious nature, his vicious suppression and slaughter of those he thought were opposing him are woven into the narrative. The author makes no effort to cut and fit the brutal autocratic terrorism of his rule into a positive heroic mold. Wu’s Zhu Yuanzhang is a hero, but a hero in the “flawed hero” style of realistic biography. In no way is this a hagiography.69 From this vivid and popular, widely read biography, it is hard to imagine that the project would become, as it did, what seems almost an obsession with Wu Han. The fact that the very complex figure and historical subject of the Ming founder had extensive ramifications for China’s present polity in the mid-twentieth century, as well as for history of the past, contributed profoundly to Wu’s continuing involvement with the subject. Not only was his subject the dynastic founder of the Ming, but he was the last Chinese ruler, up to Wu Han’s own time, who had succeeded in throwing out the foreign aggressor and unifying the country. Furthermore, he was the figure who had most set the key-note for the growth of autocracy in the Chinese pre-twentieth-century political structure, although certainly other rulers contributed to the increased use of autocratic methods of rule.70 It was this latter facet of Zhu Yuanzhang that Wu had first confronted in his investigations for the Hu Weiyong Case in the early 1930s. Furthermore, it was the aspect which has made Zhu a crucial figure in modern discourse on the nature of autocracy and autocratic rulers in the Chinese polity. As Wu started to work on the biography he could never have guessed that the biographical subject of Zhu Yuanzhang would eventually carry him into the very eye of the storm in the center of this national discourse in the twentieth century and fatally affect the course of his own life. In

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Wu’s own evolving conception, autocracy was but a part of his interpretation of Zhu. The creation and nature of national unity, the strengths and weaknesses of the Ming polity, and the social structure as it played out in the class nature of society were all key aspects of the narrative of the flawed Ming hero’s founding reign that Wu was writing.

DARK DAYS FOR WU AND YUAN ZHEN The first year Wu had been in Kunming was the most secure time in his life. National Yunnan University paid professors salaries based on the standard of national universities but, at the same time, since Kunming was located in the border region prices were low. He was able to save a lot and buy many books. But this situation didn’t last, by the next year prices had risen sky high. His salary soon lost half of its value to inflation. In addition, he had the much larger expenses of supporting his family now in Kunming. Wu was also always happy to help others in difficulty. He had never learned to keep his money for himself. One of his students at Yunnan University was from Jinhua where Wu had gone to middle school. When the student needed money Wu simply gave him what he needed.71 When they moved out to live in the country at Baiguo xiang his financial situation became more difficult. There were two booksellers who came to the house from time to time. In the past they had brought books for him to examine and select to buy. Now they came to buy from him. When he had no more books to sell then he had to let the young girl go who had taken care of the house and do all the housework himself. His friends Liang Fangzhong and Tang Xianglong would find him washing vegetables in the little stream in front of the big gate of the compound when they came up the path from the road across the fields. Despite all of this, he still worked late at night writing the Monk’s Begging Bowl.72 When his student Li Yan, who was studying Song history with Zhang Yinlin needed to read for his examinations at the Central Research Academy Library, located at Longtougou not far from his house, Wu invited Li to stay at their house for a few weeks. Late one evening when they were talking Li told Wu about his doubts about the authenticity of a particular book. Wu asked him if he had read the condensed Siku tiyao and told him the question could be found discussed there. “This is a necessary path to follow if you want to enter the treasure of historical books and records. You must put one on your desk. I told you about this long ago, have you forgotten?” The next day Wu walked into Kunming to teach and when he returned brought back a package for Li. When Li opened it he found a fine edition of the Siku tiyao inscribed by Wu to him as a gift.73 As the national situation worsened, locally Yunnan was more threatened by Japanese bombing, the Burma situation deteriorated, and Japanese troops

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began to threaten from the south. In the fall of 1939 Japanese forces had landed on the Guangdong coast and soon pushed west to Nanning in the province of Guangxi, next to Yunnan. The supposed safe haven of Kunming was not as secure as the strategists had thought. Normally a very dynamic, outgoing person, Wu began to withdraw and became increasingly worried by the tension in his family as well as for their safety. The conflict with his mother over his commitment to Yuan Zhen added to his inner turmoil. His new wife’s fragile health was a worry. His friend Luo Ergang visited him at the village outside of Kunming and later wrote about how surprised he was to see the change in Wu’s mood: It was as though he had become another person. Before he was brimming with energy, but then he was especially despondent and gloomy. Except for going into the city to teach, he spent the whole day in the village at the bridge fishing. Sometimes he put down the fishing pole and just walked back and forth on the road with his head down. I could see that he was very depressed. Then a period of great change in his life came.74

At this juncture instructions came from the university that created a watershed in his life. In the fall of 1940, the second year after Wu returned to teach at Xinan Lianda (which included Qinghua University), he was sent to Sichuan to teach Chinese general history in the new branch of Lianda being set up to provide a more secure location for the university in the town of Xuyong. Because of the dire Japanese threat to Kunming the Ministry of Education had decided to relocate the university and this was to be the first step. The Japanese had just captured northern Indo-China and forced the British to close the Burma Road which led over the mountains to Kunming from Burma. As a first step the university decided to open a branch campus for freshmen the first year. It was important national policy to preserve and protect the university. Xuyong was a remote county in the hinterland of Sichuan at the juncture of the three provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan. Its only connections to the outside world were one road and a small river. Even getting there from Kunming was a difficult job. There was no train and only rudimentary air travel. Wu had no choice but to sell the rest of his books and his furniture to raise the money for their transportation to the new location since the university would not pay for the professor’s expenses. After selling their belongings they waited in the airport office every day for two weeks while they lived in a hotel, waiting for tickets to fly. When they finally arrived in Xuyong they found that primitive facilities for the university’s people had only just been hastily arranged in the town of Xuyong. The town had many deserted temples which were converted to be used as university facilities. The Confucian Wen miao temple was used for classrooms and offices, the temple to Guandi was made into a dormitory for the male students and the Palace of the Emperor temple became the girls’ dormitory. Every day the students lived with the great

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clay Buddha gazing down on them as they slept on straw spread on the floor. The food was bad and the water for drinking contaminated resulting in rampant intestinal disease.75 Wu taught Chinese general history to the entire freshmen class of more than three hundred students. Under difficult conditions and stress, far from home in the war-torn country, a group of the young freshmen began to gather around him. His lectures were much more interesting than anything they had encountered in secondary school. Rather than the usual structure of dynasties, he organized the course around the social and political systems in the past. The political institutions, the military system, and the law system formed the course structure; he talked about the reasons that these systems had developed as they did. The students noticed his ideas were influenced by moderate historical materialism. This way of teaching, not new to Wu since he had always structured his lectures on topics and themes from the time he started to teach, appealed to the students because it made the past more meaningful than the traditional presentation of events by the rise and fall of dynastic eras. Adventurous and youthful himself, the students noticed that Wu Han took real interest in them and their problems in spite of his own troubles.76 In Sichuan, the Wu’s own living situation was extremely difficult. The trip had been exhausting for Yuan Zhen. From the day they arrived she had been ill. There were no modern doctors in the town and Western medicine was nonexistent. The lack of good food and the water problem caused more difficulty for her. Because of the miserable conditions and his financially strapped situation her care took all of Wu’s time when he wasn’t teaching. There was no time for research. Some of the students, attracted to Wu because of his open and buoyant nature, saw how difficult life was for him because of his wife’s illness and tried to help him find a doctor but it was impossible. Beset by these difficulties his mood deteriorated and he lost some of his personal dynamism, becoming very discouraged.77 Among the students in Xuyong there were both Communist and Guomindang Party members and also a lot of progressive students who didn’t belong to either party. The Communists did not identify themselves openly as members, remaining underground. In early December to commemorate December Ninth the progressive students put up wall newspapers for the first time and showed their strength. When they tried to form an organization the Guomindang Three People’s Youth Group disturbed their meeting so the group was snuffed out.78 While Wu Han was in Sichuan with Lianda, the New Fourth Army Incident took place in January 1941. Within the United Front environment in central China faced with Communist efforts at active expansion of their military influence, the Nationalist Army military command had attacked and destroyed a portion of the Communist New Fourth Army operating as a part of the United Front with the GMD armies. The bloody battle occurred

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as the Nationalist Army was attempting to drive the New Fourth Army that was north of the Yangtze River out of central China.79 However, it wasn’t until March, two months later, that the Lianda campus in Xuyong even heard about the Incident, so isolated were they. The CCP temporary party branch was the first to learn the news. When they did hear it they immediately put up a wall newspaper about it called “Introduction” which included Zhou Enlai’s statement on the Incident. By noon the newspaper had been stripped off the wall and destroyed by the Guomindang group. The reaction of most students to the news was anger at the Guomindang attack. Another wall newspaper quickly went up with comments signed by the Communist Party branch at the university. The Guomindang government was so alarmed that troops were sent to calm the campus. Yet, even in this dangerous situation the progressive students formed reading groups to read Marxist books sent to them by the party from Kunming.80 In general, in unoccupied China the public opinion response from the intellectuals to the Nationalist government attack on the New Fourth Army was shock and outrage. An American political scientist has observed: “This defeat made the Chinese Communists martyrs to the cause of Chinese nationalism.”81 Not only was this seen by many as an attack by the national government on the New Fourth Army which had been allied with it in the United Front in opposition to the Japanese, but it really marked the end of all possibility of an effective United Front itself. This meant the likelihood of a renewal of civil war conditions between the Nationalist and Communist forces, which many of the intellectuals seriously felt would further weaken the war effort against Japan.82 An interesting sidelight related to the crisis throws a light on the extent to which Wu Han had moved away from Hu Shi and how far Hu Shi had moved toward a conservative political position relative to the active years of their student/teacher relationship. By this time Hu had been made China’s ambassador to the United States. After hearing of the disaster, Edgar Snow had written a very sympathetic news article about it based on Liao Chengzhi’s information from the rear office of the New Fourth Army. Snow’s dispatch from Hong Kong broke the story in the United States. In Washington Hu Shi insisted that the reports were completely false and said publicly there are “no Communist armies” in China in any case.83 While Hu Shi may not have known about the battle, it is impossible that he didn’t know of the existence of the Eighth Route and the New Fourth Army in the United Front. In Xuyong there were many outraged students who came to talk to Wu Han about the situation. In their eyes this crisis weakened the opposition to the Japanese and seemed to be a return to the inward turning encirclement policy toward the Communist Party, coupled with appeasement of Japanese aggression, which had been the strategy of the Guomindang prior to the United Front.84 Because of their interest in Wu and their efforts to help

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him with his own problems and his sense of alarm and shock over the New Fourth Army Incident a bond formed between Wu and some of the most progressive students in these days. It was a bond that would continue in the coming years. In the months ahead as they moved back to Lianda some may have been underground members of the Communist Party, but this was only incidental to their being Lianda students and to their interest in Professor Wu’s ideas about Chinese history. In fact, it wasn’t until later that Wu actually learned some were party members. Their conversations were those of politically aware, liberal students and teacher, deeply disturbed by the policies and treachery of their government. As his eyes opened Wu was beginning to move away from his habitual aversion to politics.

NEW LINK TO AN OLD TEACHER In the summer of 1941, after they all, professor and students, had endured a most difficult year in the university’s Sichuan Xuyong location the university leadership suddenly abandoned its plan to move to Xuyong and decided to close the Sichuan branch. This meant Wu and Yuan Zhen had to return to Kunming. This time they decided to go by river boat to Chongqing first to see Yuan Zhen’s old teacher, the scholar Dong Biwu, before returning to Kunming. By this time, Dong was operational head of the Communist Southern Bureau (Nanfang ju) which had been established openly as the Communist Party presence in the wartime capital of Chongqing, under the United Front agreement with the Guomindang government. As part of the United Front the CCP maintained an office in the national capital and published a daily newspaper, the Xinhua ribao or New China Daily. While the office was legal, not all of the activities conducted from it had been contemplated in the agreement. It was through this office a great deal of CCP undercover activity was carried on in the next years. Yuan Zhen’s sister Fuzhi had stayed in Chongqing for a while to see Dong after she left them in Kunming in 1939. Now when they came to visit him this was the first time that Dong knew Yuan Zhen and Wu had married. Dong Biwu had not seen Yuan Zhen since before he was driven out of the city of Wuhan during the great Guomindang hunt for Communists in 1927. In that emergency Dong Biwu had always shown great concern for his students. The two men liked each other from the beginning; as soon as they met they recognized they shared the scholar’s outlook and interest in China’s past. Yuan Zhen previously had not had any way of corresponding with her sister in Yan’an; now Dong told her to send her letters to him and he would put them in the mail pouch that was sent from the Southern Bureau office to Yan’an. She received letters from Fuzhi the same way after this. When they left Chongqing to return to Kunming they sent a letter to Fuzhi to tell her about their wedding and their lives. Dong himself wrote to

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Fuzhi about their visit.85 Both Yuan Zhen and Wu Han were much happier that they were back in communication with Yuan Fuzhi again. The news that was coming from Yan’an at this time was very good; people were happy and life was comfortable. The Communist Party had been allowing some private business. It looked as though the harsh measures of earlier times had been left behind and Yan’an was becoming what progressive students often called the “Holy Land.” News like this made life in the Guomindang area only seem bleaker. During this time the Communist leadership was beginning to reach out to intellectuals and cultural leaders in the rear areas. In the White Areas, that is those controlled by the Guomindang, the Southern Bureau headed by Dong Biwu, supervised these activities. Although their meeting with Dong in 1941 was purely personal, motivated by Yuan Zhen’s desire to visit with her beloved teacher, it was a forerunner of future contacts between them. After visiting with Dong, the two flew back to Kunming to pick up their lives there once again.

DARKER DAYS: ON MOUNT SHOUYANG When Wu returned to the city of Eternal Spring in late summer of 1941 he was depressed and very discouraged by the effort it took to start life all over again in Kunming. Having had to sell his books and his furniture to pay for their transportation to move to Xuyong to teach, when he returned he was totally without financial resources, so poor that even when his wife needed hospitalization he was unable to pay. Cruelly, there was “nothing left to sell.” Later he wrote that he had been “extremely wrought up emotionally” about his own situation, frustrated about his work, desperate about his impoverished financial condition, and worried about Yuan Zhen.86 Expressing his hopelessness and anger he wrote a couplet to depict his despair: The books have been sold to the secret palace of Tian Luge, But we only exist in hunger at Mount Shouyang.87

The image of the hidden Han dynasty palace where the books were stored combined with the image of the Shang dynasty brothers who starved in the mountains rather than give in to the Zhou enemy, Wu and Yuan Zhen moved back to the Tang Family Temple, Wu’s own Mount Shouyang, at Luosipo far out in the countryside, and he returned to teaching at Lianda. Everyone’s anxiety was increased by the deteriorating situation at the war front and the loss in value of the currency. Early that winter in December 1941, after the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor triggered the global Second World War, the Japanese had moved to occupy the British colony of Hong Kong. The scandal of the flight from Hong Kong by airplane

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of Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kong) and his entourage including servants, and even the family dog, to escape the Japanese occupying force created a huge uproar in Kunming. Many in Kunming had friends and associates in Hong Kong. That the people of high political position could be so privileged while intellectuals living in Hong Kong had no way and no money to leave, turned Wu, unable to pay for his wife’s hospitalization, as well as many other intellectuals, even more bitterly against the Nationalist government. The GMD government could send planes to Hong Kong to rescue the important officials of the Guomindang, but gave no help to ordinary people, nor to the not-so-ordinary intellectuals. In Kunming, erupting out of this resentment, there emerged a spontaneous political movement called the “Criticize Kong Movement” which tapped into May Fourth slogans from years before. The slogan for “Rekindle the fierce fires of May Fourth” was painted in Chinese on the wall newspapers. The whole campus seethed with discussion and talk of what should be done. As the movement developed and other university students joined the Lianda-led movement the sense grew that the university had a “democratic tradition.” At this time students on campus who were Communist underground members merely stood on the sidelines and watched because they had been instructed to “remain underground for the long term, accumulate strength and wait for the opportunity.”88 In the broad picture this spontaneous movement marked a significant turning point away from passive acceptance of the war and wartime conditions by the breadth of nonpolitical intellectuals. Back at Lianda’s main campus for the 1941–1942 university year, Wu Han taught both Chinese general history and Ming history each year until the university was closed in the spring of 1946. Every freshman was required to take Chinese general history to give them a foundation in the history of the country they were fighting to preserve. At first there were two teachers, Lei Haizong and Wu Han, and then later Sun Yutang was added as the third. Wu taught all of the students in the College of Arts, Lei taught those in the College of Natural Sciences and Wu’s old friend Sun Yutang took the students in the College of Social Sciences. Each teacher followed his own course organization which meant there were real differences in the classes. Lei Haizong, the history department chairman, had long been interested in historical periodization and thus arranged his course around historical periods. His students were expected to learn history from this perspective although many found it unappealing. Wu taught general history (Tong shi) in his own special way, quite different from the usual organization of history courses. He structured the course according to broad topics putting little emphasis on periodization beyond considering the period from Emperor Qin Shi Huang to the end of Qing as one grand empire. Within this vast time period he divided history into many special systems, such as the land system, military system, legal system, examination system and so on. In the case of each system he talked about its formation,

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evolution, and development, and the success and failure of the system over the 2,000 years of the empire. His lack of attention to the change of dynasties was nontraditional. Some of the students who took careful and exact notes remembered that they had thought his lectures comparatively easy to follow and take notes on because his organization was clear and his speech was Zhejiang guanhua, the official language, spoken in slow deliberate style. The readings he used for the students were Deng Zhicheng, Zhonghua erqian nian shi; Qian Mu, Guoshi dagang; and Zhang Yinlin, Dong Han qian Zhongguo shigang. Wu particularly emphasized and respected Zhang’s book, telling the students the author was a brilliant student of Liang Qichao’s and the book not only had great value as a history but great literary value as well. Wu was well liked by his students despite his courses being considered difficult and the examinations anticipated with dread. He took teaching very seriously. Exams were held in mid-June. One year the whole class had only eleven or twelve grades over seventy with the highest a seventy-seven. In spite of the rigor of his courses, he was very popular with students, sometimes lecturing to as many as five hundred students. Students who had been assigned to Lei Haizong or Sun Yutang flocked to his classes as auditors, even standing outside the open window because the space inside the hall was completely filled. One classroom had a small tree just outside the window of the low building that sometimes students would climb up and perch in to listen through the open window.89 Wu once wrote that “after 1940 politics sought me out.” He was a proud man and the inability to pay his wife’s hospital bill was deeply painful to him, a symptom of his situation. He worked hard, walked 40 li every time he lectured to his classes, did the housework and marketing and his own research and yet could not make an adequate living while others grew rich. Conditions of life in wartime China simply would not leave him alone. Even before reaching Sichuan to teach at Yunnan University he had begun to view the current situation in political terms. Being young himself, only thirty-two in 1941, and already a well-known scholar, students who were also suffering sought him out more and more to talk over the political situation as well as to talk about what he taught in his lectures about the political issues in historic times. In his later recollections of that period he recalled “because I had never had experience in political power struggles, I was comparatively radical and had a lot in common with the young people so I often spent time with them.” As his life and thinking changed, in his words his “dissatisfaction with the Chiang (government) developed into hatred.”90 Even in his class lectures on history, politics began to seem relevant. Later in the 1950s through the lens of his open support of the Communist Party Wu described the situation of the early 1940s: The atmosphere became that of the growing wealth and corruption of the four great clans with the ordinary people unable to live, and uncontrolled currency

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inflation. The small city of Kunming was full of American goods, the spies of Chiang Kaishek dominated and there was not the slightest sign of democracy and freedom. My anger became stronger day by day over the foreign humiliation, the internal slaughter and the Chiang (government’s) political power. In my essays, in speaking from the platform, in writing and talking, in everything I did this had an effect.91

Many of his students have said that when he lectured, while he would mainly focus on the topic there were sometimes oblique critical comments on the current regime. According to them, in class he generally stuck closely to the historical subject and saved his stronger words for outside of class, presumably because he was aware of the presence of spies and the power of secret agents. Nonetheless, there slipped into his lectures occasional ironic comments. One day in his General History class he told a story about the Southern Song Premier Jia Sidao whose actions undermined the state, linking this with Kong Xiangxi from Hong Kong delivering dogs using airplanes, “we can call him the ‘flying dog president.’”92 Wu’s outrage came not from ideology or theoretical reasons but from an innate sense of justice and fairness and from the frustrations of an independent spirit that, in the end, answered only to itself.

NOTES 1. Israel (1998), 12–13. 2. Li Yan (1981), 34–46. Interviews 21, 22, 23, and 24 for material from Li Yan used in this section. 3. Personal communication with David T. Roy who made the trip from Hanoi to Kunming a year after Wu. Also from my own trip from Haiphong to Kunming by the same railroad on the same tracks in the 1990s. 4. Wiens (1976), 20; Times Atlas of China (1974), 93; People’s Republic of China Atlas, CIA (1971), 20. 5. The Yunnan region ethnic groups had long included a large Chinese Muslim (Hui) population. Even in 1971 the ethnic groups were still 30 percent of the provincial population, according to the CIA People’s Republic of China Atlas (1971), 20. 6. An airport was soon built, railroad connections only in 1969 when the Kunming Guiyang link was added to the national railway system. Times Atlas, 93. 7. Hall (1976), 7–9, 49–55. 8. Hall (1976), 174. 9. Hall (1976), 137–41. 10. Hall (1976), 144–49; Minguo renwu dacidian (1581). Miao was educated in the United States at the University of Minnesota as a mining engineer. 11. U.S. Department of State, Yunnan, Political Report for December 1936. Eastman (1984), 10–44. 12. U.S. Department of State, Yunnan Political Report for February 1937. 13. U.S. Department of State, Yunnan Political Report for February, July, August, and September 1937. Li Yan (1981), 35.

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14. Israel (1998). 15. U.S. Department of State, Yunnan Political Report for October 1937. 16. Li Yan (1981), 38. 17. Li Yan (1981), 40. Wu Han, “Mingdai Jingnan zhi yi yu guodu bei qian.” 18. Descriptions of Hu Shi’s style as a teacher are drawn from Luo Ergang (1958) and Hu Shi’s letters to Wu Han as well as several of the interviews. 19. Li Yan (1981), 40. Description of the house from the present author’s visit in 1986. 20. For the following section Israel (1977), 131–54, and Israel (1998). 21. As quoted in Israel (1977), 134. 22. Israel (1977), 138. 23. For the March see Wu Zhiyi (1986). Also Israel (1998). 24. Interview 58. 25. Interview 58. 26. Wu Puyue (1984), 235. 27. When the mother had gone to Beiping in 1936 she had not seen Yuan Zhen. Wu and his friends had told her that Yuan Zhen was better and had left the city for a while. 28. Interviews 58 and 61. 29. Li Yan (1981), 41. Interview 39. 30. Interview 58. 33. Interview 61. 32. The effects of Wu Han’s marriage to Yuan Zhen and his devotion and love for her ramified and reverberated in his family for the rest of his life, even after his death. Always just under the surface a tension existed, at times reappearing in explicit statements. This was evident both tacitly and in explicit remarks in interviews with family and friends. It was obvious that there was a continuing fascination and effort to understand the nature and vitality of the relationship, even as the interviewees didn’t wholly applaud their relationship. 33. Interview 39. 34. In the Cultural Revolution Yuan Zhen was asked many times, “why did Wu Han love you so deeply?” as though she had some magic hold over him (Interview 62). Implicit in this question was the attitude that this intellectualized, egalitarian, primarily nonphysical relationship between man and woman was unacceptable, nonhierarchical, and therefore non-Chinese, especially since she was unable to bear his children and in this respect she was being demonized. In the assumptions of the radical leftists a relationship of devotion and pure love was evil because it was individual, that is, beyond ideology. 35. He had refused an arranged marriage before he left home. 36. Interview 62. The similarity of their relationship to classical relationships has been commented on independently by several people: it has been seen as that of Daiyu and Baoyu in Hunglou meng by Ho Bingdi and several other people. Also the Guangxu Emperor and his concubine Zhen Fei are reputed to have shared the same opinions and enthusiasm for reform. In Ba Jin’s Jia, the elder brother and sister-in-law loved deeply and shared the same opinions. These tragic relationships have become metaphors that stick in the minds of people. Wu Han and Yuan Zhen’s love story itself has become something like this for many people. See Wang Hongzhi, under the penname of Lin Lin. Whether or not the existence of such metaphors influenced Wu Han as models in the conscious or unconscious structuring of his relationship with Yuan

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Zhen is worth consideration. An example within Wu’s life, his friend Qian Jiaju thinks that a literary hero from a Qing novel influenced Wu, so the mechanism for this kind of tropic modal patterning of behavior is not a foreign concept in Chinese thought. 37. Interview 61. Wu Han, “Wan Ming liukou shi shehui beijing.” 38. Interview 39. 39. Interview 61. 40. Barlow (1974) suggests that in men’s taking a new place in the evolution of Chinese traditional society in this century a new subject position for women had to be evolved. Thus the Chinese male intellectuals’ interest in rethinking woman both collectively and individually had a great deal to do with their own position in society. This is worth considering in understanding Wu Han’s life. For the novel Yesou puyan and its influence on Wu see chapter 1 in this volume. 41. Interview 63. 42. Freyn (1940), 34–40, quote on 40. Wu Zhiyi (1986); Israel (1998). 43. Guoli xinan lianhe daxue xiaoshi ziliao, 96. 44. Guoli xinan lianhe daxue xiaoshi ziliao, 29. 45. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin.” 46. This is the project described in chapter 6 in this volume. Volume 1 was published by Zhang Yinlin as Dong Han qian Zhongguo shigang. 47. Su Chi [Zhang Yinlin] (1929), 8. 48. Wu Han, ed., Zhongguo lishi xiao congshu [A series of brief Chinese histories]. This extensive series, distributed and sold all over China, was initiated solely by Wu Han who as editor in chief organized the participation and contribution of senior scholars and many secondary school teachers in a truly popular history. While it had the blessing of the CCP it was not the idea of the leadership but was Wu’s project, a direct outgrowth of these early visionary plans developed in his collaboration with Zhang Yinlin. Publication of the series, stopped during the Cultural Revolution, was resumed in the 1980s. 49. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1920), a general world history was widely admired in China. Hu Shi had written positively about it, saying that Wells had included China as an important part of the world. However, after examining Wells’s work it must be said that Hu was grateful for a pitifully small amount of superficial and patronizing attention to China. 50. Hon Tze-ki (1996). 51. Gu Jiegang and Wang Chongqi’s Benguo shi, was banned at this time by the Ministry of Education. See Mazur “Discontinuous Continuity: The New Synthesis of General History” (2007). 52. Wu Han, “Ji Zhang Yinlin,” 254–55. 53. Wu Han’s biography was published by two publishers under two titles in 1944, Ming Taizu zhuan and Cong sengbo dao huangquan. Wu’s 1936 article, “Yuan diguo zhi bengkuei yu Ming zhi jianguo.” 54. Li Yan (1981), 41; Interview 113. 55. Letter 15 December 1942 from Wu Han to Fu Sinian contained in Wang Xunsen and Du Zhengsheng (1995), 226–27. I have dated the year of the letter by internal evidence. 56. Preface to Ming Taizu zhuan. 57. Liu Mian [Wu Han], “Ming Taizu he Cong sengbo dao huangquan.” 58. Wu Han, “Yuan diguo zhi bengkuei yu Ming zhi jianguo.”

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59. Wu Han, “Wo de zhixue yu sixiang shi zenyang jinbu de,” 18. 60. Interview 68. 61. Nivison (1962), 457–62. 62. Howard (1962), quotes from 471. Liang Qichao (1922), 38–39. 63. Hu Shi (1930), 2. 64. Hu Shi (1930), 3. Hu Shi himself wrote about such a “failed hero” in his biography of Zhang Xiaoruo. In spite of Hu Shi’s advocacy of the modern biographical form he never wrote one of his own, but stayed within the familiar nianpu. 65. Interview 140 with Qian Zhongshu; letter to Fu Sinian. Wu Han, preface to You sengbo dao. 66. The 1949 version BDRC3, 426 (published in 1970) refers to it as being “considered by many writers to be the best biography written by a modern Chinese.” 67. The versions are: Ming Taizu zhuan (1944) and its twin You sengbo dao huangquan (1944), Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (1949), Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (1955, u.p. manuscript), Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (1965). The 1949 version is the one best known by Western scholars. In the PRC the 1965 version is the most well known. See chapter 11 in this volume for the 1965 version. 68. Mazur, “The Four Zhu Yuanzhangs: a Succession of Biographies of the Ming Founder” (1997) for a fuller discussion of the four versions. 69. For a different view of Wu Han as biographer of Zhu Yuanzhang based on the 1949 version see Mote (1961). Mote, 31, refers to Wu Han’s writings on Zhu Yuanzhang as “emotional and prejudiced,” needing the counterbalance of Meng Sen’s interpretation which downplayed Zhu’s autocratic terrorism. Meng, of course, followed the more traditional Confucian form of historiography and fashioned his narrative to stress the positive aspects of Ming Taizu’s reign. 70. Mote (1961). 71. Interview 120. 72. Interview 120; Li Yan (1981), 43. 73. Li Yan (1981), 44. 74. Luo Ergang (1984), 11. 75. “Lianda Xuyong fenxiao shenghuo jishi,” Jiachui xiansong (1986), 231–40, especially 231. 76. Interview 117. 77. Interview 117; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 78. “Lianda Xuyong fenxiao,” 234. 79. Johnson (1962), 136–40. Yongfa Chen (1986), 64–77. 80. “Lianda Xuyong fenxiao,” (1986), 237–38. 81. Johnson (1962), 140. 82. Van Slyke (1967). 83. Snow (1958), 235–36. 84. Interview 117; Interview 66. 85. Interview 61. 86. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Interview 117; Interview 21. 87. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Tian Luge was the secret archival treasure room in the royal palace of the Han dynasty where rare books were stored. It was probably also the name of a bookstore in Kunming. Mount Shouyang is the place in Yongjin, Shanxi Province, to which Boyi and Shuqi, the brothers of the last emperor of the Shang dynasty, fled after they were urged to surrender to the first emperor of

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the next dynasty, the Zhou. The brothers preferred to stay in the barren mountain landscape and live on wild plants, finally dying of hunger, rather than surrender to the men who overthrew their dynasty. 88. Yunnan wenshi ziliao 34 (1988): 247. 89. Zhang Yuanqian (1988), 173–74. 90. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 91. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 92. Yunnan wenshi ziliao 34 (1988): 24.

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olitics was becoming inescapably a part of many intellectuals’ lives in war-torn China. Until the early 1940s political affairs had been intellectually relevant and interesting for Wu Han but not an activity which he cared to participate in himself. Now when life’s conditions were intertwined with politics he began to change. In the autumn of 1943, a year and a half after Wu and Yuan Zhen came back from Sichuan an old friend of hers from the early 1920s at Wuchang Girls’ Normal School, came to visit them in Kunming.1 Li Wenyi had been one of the small group that included Yuan Zhen and her sister in the student rebellion at the school. In 1921–1922 the girls had been special protégés of their teachers, Chen Tanqiu, Li Hanjun, and Dong Biwu. All three of these teachers were also founding members of the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. In the following years, after the three young women joined the Communist Party during 1925 and 1926, Fuzhi and Wenyi went off to Moscow to study. Yuan Zhen, however, remained in China to enter Wuhan University. After a frightening experience, hiding from Guomindang agents hunting her as a Communist and relative of Communist “bandits” in Wuhan, Yuan Zhen went on to enter Qinghua University in Beiping to study history.2

RIPPLES FROM MAY FOURTH Now in 1943 in Kunming, Li Wenyi came to see her old friend and schoolmate comrade-in-arms. Because of her long illness Yuan Zhen had lost her “single line” relationship in the party long before she met Wu Han so she was no longer a member. Nonetheless, she had never lost her interest in 269

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the communist viewpoint. During the intervening years, Li Wenyi, a progressive woman, had worked as a party organizer and activist, but always underground although anyone who knew her well might have guessed that she was a party member. This was the first time Wenyi had met Wu Han and years since she had seen Yuan Zhen. She recalled years later how distressed she was when she saw how difficult their lives were despite Wu’s prestigious academic position. There was no money, not even for a doctor. Sometimes Wu went fishing to provide fresh nourishing food for Yuan Zhen. One day he started talking to Wenyi very seriously about his worries over the country’s situation and the anti-fascist struggle of the allied countries. He talked about Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial rule, about the Chinese people’s desire for unity, the anti-Japanese resistance, and Chiang’s autocratic opposition to the people’s wishes. Wu told her he was extremely dissatisfied with Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. She could see he was full of complaints like most of the students and teachers. She told him it was no use to just complain and suggested he join some organization where he could be more effective. Wenyi brought up the Democratic Movement and explained what the League of Democratic Groups was and what it was trying to do.3 She said both she and her husband were members of this centrist Kunming organization, the forerunner of the Democratic League. Very soon Li Wenyi introduced Wu to her husband, Zhou Xinmin, a professor at Yunnan University who was also the organization chairman of the Kunming League of Democratic Groups. He was actually participating in the league as a Guomindang member. Zhou came often to see them and Wu enjoyed talking for long hours with him about the political situation. Although Zhou and Li had both been Communist Party members for many years it was not openly known in Kunming, but Wu Han knew about it from Yuan Zhen. She was familiar with the Communist Party and how it worked from her own experience as a member years before and she knew that Wenyi had come to Kunming to work with women as she had for years, ever since the days of the Left Wuhan government in 1927.4 Through these personal relationships originating far back in the student tide in post–May Fourth Wuchang, by late 1943 Wu was beginning to have close connections with people who were actively working in the Communist Party.

EXPANDING THE UNITED FRONT In fact, Zhou Xinmin had been sent by Dong Biwu to Kunming charged with promoting the growth of the League of Democratic Parties. Before he left Chongqing Dong Biwu had talked with him about making more friends for the Democratic Movement in Kunming to help it expand.5

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Li Wenyi was soon able to get medical attention for Yuan Zhen through her association with Li Gongpu, a prominent activist member of the League of Democratic Groups. He had a medical doctor friend whom he asked to see Yuan Zhen. Li Gongpu had been one of the group of intellectuals known as the Seven Gentlemen whose imprisonment by the Guomindang in 1936 had become a cause celebre across China around which people rallied in protest against the GMD.6 Hua Gang was another party member Wu came to know, sent by Dong Biwu to Kunming late in the fall of 1943, his responsibility was the Communist Party United Front work in Yunnan. A party member since 1925, during the difficult period of 1928–1929 in Shanghai he had been an important cadre in youth and student work because he was exceptionally good at organizing propaganda work with youth. Hua was a historian who became known as a Marxist historian of modern China. In fact, he took a position as professor under the name, Lin Shaohou, in the sociology department at Yunnan University, when Wu Han introduced him to his friend, Fei Xiaotong, the chairman of the Yunda Sociology Department.7 Hua had been sent to Kunming for several reasons. One important mission was to be the representative of the Communist Party to Long Yun, the powerful Yunnan militarist governor who opposed Chiang Kai-shek, with the objective to encourage Long to support the Communists.8 Long Yun had been a holdout against Chiang’s leadership of the unification of China from the beginning. Kunming’s strategic importance as a crucial node on the transportation line that entered the war-bound country through Burma meant that control of the region was of the greatest importance to China militarily as well as politically. An equally important reason that Hua went to Kunming was his mission to encourage the transformation and expansion of the League of Democratic Groups from a loose association of groups to a more tightly knit organization based strictly on individual membership that would fit into the United Front of the Communists and the Guomindang. To carry out these policies “to enlarge the United Front” and help the league to “unite intellectuals” the Communist Southern Bureau under Dong Biwu was sending these people, among them Hua Gang, Zhou Xinmin, and Li Wenyi.9 As Wu got to know Zhou Xinmin he found that Zhou was interested in many issues which he had never thought about before. It was Zhou who introduced Wu to Hua Gang and from Zhou that he learned about the United Front and what its goals were.10 Wu Han certainly had heard of the United Front before, but this was the first time he fully realized that there was a place in it for intellectuals like himself who wanted a forum where they could make their political criticism effectively heard by the government. Since the New Fourth Army disaster, the Communist leadership’s conception of the significance of the Front had changed. The party leaders

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realized that it could include groups in the middle of the political spectrum who wanted their voices heard in a national forum. Having resisted political affiliation and activity up to this point, it was new to Wu to think of taking a role in centrist politics. What these friends were telling him now about the possibility of centrist voices being heard in the United Front and changes that might come in the League of Democratic Groups made sense. The league might well be the place to put his frustrations to constructive work for the good of the country and himself. Since his marriage to Yuan Zhen he had begun to shed his antipathy for political action. He was beginning to realize more and more that his country’s past history had a great deal to do with the present in an immediate way, beyond the sense of controlled reform of the culture that Hu Shi had advocated. The United Front that Zhou and Hua were speaking of was a theme Mao Zedong had begun talking about widely in 1940.11 This United Front was predicated on the need for the Communists to cooperate with individuals and groups, not only the Nationalist government. In a 1941 speech to cadres Mao had talked about opening doors and the need to “cooperate democratically and consult with non-Party people. . . . We still have many failings. We are not afraid to admit them and are determined to get rid of them. . . . We shall do so by strengthening education within the party and by cooperating democratically with non-Party people.”12 The main objectives of the Communists at that time were: “The overthrow of Japanese imperialism and the building of a China of New Democracy.” This “New Democracy” meant Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary Three People’s Principles. Since both of these objectives were the objectives of the Guomindang as well as the Communist program, it wasn’t difficult to make them the basic principles of the United Front.13 In his speech reflecting the new policy, Mao frankly said Communists needed to correct their “closed door” work style and understand that they were “duty bound to cooperate with people outside of the Party who are against Japan, and have no right to shut them out. . . . We should listen attentively to the voices of the masses, keep in close touch with them.” Mao’s words appealed to people outside of the party as well as within. They fulfilled what people were looking for in national leadership and not finding in the Guomindang. “Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.” “Communists have the duty to cooperate democratically with non-Party people and have no right to exclude them and monopolize everything. The Communist Party is a political party which works in the interests of the nation and people and which has absolutely no private ends to pursue.” “It is only by subjecting our failings to such crossfire, both from within and from without, that we can remedy them and really set the affairs of state to rights.”14 What attracted people to the United Front in the 1940s? To individuals on the scene, enmeshed in the current war emergency and later, after the antiJapanese war ended in the civil war period, the Front didn’t mean the cold

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generalities of an abstract principle linking (or failing to link) two parties, but the immediate context of political relationships touching on their individual lives at the time. People were most immediately attracted by the possibility of a practical framework within which they could actively support opposition to the Japanese and support their country. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, then this patriotic feeling shifted to the support of national unity and opposition to civil war. This was a powerful sort of individual motivation. The political and social groups, often local, which many people joined, could join together in the United Front under the banner of opposing the enemy and patriotic support of the country. The National Salvation Association (NSA) groups which had organized all over China after the December Ninth Movement in 1935, and continued to grow afterward were local, loosely organized patriotic groups that were to become a central component of the United Front as it developed.15 Many of the NSA leaders such as Zou Taofen, Zhang Naiqi, Shen Junru, Sha Qianli, Li Gongpu, Wang Zaoshi, and Shi Liang, the firmest supporters of the idea of a national united front in 1936, became active leaders in the new United Front coalition relationship that was developing in the 1940s.16 NSA people often became active leaders in the small political groups and parties that were forming. Several of these people: Zhang Naiqi, Shen Junru, Li Gongpu, and Shi Liang, emerged later as leaders of the Democratic League.

PROFESSORS’ FORUM Considering the distressed frame of mind Wu was in, it’s little wonder that he had a favorable reaction to what he learned about the United Front. However it wasn’t only his own critical mood that pushed him toward political action in the framework of the United Front. Yuan Zhen’s closeness to the early Communist Party and the continuing influence of her earlier party membership on her ideas encouraged him toward radical affiliations, according to his friend Fei Xiaotong. Fei, who had been a friend of Yuan Zhen’s when they were both students in Beiping and through her had met Wu, was convinced that it was through her that Wu became interested in the United Front activities that Hua Gang and Zhou Xinmin were talking about. Fei Xiaotong’s memory of them was that “Wu followed what she wanted.”17 Certainly knowing that his wife, his closest friend and companion, was drawn favorably to the United Front policy as a way of political action must have reinforced Wu’s own inclinations. One of the first things that Hua Gang did in the fall of 1943 in Kunming was to suggest that the league organize a discussion forum for university professors. The forum took the name of the Southwest Cultural Research Society. The participants were almost all professors: besides Wu Han, there were Chu Tunan, Wen Yiduo, Pan Guangdan, Zhou Xinmin, Wen Jiasi, Luo

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Longji, Fei Xiaotong (who participated later), Feng Sutao, Xin Shichao, Li Gongpu, and Hua Gang, as well as Zeng Zhaolun, Shang Yue, Pan Dakui, Li Wenyi, and Tang Xiaoming.18 The group met once a week, alternating academic discussion one week with political discussion the next. The meetings were held in the Kunming Tang Family Garden bamboo grove which was owned by Tang Jiyao, a power in Yunnan and former militarist governor. His son was a member of the forum. If they feared being overheard by the GMD secret agents, the meeting was moved to a rented boat on the beautiful lake Dian chi, west of the city at the foot of the mountains. During their academic meetings, timely lectures were presented by the professors on their academic specialties: Wen Yiduo read his “Animals, People and Ghosts” and Wu Han read “On Scholars,” “On Corruption,” and “A Chapter in the History of Corruption.” Someone read a paper on the 1911 Revolution and Yuan Shikai.19 At the political discussion meetings, Hua Gang gave talks about Communist Party policy, and analyzed the international situation and the internal situation in China. As a modern historian and something of a sociologist he could speak knowledgeably. They read works by Mao, the New China Daily (Xinhua ribao) and The Masses magazine. Occasionally Hua had news from Yan’an for them. Considering the content of Hua’s talks there could have been little doubt as to his ties and affiliation although he never announced openly to them his Communist Party membership. Even though Hua’s political viewpoint was obvious, Fei Xiaotong, one of the forum members remembered that in the free and open atmosphere of Kunming these academic people paid little attention to anyone’s political affiliation. Their interest was in discussion of the issues. Fei said that each person counted among his friends those of all political casts. There was no pressure for conformity according to Fei nor to Li Yan who later taught at Yunnan University.20 Li Wenyi later acknowledged that through the Cultural Research Society the league had some ties with the Communist Party although she did not think this was the main thrust of the society.21 Wu Han himself knew Hua Gang was a Communist and had been in Yan’an before going to Chongqing and then coming to Kunming. He knew that Hua was in Kunming as a party representative to accomplish the objectives of the party. Wu and Hua became close friends over the next years, their friendship reinforced by their Zhejiang tongxiang ties, both having grown up in neighboring counties of Jinhua prefecture.22

CONTRADICTORY VALUES FROM HISTORY In his own writing Wu Han was beginning to turn to contemporary social and political issues by the end of 1943. During most of the year he had worked to finish the biography of the Ming founder. His pressing need to

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buy medicine for Yuan Zhen increased the pressure to get the biography to the publishers to supplement his inadequate salary. To help he arranged to publish the same manuscript under two titles by different publishers. The two volumes, You “sengbo” dao “huangquan” (From Monk’s Begging Bowl to Imperial Power) and Ming Taizu (The Ming Founder) were released within a short time of each other.23 The essays he was working on brought in writer’s fees that boosted his income a bit when they were published in the Kunming newspapers. Inflation brought a great deal of suffering to all university teachers, yet there was little they could do to bring in more income for the necessities of life but publish books and essays. Choosing themes from history as the starting point for contemporary social commentary continued throughout Wu’s life as a style which he used very naturally. The relationship between historical events and current affairs was a question often on the minds of most intellectuals—many wrote about the interconnections. Sometimes it was easy for people to read subtle motives into writings even when there were none intended. During this period there was an episode with the Guomindang censor over publication of a paper by Wu about Ming Taizu. The peasant army in the late Yuan uprising had been called the Red Army (Hong jun) by people in that period and, naturally, Wu had used the name in writing about the fighting. Despite the historical accuracy of “Red Army,” because it was also the name used by the Communist armies, the censor demanded that it be removed before the work could be published. Wu refused as a historian to comply, insisting on using the correct name from the period as used by Zhu Yuanzhang’s army with the result that the paper could not be published. This conflict with the censor so infuriated Wu that people around him began to notice he was more openly critical toward the Guomindang.24 While the papers Wu Han presented in the forum were stimulated by contemporary issues, his subjects were persistent moral themes that had preoccupied Chinese intellectuals for centuries. The first, “On Corruption,” was a broad critique of what he saw as a society-wide problem. Corruption had been an ever-present problem throughout Chinese history, weakening the country, caused by the social milieu, by the family system and its heavy responsibilities. Following the spirit of May Fourth criticism of the family traditional structure and emphasis on the individual, and reflecting the values and experience in his own life, Wu held that fundamental change in the family structure would eliminate the source of corruption and bring social change. The individual would be freed of the network of heavy family obligations, requiring the expenditure of large sums of money and be allowed to function as an individual, independently using his income to maintain his own life. Latent in this essay lay an unresolved agenda of Wu’s, fraught with unarticulated contradiction. He was absolutely clear that social morality was directly connected with family morality and in this paper he takes the position

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that the family system corrupts. But if we look at the example of his own life heavy family responsibility does not seem to have produced corruption or immorality. Paradoxically, at the very moment he gave the paper Wu himself was buried under heavy obligations of family responsibility, the heaviest of which, the care of Yuan Zhen, he had voluntarily insisted on assuming as his burden. In fact, those in his social context who watched saw him as a shining moral example because of his shouldering of this responsibility. A part of his public argument is concerned with the oppressiveness of the family burden. In the essay he looked to the general reform of “society,” of the family system itself, not to the individual’s free will arrangement of his own life, and certainly not to a Marxist class struggle remedy, for the solution to the pressures of the social system that produced widespread corruption. In the grip of his own contradictions Wu talked about loyalty in the same forum series in a paper “On Scholars.” Here he discussed loyalty as the heart of morality, requiring total selflessness in the carrying out of duty. Wu was on the horns of a dilemma which he seems to have been unable to acknowledge, a dilemma deeply imbedded in the transformation of Chinese moral thought into the modern venue. His social analysis and his ideas on morality were in conflict with one another although he couldn’t see it or perhaps preferred to close his eyes to the clash. Actually, the basic ethic of loyalty at the heart of the family system was in conflict with the need to reform society to remove the excessive demands of the family system which led to the corruption. Although he focused on the need to change the relationship of the individual and the family, he dodged prescribing or even implying any action or responsibility of the individual in real life. He writes: “To eliminate corruption completely the basic method should be to liberate the person from the shackles of the family.”25 Although he saw this need he did not find the answer in individual action but in broad social reform. He backed off from the May Fourth mandate for individual action. The door was open to him later to find the answer to the need to reform society in social and political liberation by revolutionary communism. The group and ideology would liberate, but this answer was not one he reached for at this point. In the essay, “On Scholars” he upheld the special morality of loyalty (zhong) of the ancient soldier-scholar (shi). The meaning of loyalty, Wu explained, is that duty is more important than life. Honor must be considered more important than safety. When conflict occurs life or safety must be sacrificed to fulfill duty and maintain honor without hesitation. Wu pounded on the idea that the patriotism of the intellectual stratum is essential to the nation, writing that “The spirit of our country is established” on the loyalty of the scholar. This was, in effect, a fundamental article of faith for Wu. The rationale for the participation of intellectuals in politics and in the United Front was an inherent part of China’s culture.26 Wu was holding up the mirror of history to illustrate this issue with historical examples. All of this verbiage on scholars and the need for their loyalty expressed a new stream

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in his thought for Wu, although ages old in Chinese thought. The participation of intellectuals in the modern civil sphere was clearly an immediate issue for him.

CONTRADICTORY GROUNDS FOR ACTION Although it was far from his conscious intent that the papers he read to the forum be a personal statement, nonetheless they focus on two of the most central themes in Chinese political culture, values which also increasingly provided the bedrock of Wu’s own persona and thought in the years ahead. These were also issues which became the basis for fundamental contestation in the Communist state when it did arrive. One theme was the duty and role of the intelligentsia in the nation and the fundamental need of the nation for the soldier-scholar’s participation and loyalty to the state. The second theme was the core relationship and nature of the family and the individual: the value of filiality and the complex, contradictory nature of the individual’s relationship to the family and the family to the individual. And by inference the individual’s relationship to his own self. In these themes were the moral imperatives which profoundly affected the course of Wu’s own life and provided the complex channel within which his life ran. It was also in these values that was to lie the dilemma that led to his enthusiastic participation in the construction of the new Communist state in the 1950s and then became the source of his fateful and symbolic conflict with the leadership in the leftward Maoist political tide of the mid-1960s. In 1943–1944, however, neither academic nor political discussions in the forum induced Wu to absorb Marxist thought deeply. The exchanges did stimulate his critical ideas about society and posed new possibilities for him, nonetheless. The major idea that attracted Wu, as many others at this juncture, was cooperative action to preserve the nation under the United Front. The United Front, a loose amorphous relationship, seemed to quite a few intellectuals to have a lot to offer in the face of the national emergency.

FORMATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE Wu was being drawn into political organizational matters through the forum at the same time he was working through these questions of values. In the Tang Family Garden on the side of Green Lake the Southwest Cultural Research Society had set up an office. Wu became the director and had two students to help him. He chose the name, Southwest Document Research Office, so Guomindang secret agents would think the office handled academic affairs. Actually the students who ran the office were Lianda students who were CCP members.27

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Although several of the forum participants had been involved in political activity of various sorts for many years, for others like Wu it was a new experience. It offered the opportunity to actively express their deep concerns over the national crisis and anxieties about their own living problems through a political party. Although neither had been involved in politics before, Wu Han and Wen Yiduo soon emerged as two of the most idealistic and radical among the activists. It was their fearless idealist motivation that brought them together as close friends in the next three years.28 Introduced for membership by Zhou Xinmin and Pan Guangdan, the sociologist, Wu Han joined the Democratic League branch in Kunming in the fall of 1943. The idea of participation in the United Front by way of joining the Democratic League appealed to Wu. A year later in September 1944, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Democratic League.29 This meant he was at the national level in political activity. The year 1943 was a critical period for China. It was a time of transition for those who favored the development of a third force in the center between the Nationalist and the Communist parties. The Nationalist government was lightening its control of the political scene enough that there could be some increase in the level of small party political activity. This encouraged an already rising interest in political action among intellectuals and many intellectuals and academics to step forward to take part in small political groups. Additionally, the protection of the Yunnan warlord, Long Yun, a staunch opponent of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, was an important factor in the development of a free sphere for this centrist political activity. Two years before, in March 1941 in Chongqing, after the Nationalist government’s suppression of the New Fourth Army, a number of the small “liberal” parties and groups had held a congress and organized the League of Democratic Political Groups of China (Zhongguo minzhu zhengtuan tongmeng) to create a united group of parties which would try to mediate between the Guomindang and the Communist Party. This development led the way to a transformation in the way the league developed internally and functioned in relation to other political groups.30 Two years after the creation of this organization at the national level in Chongqing, in Kunming a branch was established in 1943 through the efforts of Luo Longji and Zhou Xinmin who contacted Pan Dakui of the NSA to join them. Luo Longji, a Western educated political scientist and member of the National Socialist Party, had participated in the creation of the League of Democratic Political Groups in 1941 and then came to Kunming in 1942 to teach at Southwest Associated University.31 The first chairman of the Kunming League was Miao Yuntai, Yunnan governor Long Yun’s financial director, a man who had no allegiance to either the GMD or the CCP. Miao, an American educated engineer, was well connected with the Yunnan bourgeoisie. Zhou Xinmin was the league orga-

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nization chairman, Pan Dakui in charge of youth, and Pan Guangdan in charge of finance. When Li Wenyi arrived she joined the league to work in uniting circles of women. Soon after the organization of the Kunming league of Democratic Groups Wu Han joined beginning his first association with a political organization.

CENTER POLITICAL ISSUES Even though it was wartime, there was a surge of interest in constitutionalism and civil rights which until then had been severely restricted by the Nationalist Party. During the 1930s and early 1940s demands for termination of the Guomindang imposed Period of Tutelage had repeatedly been directed at Chiang’s Nationalist government. This autocratic phase of government decreed by the Guomindang government years before in 1929 when the GMD party-state was established was very unpopular with many people.32 Demands for the termination had been a part of demands for the adoption of a permanent constitution to replace the Draft Constitution promulgated by the Guomindang-dominated national convention in 1931. Because of pressure coming from foreign countries about the dictatorship of the Guomindang, in 1943 the Guomindang once again became willing to talk about a permanent constitution. In September, Chiang Kai-shek spoke to the People’s Political Council on the need to create an organization to prepare for constitutional government. The people in the Democratic League felt these issues were of great importance to China. A statement made by the league national level 19 May 1944 on the current situation, publicly addressed the lack of civil rights and personal freedom and the need to terminate the Period of Tutelage.33 Providing a rallying point for many, this statement reflected the rising dissatisfaction of the intelligentsia and middle class with Chiang’s Nationalist government leadership. With the new emphasis from the government and the possibility of a constitution ahead, league members began to see the league as a real and effective “third force.” It must have a political existence and influence of its own, independent of its relationship with the two major parties, but serve the need of the two parties for a mediator. The opportunity that the situation offered inspired the members to consolidate and strengthen the league and fully eliminate the associated groups which came between the individual members and the league itself diluting the influence of the league. On 10 October 1944, the formation of the Chinese Democratic League (Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng) was publicly announced. The goals were the same as the preceding league’s, but the membership was only for individuals. This made it possible for it to

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function as a political party.34 The program adopted by the League Congress in September 1944 announced the league would take up a breadth of issues. There were sections on government, economics, military affairs, foreign affairs, education, and society. The chairman of the thirteen man Central Standing Committee was Zhang Lan, educator and former provincial governor of Sichuan. Individual membership as the basis of participation stimulated the growth of the Democratic League. Its nature and activities changed dramatically, especially at the local level as it became a real political party, with active individual members. The people joining were individuals, choosing the group and their own affiliates and allies according to the appeal of the immediate situation rather than being the followers of a group leader as before. It also meant the new people joining were younger, more progressive and militant, than the membership of the older parties and groups. Nationally, by 1945 among a total of approximately 3,000 members, over 70 percent had no other party affiliation, the result of the league having swung preponderantly away from being a league of groups.35 In Kunming changes at the national level were carried out in local action. The Kunming league branch became the Yunnan provincial branch of the Democratic League in November 1944, with Luo Longji as Yunnan branch chairman. Its membership grew to two hundred. Although in 1943 there were merely 3 members in the Kunming branch with strictly Democratic League membership, by 1945 there were 154 individual members.

WU HAN—DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE ACTIVIST Even though Wu Han became a member of the Democratic League Central Committee, which met in Chongqing, his own sphere of activity always remained at the local level. He was most at home in the grass roots sphere of league activity. It was also where his emerging talents of persuasion and mobilization were most effective for the league. After the reorganization was in place, the Kunming members set out to expand the membership. Wu plunged wholeheartedly into this with his newfound commitment to political activity, “persuading and uniting” with others of like-mind. Although he was only a junior professor at Southwest Associated University, because of the renown of his pioneering historical research and the reputation of his academic mentors in the 1930s, his prestige was high. It was widely known that Jiang Tingfu, Hu Shi, Zheng Zhenduo, and Gu Jiegang had all thought highly of him and given him special support academically as a student and young teacher. His credibility in “persuading and uniting with professors who had a democratic tendency” was enhanced by his academic prestige and his personal steadfastness and enthusiasm.36

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Although Kunming was thought by many to be more radical than other places in Nationalist China, the people identified as potential league members were usually fellow academics who leaned toward progressive rather than radical ideas. Significantly, these league people didn’t try to recruit beyond their narrowly circumscribed elite social ranks. They made no effort to recruit from other social groups such as workers or farmers. Considering the circumstances of political crisis and rising political awareness, a membership of two hundred was scarcely evidence of a broadly based democratic party branch, although it certainly showed strength among academics. In spite of its own program which declared that “a democratic country takes its people as the master,” the Democratic League itself was a narrow, elitist party lacking a rank and file. And no wonder, recruiting as it was only from the upper echelons of the educated sector (zhishifenzi) with no sign that it aimed to be anything but an elite group.37 A local league newspaper, the Minzhu zhoukan (Democratic Weekly) was created in December 1944, by the Kunming branch under Wu Han’s chief editorship. The office in the Tang Family Garden which Wu directed became, in fact, a clandestine printing office where democratic publications under the league sponsorship, among others, were printed. While the office existed some ten small “mosquito” newspapers or magazines were printed here, one after the other. When one was banned by the rigid censorship, another would be launched. Minzhu zhoukan was published here, as was Shidai pinglun (Times Review) sponsored by Fei Xiaotong in 1946.38 After Wu joined the league in 1943, he began actively writing about current issues. Except for a few essays and finishing his biography of the Ming founder, his primary focus was now on the present, not a contradiction for a New Historian, either Chinese or Western. Gradually he shifted from framing his subjects as discussions of past political and social culture as had been his approach in his forum contributions, and began to use historical analogy to comment on current events and with great effect. Some essays were on social structure and corruption, some about democracy and power, others take a political reformist stance, advocating constitutional government. One of Wu’s earliest essays on a current political theme was published in The Freedom Tribune (Ziyou luntan) soon after he had joined the league. Entitled “Rule by Man or Rule by Law,” this subject, relevant to the discussion in the national arena on adoption of a constitution, had been a persistent political issue discussed by Chinese writers in the early years of the century. This antithesis represented a basic contradiction between Chinese and Western political theory. Wu synthesized modern ideas with the Confucian viewpoint of the importance of man: “law alone is not sufficient to rule a country; only through people who use the law can it function.” His conclusion that democratic politics are necessary to provide for the combination of able rule by man and the law pointed to elections as the key to solving the problems of totalitarian rule.39

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POSSIBILITIES OF COALITION With the end of the war beginning to seem possible, there was growing recognition among the democratic movers and shakers that with victory in sight in the anti-Japanese struggle the United Front must have a broader reason for its existence if it was going to have a place in the changing political environment. The expanding constitutional discussion was also stimulating change in the Chinese Communist conception of the United Front at the same time. Mao Zedong’s speech, “On Coalition Government,”40 at the Seventh National Congress of the CCP in April 1945, was designed to adapt the strategy of the United Front to this changing situation. The speech was read clandestinely with enthusiasm by members of the Democratic League and other democratic parties. Mao’s appeal for a coalition was particularly influential with many intellectuals who wanted to see the two main parties work together for the unity of the country. In his basic restatement of the essence of the United Front in “On Coalition Government,” Mao stressed unity. This was the time for coalition. The Front must unite “representatives of all political parties and groups of the people without any party affiliation and establish a provisional democratic coalition government for the purpose of instituting democratic reforms.” He wrote positively about convening a national assembly on a broad democratic basis and setting up a coalition government “which will lead the liberated people of the whole country in building an independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful new China.”41 These ideas matched the ideas of many politically inclined people in the democratic movement, such as Wu Han. They joined in the criticism of the “Guomindang government’s policy of passive resistance to Japan and its reactionary domestic policy of active repression of the people.” Mao’s stating that the democratic parties would participate in the formulation of the common program encouraged those like Wu Han, people who despised and distrusted the GMD for suppressing the intelligentsia, encouraged them to believe that there was a real place for the democratic parties in Communist thinking.42 To reinforce third-party thinking, Mao pointed to the growing democratic movement in the GMD areas, and specifically to the Democratic League’s manifesto of January 1945, which demanded “the elimination of the Guomindang’s one-party dictatorship and the establishment of a coalition government.”43 By 1945 as intellectuals were becoming more progressive Wu Han went further than many in his active support of the United Front. His interest was strengthened by the friendships of his wife, whom he was devoted to, from her early Communist ties and by his newly found enthusiasm for the United Front. His new friendship with Wen Yiduo also reinforced his leftward inclinations, but Wu’s political activity remained firmly connected to the league.

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WU HAN—RALLY LEADER WITH A MISSION He had begun speaking at political meetings and rallies during the reorganization of the league.44 On 10 October 1944 National Day, the same day the national reorganization of the Democratic League was announced in Chongqing, there had been a Kunming rally to “Remember the 1911 Revolution.” National Day, 10 October, was, and still is, the Chinese counterpart to the 4th of July, a holiday to commemorate the overthrow of the Qing, the last imperial dynasty. The speeches on this day in 1944 attacked the GMD (the Nationalist Party) for betraying Sun Yatsen, Father of the Country, and for corruption and passivity in the anti-Japanese war campaign. That afternoon in Kunming as the meeting went on, Guomindang special agents broke in to create a scene and disturb the audience. Wu Han and Wen Yiduo, along with Chu Tunan and Li Gongpu, had calmed the crowd and restored order. Two months later on 25 December a meeting was held to memorialize the earlier Yunnan Uprising of Cai E against the would-be emperor Yuan Shikai (an important event in Yunnan provincial history). Wu Han spoke at the meeting and was one of the leaders of the demonstration parade afterward. The banners the students carried on the streets read: “Support the Republic,” “Down with Dictatorship,” “Guarantee People’s Freedom,” “Freedom of Speech,” “Punish Corrupt Officials,” “Arm the Masses and Defend the Southwest,” “Down with Japanese Imperialism,” “Wipe out the Fascists.” People at both of these meetings identified with Yunnan and looked with suspicion on the power of the one-party Nationalist government. The bonds between the academic community and Long Yun’s government were strong. Without his protection these meetings could never have happened. The celebration of their respect for Cai E’s 1915 uprising was symptomatic of the still regional nature of the national polity despite the years of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party rule. The next spring, 1945, on the eve of May Fourth, the Lianda History Society held a meeting about May Fourth, at which Wu Han along with

Figure 8.1. Wu Han speaking to a Democratic Movement rally in Kunming, 1944

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several others spoke. His topic was the “Youth movement and the current democratic movement,” Wu rallied the students with the kind of speech he was becoming famous for, standing before the crowd and speaking in his direct style: Youth naturally must inherit the glorious tradition of May Fourth, of opposing traditional morality, of opposing imperialism and fascism, opposing dictatorship, demanding democracy, freedom and liberation. They must cooperate with the worldwide democratic tide, devote themselves to the great cause of laying the foundation for the people’s era. . . . In the new unprecedented situation the youth, who represent the people, stand up to demand political democracy, furthermore they demand economic democracy, demand freedom of thought, speech, press and gathering, association, residency, of performance of drama, even including the most fundamental personal freedom.

He went on in his electrifying voice to speak of the youth to his student listeners and finished by saying: They demand unity, unification, reform of internal politics, using the force of the whole nation to get rid of cruel politics, restoration of our territory. This is a sacred historic mission. It is also the chief mission of today’s Chinese nation.45

Wu Han was no longer only a single-minded scholar thoughtfully examining the authenticity of a document, nor was he the historian so devoted to his research projects that he would not think of leaving his study to join in demonstrating against the government. He had become an intellectual with a mission to make demands and criticize the holders of power. This was a “sacred historic mission” for Wu Han that he shared with the youth he was deputizing and with people across the whole country. Wen Yiduo also spoke at this History Association meeting on the eve of May Fourth. Wen dropped his planned topic and instead spoke spontaneously to the students in the spirit of the May Fourth, 1919, experience: a revolutionary movement must have the leadership of a revolutionary political party. We should use a historical point of view to look at the present period. . . . Don’t hesitate, don’t be afraid of being used by some parties or groups. Don’t regard yourself as more superior and clever than others. . . . We must enthusiastically celebrate and actively support the Party which leads history forward and join this Party enthusiastically.46

This was Wen’s charge to the students. The name of the party he talked about wasn’t mentioned explicitly but the students understood that he had in mind the Communist Party. The applause was loud when he finished speaking. The next day this meeting was followed by a rally of more than a thousand enthusiastic students with a grand parade afterward to honor the twenty-

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sixth anniversary of May Fourth. This meeting, which Wu was involved in organizing, welcomed Mao Zedong’s 24 April call for a coalition government.47 At the rally, in a drenching rain, both Wen Yiduo and Wu Han spoke again. In excited, rapid words Wen turned adversity into a challenge to rally the spirits of the crowd standing in the downpour: “This is Heaven washing the truth clean, this is the precursor of good luck. We are not even afraid of death! How can we be afraid of rain? Those who are brave come closer!!”48 Marching at the front of the parade after the rally were Wu Han, Wen Yiduo, Fei Xiaotong, Zeng Zhaolun, and other nationally known intellectuals. The marchers carried banners criticizing the government, calling for unity and democracy. Together the marchers sang the stirring Communist International as they paraded.49 A MESSENGER SENT TO SILENCE WU HAN Less than two months later on 7 July 1945 there was another mobilization meeting to memorialize the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that had begun the war in 1937 eight long years before. Once again Wu Han spoke. The Democratic League activists lost no opportunity to raise the consciousness of the Kunming intellectual arena in those months. Wu’s active role in the movement criticizing the Guomindang was beginning to be known far beyond Kunming. One day, a man who said he was from his home county of Yiwu in Zhejiang, a man he had never seen before, suddenly appeared at his door. He was a member of the Yiwu Guomindang Party who had been sent to talk to him. He told Wu that if he would stop criticizing the Guomindang he would be appointed to be a bureau director in the Nationalist government and would not have any more problems. Presumably the man meant he would be helped with money. When Wu realized the purpose of the visit was to silence him with the bribe of a position in the Nationalist government he became furious and drove the man away.50 In the years of the war Wu Han’s home village had become an anti-Guomindang center of resistance to the Japanese and many of his relatives were fighters in a locally famous Communist guerrilla brigade connected to the Zhejiang guerrillas. This clumsy move by the Guomindang leadership probably had a purpose in the Yiwu campaign against the local brigade as well as attempting to silence Wu’s activity in Kunming but it’s only success was to increase his determined opposition to the Guomindang regime. FELLOW RADICAL—WEN YIDUO Wen Yiduo, Wu’s comrade-in-arms in these years, was a scholar of Chinese literature and a poet when Wu was a student. He had taught at Qinghua in the literature department and had come to Kunming on the long march from

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Changsha. Ten years older than Wu, Wen was a romantic who had traveled beyond China to take a look at the West as represented by the United States, even studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. But what he found in the West disappointed him and he had come back to China to delve deeply into Chinese literature and promote a sense of “cultural nationalism.”51 After coming to Lianda in about 1943 Wen went through a great change in his thinking. He had been introduced by the poet Zhu Ziqing to the poems of a poet living in Yan’an by the name of Tian Jian. Wen admired Tian’s simple, direct poetic style with short lines punctuating the poems like the beat of a drum. From Tian’s poetry Wen became interested in his political thought. He called Tian a “poet of the masses,” a “poet of the new world.” Frequently at meetings Wen talked about this poet. He wrote an essay on Tian Jian, “The Drummer of Our Time,” that was widely read. 52 Wen Yiduo was having a very hard time financially. It was impossible to support his large family on an academic’s salary in the face of the steeply rising inflation. His wages from the university only provided for ten to fifteen days of household expenses for the family each month. He had to sell his books to raise money for the family and finally turned to his carving skill to carve seals to sell. He grew more and more distressed as the military losses increased and the economic situation worsened. The bombing runs over Kunming meant his big family had to move to the countryside. Wen saw the corruption of the Nationalist officials who lived a comfortable, even luxurious life making money off the difficulties of war. Along the border of Yunnan and Burma high officials were involved in smuggling scarce goods into China and selling them to dishonest merchants. They ate well in Kunming while the rank and file, including the poet’s own family, lived miserable lives. Wen was distressed with the contrast and began to consider the political questions behind the contradictory conditions. By 1942–1943 Wen had begun talking to his family about these things and lecturing on them in his classes. There was another problem that angered him, as it did many others. He saw the way peasants were captured and forced to be soldiers, chain ganged together with ropes. The men’s legs were thin, hardly strong enough to stand up much less fight in a battle. In outrage he talked to his children about seeing the soldiers walking on the road dragging along with all kinds of sickness while he was walking home from school. The men simply fell down in the road and collapsed there. This was happening between Lianda and their house in Xicanpo, not far from the campus. When the men fell the officers beat and whipped them to force them to get up and go on. If they couldn’t they were abandoned on the roadside. Wen’s questioning of the war and the government’s policy grew louder and louder when he saw this. Soldiers like this were everywhere, they even came into the middle school courtyard where the children saw them. Wen was convinced that Chinese people must begin to speak out to fight against corruption. He began to lecture and express his dissatisfaction in

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writings. When Wu Han saw that Wen was becoming very outspoken he reached out to him because they had ideas in common. The two men quickly became close companions stimulating and reinforcing each other. Wen had a passionate personality. All his life he had abundant, intense emotions. It was easy for him to express emotion but he did not often lose his temper toward people. Rather, it was events and problems that angered him. When Zhao Dan, the movie star, was imprisoned Wen came home and raved over the news and the Guomindang to the family at supper. Comrades-in-arms, the two men worked closely together in the Democratic League.53 Wen had become a good friend of Luo Longji’s in the United States when they were both students. In the United States as foreign students they had organized, together with Liang Shiqiu, a Chinese political group, called the Great River Study Society that advocated Chinese nationalism. Now Luo Longji was the head of the Kunming Democratic League. Although as a long-standing member of the league his position was higher than Wu’s, nonetheless Wu Han’s influence on other people at Lianda was much greater. Wu Han, very popular with his students, reached a broader segment of the academic “masses” of teachers and students than Luo who had become quite Westernized. Wen and Wu worked together as a team, whenever Wen made a speech Wu was there beside him and Wen stayed beside Wu when he spoke. They consciously fought shoulder to shoulder as comrades. After Long Yun was forced from Yunnan by Chiang Kai-shek in the fall of 1945 as the war against Japan ended, the protection Long had given to centrist and left-leaning political activists vanished. It soon became known that Chiang Kai-shek had ordered that certain people, namely Wen Yiduo, Chu Tunan, and Wu Han should be “dealt with,” that is assassinated, at a suitable time.54 With this the underground CCP warned the two they must take care and ought not to speak so openly. In these later years in Kunming as they worked together on political organizing the two men drew close together.55 Both families had returned to the city and moved into the same courtyard at Xicanpo, not far from the university campus. This was a new, one story building compound built for the upper level Professors who drew straws to get a tiny flat in it. The rooms were very small. Wen Yiduo and his family had one and a half rooms. Wu Han and Yuan Zhen had a one room section that had been divided into two small rooms. Feng Youlan and Pan Guangdan and their families were also in the same courtyard. Wu’s door faced Wen’s across the small courtyard. Wu would take Wen special tea and Wen brought Wu specially delicious dishes. When Wen came across the courtyard to Wu Han’s to talk, Yuan Zhen would often join in the conversation. She had a very acute political mind, very sensitive in her ability to judge situations, straightforward in expressing herself and rather imposing when she spoke. Of course, she also knew a great deal about how radical political action was mobilized from her

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previous connections. She liked to talk about political issues and participated naturally without hesitation, something most men were not accustomed to with women. Wen, who was used to his wife always being too busy caring for their large family, would say abruptly to Yuan Zhen trying to turn her off and push her away, “I came to talk to Wu xiansheng.” In contrast, Wu was especially considerate of his wife and. they were dependent on each other. Childless, Wu Han paid special attention to Wen’s large family of children who often played in the courtyard. Wu was known among the people in the courtyard as a man whose moral principles toward his family and wife were very strong—Yuan Zhen could criticize him but he never turned angry with her. THE LEAGUE UMBRELLA: ORGANIZING FOR THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT Some of the activities Wu was involved in as a Democratic League member were only loosely connected with the league. The league umbrella legitimized and protected some United Front activities like the printing of Communist literature and organizing the student Democratic Youth League (DYL). Since the printing office in the Tang Family Garden was already publishing the league’s centrist Minzhu zhoukan (Democratic Weekly) the open, legal status of the league in 1945 and 1946 could shelter other less orthodox printing activities. In this printing office, staffed by students who were becoming members of the newly forming DYL (Zhongguo minzhu qingnian tongmeng), works which represented United Front policies such as Mao Zedong’s On New Democracy (1940) and On Coalition Government (1945) and Zhu De’s On the Battlefield in the Liberated Areas (1945) were printed. Most of the flyers for the December First Movement in 1945 were also printed there.56 Across China, as the war was ending, activities such as demonstrations and boycotts, petitions, newspapers and magazines, wall newspapers, dramatic presentations, and political parties and groups which advocated democracy had become known loosely as the Democratic Movement. The content of “democracy,” minzhu in Chinese, was not really understood by the students and many of the professors.57 Only a very few Chinese had observed the way a democratic government worked in Western countries, whether the United States or Europe. Even those few observers had never participated in the responsibility of citizens under democratic rule. At best they had only enjoyed the freedoms provided in a democratic state while they were visitors to a country. When the participants in the Democratic Movement spoke of “democracy” they talked about “demanding” political and economic freedoms but never about the specifics of how anyone would work to obtain and institute and then insure those rights. Generally, the leadership and direction of the Democratic Movement tended to be radical because the principal moti-

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vation of the movement was radical change of the existing regime. This amorphous movement or tide was referred to as the “Democratic Movement” by those in the center and by leftists as well as Communists. In actuality, what all these factors generally had in common was opposition to the Japanese invaders, opposition to the dictatorship of the Guomindang, and affirmation of some sort of participation of the vaguely defined masses. Beyond that there were few in the so-called Democratic Movement who had any specific idea of what the positive objective was or of specific plans. In 1946 Liang Shuming and Zhou Xinmin wrote of the Kunming political scene: “The Democratic Movement is not the same as the Democratic League, but they are associated. Everyone knows that in the past the Democratic Movement in the country was most vigorous in Yunnan. . . . The Yunnan Provincial Branch of the Democratic League was relatively the strongest and most active.”58 DEMOCRATIC YOUTH LEAGUE CREATED A major project within the framework of the United Front which Wu participated in as a member of the Democratic League, was the founding of the DYL in the spring of 1945. The relationship between the Democratic Movement and the Democratic League is clear in the inception and development of the DYL (Zhongguo minzhu qingnian tongmeng). Known as Minqing, the DYL was founded under the auspices of the Democratic League in the Guomindang controlled areas of China, beginning in Kunming. Its purpose was to unite youth to actively participate in the Democratic Movement and oppose the Guomindang. Wu Han and Wen Yiduo were in the core of people involved in the creation of the DYL. As a popular university teacher who had attracted a large student following Wu was a good candidate from among Democratic League members to be an organizer. He joined in working to set up the DYL along with others involved in organizing progressive youth including students who were CCP underground workers. His personal rapport with students meant that his opinions were carefully listened to by those who gathered around him. It was obvious to students that he cared deeply about China’s future. The first group of the DYL was established in Kunming in March 1945. By December 1, 1945, the Kunming group had three hundred members. Later in looking back Wu said of these next years, “the Youth League became the mainstay of the student movement.”59 The Democratic League initiated the Youth League after the CCP had decided in early 1945 to organize a youth group in Kunming. The organizing was through the Democratic League in order to deflect the attention of the Nationalists. Wu Han, closely involved with students and working with his young assistants in the league publishing office, was the natural choice of the parent Democratic League as liaison to oversee establishment of the group.

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Wen Yiduo joined Wu Han in the formation of the Youth League, presumably also with the blessing of the CCP. At this point the two were at the center of the Kunming progressive groups. Hua Gang was the link who transmitted the CCP wishes to Wu Han from the Southern Bureau, where Dong Biwu held forth under Zhou Enlai’s supervision.60 From the viewpoint of the leadership of the Democratic League, it was the league through its members, Wu Han and Wen Yiduo, that had fostered the organization of the Youth League. The complex role played by Wu and Wen was not apparent to all of the senior Democratic League leadership at this time, although it was understood by Wu and probably Wen. Zhang Bojun, national league leader, cited the league’s operational role in his “Work Report to the (Democratic) League Central Committee Organization Meeting” in October 1945.61 Within the inner circle of the Kunming Democratic League, there was sharp disagreement about what the relationship of the Democratic League should be to the youth group. Should the Youth League be allowed to make its own decisions or ought it be closely under the control of the Democratic League? According to Wu, “On the question of the leadership of the Youth League, Luo Longji and Pan Dakui insisted it must be led by the Democratic League.” Wu wrote: “Wen Yiduo and I struggled fiercely without compromise with them on these questions. Reason was on our side and strength was also on our side. They had no alternative but to agree with us. Although they acted according to what we advocated, nevertheless in their thinking the problem still wasn’t resolved.”62 From the evidence of the situation, the relationship which Wen and Wu had with the DYL was more a joint consultation for strategy than the topdown controlling type leadership desired by the other league people, which would have pitted the Democratic League against the CCP for control of the group. This was a struggle that both Wu and Wen knew the Democratic League leadership could not win. Both of them were well aware by then of the presence of Communist students within the students forming the Youth League. These two men were the representatives of the Democratic League in what was essentially a liaison relationship with the Youth League. However, this style of joint consultation they followed masked the reality that there was independent energy as well as authority among the student organizers Wu and Wen were working with, uncontrollable by them even with their popularity with the students. END OF THE WAR WITH JAPAN: TENSION IN KUNMING At the Japanese surrender in September 1945, a wave of joy and excitement swept over the people. Eight years of all-out war with Japan were over, not counting the years of war-footing with Japan after the Japanese grab of Manchuria in 1931. Wu also was optimistic but he soon realized that while the Guomindang government looked out for itself it was neglecting the interests

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of the people.63 Everyone was looking forward eagerly to peace and normal life after the years of war. But serious problems with accepting the surrender of the Japanese soon ballooned into an enormous struggle between the Guomindang and the Communist governments. During the autumn, fighting between the GMD and CCP forces was becoming the reality feared by the people—the pre-anti-Japanese war situation of civil war was reemerging. Everyone was sick of war and fighting and wanted to get back to some sort of normal life. The fear grew that if civil war continued, the country would be destroyed. The American policy of continuing aid to the Nationalists after the war was over was seen by many as interference in the Chinese civil war. Resentment toward the U.S. government began to grow as American aid to the GMD forces increased to enable the GMD to accept the surrender of the Japanese occupation armies.64 Despite Mao Zedong’s meeting with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing in early September to arrange the basis for future relationships, fighting between the Nationalist and Communist armies continued. In Kunming, with opposition to civil war swelling, in late November a meeting was called at Lianda to protest against the Communist and Guomindang clashes. However, the atmosphere in Kunming had changed drastically that fall, making it very dangerous to hold political meetings. The total change made the students worry about GMD spies. The root cause behind the changed atmosphere was Governor Long Yun’s removal and replacement by Chiang Kai-shek with one of his own men who saw the students as a threat to the Guomindang that had to be controlled. This shift in the provincial leadership naturally created in the students more tension and resentment. The permit for the antiwar meeting planned for Yunnan University was refused by the authorities. However, unintimidated the student organizers still held the meeting 24 November on the Lianda University campus. Four professors: Qian Duansheng, Fei Xiaotong, Pan Dakui, and Wu Qujian spoke at the meeting against civil war and in favor of a coalition government.65 Wu Han and Wen Yiduo had been cautioned against speaking at this meeting by the CCP underground, so they remained in the audience.66 During the speeches, the meeting was fired on by government soldiers as the speakers continued speaking. Infuriated, the students decided on a three-day classroom boycott to protest the government’s “fascist” actions. A Student Strike Committee, formed 27 November, called out 30,000 students on strike. Four demands were made: one, end the civil war; two, establish democracy with freedom of assembly, speech, and press; three, establishment of coalition government; and four, no foreign intervention in the civil war. TERRORISM ON DECEMBER FIRST In this new atmosphere of civil strife, to intimidate the strike planners, on 1 December, a mob of hired thugs went on a rampage through Kunming,

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targeting the educational institutions in the city. They attacked and roughed up students, throwing hand grenades and beating up anyone who happened in their path regardless of what they might have been doing. Four people were killed, many injured, and many more were terrorized. The dead became martyrs in what, thanks to these attempts to terrorize people, now became an irrepressible student movement known as the December First Movement. The students demanded permission to have a funeral procession through the city streets and called an unlimited classroom strike to last until they received the permission for the procession. Only after demands by the university administration and urging by professors did the Lianda students who had walked out of classes finally return to class on 26 December, four weeks later, still dissatisfied and without permission for a funeral procession for the dead students. Permission was not granted until March 1946. In the meantime the corpses of the four martyrs lay in state for mourners to pay their respects for more than three months.67 In the fall of 1945 as the anger and tension grew in Kunming, the DYL was deeply involved in the beginnings of this movement. The movement had grown out of student meetings held on the Southwestern campus to protest the military clashes between the Guomindang and the Communist forces after the Japanese surrender was signed. The DYL was a major part of the student leadership in the burgeoning movement that exploded out of these events. In early December during the upsurge of the movement following the rampage on December First, Wu and Wen representing the Democratic League, met with the student leaders in tense daily meetings to discuss and exchange ideas about the best organizational strategy for responding to the repressive government action.68

DECEMBER FIRST MOVEMENT: A FALLING OUT Despite Wu’s close relationship with the Youth League, in the days following the incident a rupture occurred between him and the Minqing leadership over demonstration strategy. Wu, practical and levelheaded about the possibility of success, tried to calm the brash plans of the students. The situation that produced the rift in December after the incident itself was later described by Wu himself: When the movement began, the Minqing advocated calling a city-wide strike of workers and the city market; in the final phase the Minqing wanted a classroom strike of unlimited duration to last until the Chiang . . . gang had completely agreed to the demands before returning to class. I thought that the prerequisites for a workers and city market strike did not exist; if we called for the strike and the strike could not be fulfilled the result would be worse. It was impossible to ask the Chiang . . . gang to agree to all the terms raised. We must conserve our

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forces, prepare our strength and make a long-term plan. The debate did not reach a conclusion and in the end there was a falling out (between me and the Minqing) and the responsibility for the relationship with the Minqing was assumed by Wen Yiduo. I only resumed a working relationship with the Minqing after I returned to Beiping.69

As it would turn out, Wu’s position in the disagreement with the students in the Youth League was also the position of the CCP Southern Bureau, but Wu had no way to know. Wu had lost his own connection with the Communist Party before this because Hua Gang had already left Kunming for Chongqing due to the shifts in the national political arena in the postwar situation. As a consequence, Wu had no way to know the Southern Bureau instructions to the Minqing. As a result of the conflict, Wu walked out angrily and Wen Yiduo took over the responsibility for the relationship with the Minqing and Zhou Xinmin took Wu’s place as the second Democratic League representative to the Minqing along with Wen.70 Later Wu learned that the Southern Bureau had also questioned the wisdom of the Youth League’s plans and had asked one of the young leaders, Wang Hanbin, to revise their strategy of an unlimited boycott. Wu only found out about this in May when he talked to Dong Biwu personally about the incident in Chongqing.71 The Southern Bureau had told the Minqing: “As time goes on it will be likely that the masses will become bored and their fervor cannot be maintained longer with the consequence that the progressive elements will be isolated and attacked.” In the end, the plans were changed and classes resumed on 26 December.72 Wu remained active in the December First Movement but he was not an adviser of the Minqing again until he returned to Beiping. Actually, the crisis over the unlimited classroom strike at the universities in Kunming was far broader than this fuss between Wu Han and the Minqing. There was serious concern at the university level that it be called off. In fact, Wu’s doubts about it were doubtless related to the uproar it caused among the faculty. Because the national Political Consultative Conference was soon to convene to discuss a constitution, generally the faculty wanted the strike over, as did the government so the conference would not be needlessly complicated. After lengthy negotiating, the students finally gave up and went back to class 26 December, but only after a student named Luo, in sympathy with the radicals gave a speech. His viewpoint taking the longterm view was essentially the same as Wu Han’s. He said that the defeat of the enemy . . . could not be achieved in one blow. Nor could peace and democracy be attained in a few days. . . . To assume an active role in the long-term struggle, it was essential to return to class.73 Perhaps the Southern Bureau had reached its contacts among the students in Kunming. After a long time had passed, the day of tribute to the December First Martyrs was finally held on 17 March 1946.

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The real importance of the December First Incident was that it quickly became a popular, widespread cause celebré. The commemorative meetings held during the winter in many locations in China led to the launch of a broad student movement. This movement, springing initially from the areas where the refugee universities had collected in wartime, especially Kunming and Chengdu, provided a vast training ground for the mobilization of student activists. Since the wartime universities were on the verge of closing and returning to their home areas at the end of the academic year in spring 1946, this meant the dispersal across China of angry, militant students flying the banner of “democracy,” increasingly blaming the Guomindang for the continuation of the civil war. This antiwar protest of the students was the first of a series of protests which produced a strong nationwide student movement. Each time, as the government attempted to suppress student action, the very act of suppression fed the fires of the movement. Although the students’ demands started as opposition to civil war, they quickly assumed the character of pro-democracy demands, putting the student movement squarely in the Democratic Movement in the civil sphere, alongside of the Democratic League. The climate of opinion surrounding the Political Consultative Conference nourished strong ideas of democratic government but, as so often in China, student movement opinion was impatient for results, expecting instant gratification.

DIVISION IN THE DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE During this transitional period, within the inner circle of the Kunming league branch itself the question of the Democratic League/Communist Party relationship in Kunming continued to be a divisive issue. Not only did Wu Han and Wen Yiduo disagree with Luo Longji and Pan Dakui’s previous insistence that the Democratic League provide guidance and control of the student’s DYL, but the issue of Communist participation in the league itself was also raised by Luo Longji, Pan Guangdan, and Pan Dakui, centrist league branch leaders who were opposed to individual Communists participating in the Democratic League. Although Zhou Xinmin and Li Wenyi actually both participated in this meeting, it was not known by most of the others at the moment that they were Communists. Another aspect of the same issue erupted in arguments over what was to be published in the league’s weekly Minzhu zhoukan. Wu and Wen once again were involved, this time in an intense debate in the editorial committee over an essay of Pan Guangdan’s opposing Communism.74 As a consequence of Wu’s wholehearted support of the Democratic League role in the United Front he had shifted to the left of the Kunming league leadership of Luo Longji and Pan Guangdan. Two of the factors that pulled him to the left were: his personal network of relationships and sec-

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ond, his wholehearted approval of the United Front policy as it was enunciated by Mao in “On New Democracy” and “On Coalition Government.” Because of his unreserved approval of the Communist United Front policy, although Wu was a very independent person, he was willing to work within the Front, even to the extent of accepting instructions from the CCP Southern Bureau through Hua Gang. Owing to his background as a historian of China, educated solely in China, Wu perhaps found it easier to accept the CCP-led United Front political mentorship of the Democratic League than Western trained intellectuals like Luo75 and Pan, who had become familiar with Western political models of democracy while studying in the United States. Another factor that supported his shift to the left was his newfound friendship with the poet, Wen Yiduo, who had also independently turned radical in the last years of the war. Although Wen had spent time in the United States, when he returned to China his disaffection with what he had learned of American society contributed to his refocusing on Chinese culture. This concentration of Wen’s on China’s culture and future contributed to his radical criticism of the Guomindang and his increasing eagerness to work with the CCP-led United Front.76 Nonetheless, at the close of the anti-Japanese war, in his writings Wu did not go beyond the Democratic League mediational position between the Communist Party and the Guomindang. He continued to condemn civil war and actively supported a coalition government. Although he cooperated with the United Front workers in the CCP this did not contradict his membership in the Democratic League or his centrist stands on the political situation. He simply would not oppose communism because there was much in it which made sense to him in 1945. At the Japanese surrender there was great optimism and the sense that unity and real internal peace might be possible in the country. Although all of this soon proved to have been but a futile utopian hope, yet in the fall and winter of 1945–1946, and for some time afterward, it seemed that the Democratic League, even though merely a very small third party, would hold a key position in the construction of a new government for China and this vision drove forward many league members.

POLITICAL CONSULTATIVE CONFERENCE: OPTIMISM AND DISAPPOINTMENT Although World War II was over, in December 1945, President Harry Truman announced he was sending General George C. Marshall on a mission to China to mediate the GMD-CCP internal dispute and move the country toward unity. In January, Chiang Kai-shek convened the Political Consultative Conference, with the Guomindang Party, the CCP, and the smaller parties—including the Democratic League—to negotiate, among

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other matters, a constitution. United States’ Ambassador Marshall acted as mediator while the conferees, in the course of the meetings, lined up on two sides. On one side were the Guomindang, the Youth Party, and six or seven nonparty delegates and on the other the Communist Party and the Democratic League plus one or two nonparty delegates.77 In the words of Qian Duansheng “the principal function of the Political Consultative Conference was to arrange for the peaceful solution of the (internal) conflict that was hovering over the nation.”78 At the close of the three-week conference there was much jubilation over the agreement that had been reached on the most important issues. But that was not to be the end. In the succeeding months Democratic League people watched in consternation as the GMD managed to scuttle the agreements made with the CCP that provided for a coalition government. By November 1946, only eleven months after Marshall was sent by Truman, ignoring the agreements made at the Consultative Conference, the Guomindang convened a National Assembly to adopt a constitution that established a one-party government ruled by the GMD, reflecting the wishes of the Nationalist Party and its allied parties, the Youth Party and the Democratic Socialist Party. For the people in the center the period preceding and during the Consultative Conference had been a time of both high optimism and apprehension. These were the third force intellectuals who were seen as important, key participants in the resolution of China’s internal conflict. This perception of virtual reality had been encouraged by the attention paid to them by the two Chinese sides, the Right and the Left—the GMD and CCP—and the Americans as well. The disproportionate prestige accorded to the Democratic League at this juncture had been demonstrated in the distribution of Consultative Conference delegates: 9 delegates out of the total of 38 were granted to this minuscule elitist party with a total of some 3,000 members. The weight placed by both of the major parties, as well as its own self-image, and the American emphasis also, on the key nature of the league reveals consciousness on the part of all actors of the crucial nature of the intellectual elite in the Chinese polity. This was reinforced by the vocal interest in democratic governance by the intellectual elite. The reality of this conception of the league can’t be forgotten in understanding the course of Wu Han’s life. Nor can it be ignored in understanding the discourse on democracy and autocracy manifested in the events of this era of political change. Our understanding of any reference to “democracy” by the players in the context of the conflicts in Chinese political culture has to be qualified by what was experientially known of the term “democracy” by the specific users of the word. To put it another way, when Mr. George Marshall used the word “democracy” and when Mr. Wu Han used the word “democracy” the concept referred to was mediated

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by each individual’s experience of his own political culture, and the two experiences were very, very different.79

OPEN LETTER TO MARSHALL After the Japanese surrender, the Guomindang maneuvering to reoccupy the areas in the north that had already been retaken by the Communist armies from the Japanese raised widespread fear across China of renewed civil war. In Kunming, preceding the Consultative Conference, Wu had joined in publishing an open letter expressing deep concern about the civil war to General Marshall with three other members of the Yunnan Branch of the Democratic League—Pan Guangdan, Fei Xiaotong, and Wen Yiduo. According to Fei Xiaotong, actually he was the one who drafted the letter.80 As the eldest, Pan’s name came first on the letter and Wu’s last as the youngest. Although written by Fei, the letter embodied the ideas of all four men. The idea for the letter had been Wen Yiduo’s and Fei’s, Wu Han and Pan then joined them. Fei Xiaotong had worked together with his good friend, Wu Han, in the Democratic League for years, organizing demonstrations and talking to the students in the universities: Fei at Yunnan University where he was the chairman of the sociology department and Wu Han at Southwest Associated (Lianda). Wu often helped him with suggestions for activities. Years later Fei Xiaotong emphatically recalled how they had taken the initiative in the projects without being led by suggestions from anyone else. Both were obviously quite aware and eager to work in the United Front framework. While their open letter was addressed to Marshall it was actually the Chinese public they aimed to reach. The letter spoke of the Chinese as being divided into those who oppose freedom and those who fight for freedom. It said, at present, under the name of democracy China has a dictatorship. The letter stressed that the economic situation strengthens the power of dictatorship because the bankrupt peasants become the soldiers of the ruling class. Poverty gets worse while the special class created by the war gets richer. The middle class also suffers greatly. In this way the leading force for freedom and democracy is weakened and the concentration of wealth weakens the stability of China. The letter stated: because of the spies everywhere and their investigations, people have less chance to speak out. Since the only way to oppose is violent opposition, the party in power depends for existence on armed force to suppress the opposition. It stated, “We do not favor the Communist Party which is out of power, but has armed force. We strongly oppose any political party possessing armed force. . . .” The letter went on: “in order to stop the civil war, the people must be able to take part in politics and express their political opinions. . . . The basis for democracy is the guarantee of human

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rights. To eliminate one party rule and dictatorship, the army will have to be thoroughly reorganized. . . . Economic factors are the basis of the present disordered situation; the living standard must be improved before corruption and the misuse of power can be corrected.” They recommended the reorganization of the government to include all parties and groups but said that the establishment of the legislative organization is the key. The letter pointed out that without freedom of speech the political parties cannot act publicly and elections become only an empty form. Under one party dictatorship democratic politics cannot be created. Freedom of the press is basic. The problem of the separation of name and reality in regard to democracy has occurred in China’s past politics. The name of democracy has been cried but the reality was the opposite of democracy.81 The four men who published their coda in this letter had warm mutual relationships that sprang from special ties among them. Since Fei was Pan’s student that relationship preceded their political relationship in the league by many years. Wu Han and Fei’s long-standing relationship began when they were schoolmates at Qinghua and Fei had know Yuan Zhen first, before Wu met her. Wen Yiduo and Pan were fellow students when they were young and in Kunming they carried on that bond, visiting each other frequently. Wu and Wen were close neighbors across the same courtyard in Kunming and visited back and forth daily. Wu went often to Pan’s house. This network of relationships was personal, separate from their activities in the Democratic League and their writing the Marshall letter. In those years relationships in Kunming were very informal and bonds of friendship strong. Fei reflected later, to illustrate the informality of even serious political involvement that the exact point the Democratic League actually formally had begun in Kunming was difficult to establish because it emerged from many bonds like these between the four of them: Wu Han, Pan Guangdan, Wen Yiduo, and himself.82 Many of the ideas in the letter to Marshall Wu Han had been writing about himself since he had turned to political action. They were principles that were necessary for China’s future to carry out the promise of reforms that had not yet been instituted, namely constitutional government.

THE MONTHS AFTER DECEMBER FIRST The Kunming student association and other cultural groups held a mass meeting in Kunming on 17 February 1946 to draw attention to the agreements reached at the Political Consultative Conference in January and to protest a bloody terrorist attack on some of the participants in the conference in Chongqing. Wen Yiduo chaired the meeting and Wu Han, Qian Duansheng, and Fei Xiaotong all spoke to protest the Guomindang effort to undermine the outcome of the conference.

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After that, the long-awaited memorial meeting for the burial of the December First martyrs was finally held on 17 March in Kunming with an estimated 30,000 people attending according to the photographer. Wu Han addressed the crowd at the rally: On the tomb are the four characters, “Seeds of Democracy.” I think that this place should be made into a Sacred Shrine of Democracy. Historically China has had its sacred places. Soon many friends will leave here. In the future, when a new China, happy and democratic has arrived, we will never forget that in this corner of the southwest, there is a Sacred Shrine of Democracy.83

This 17 March memorial meeting came to signify not only the commemoration of these four deaths but also to mark and symbolize the end of the wartime refugee years in Kunming. The “Sacred Shrine of Democracy” that Wu spoke of was to symbolize the memory of events and experiences in these years in Kunming, events that pointed the way to what would be a better political future for the country. During the months after the Political Consultative Conference, Wu Han published many short articles on political subjects in the small democratic newspapers in Kunming and Chongqing. Even though he had not attended the conference he did everything he could to promote the Democratic League position in support of the new constitution and a coalition government. Unfortunately, the situation deteriorated into civil war so fast that hope was lost, nothing could be done. When it was realized that any possibility of coalition government was slipping away, when fighting between the GMD and CCP forces had broken out in north China, the widespread positive mood collapsed and turned negative very quickly. Wu’s essays became polemical attacks on the Guomindang government. That spring before leaving Kunming he collected many of these essays in a book of short zawen essays entitled The Mirror of History and arranged for publication by the NSA bookstore in Beiping.84 Criticism of the United States began to emerge in the political environment in Kunming as elsewhere. In Kunming it had begun even before the war ended as attitudes toward the American soldiers changed. When the foreign soldiers had first started to appear in Kunming after the American entry in the war, the American army was accepted as good. People were especially favorable toward the United States after General Chennault’s planes arrived because the bombing decreased. But as U.S. troops started to pour into the area toward the end of the war the presence of so many soldiers on the streets caused problems because they attracted young Chinese girls. There was Western dancing and automobiles where there had been almost none before. The jipu nülang or Jeep Girls who rode around on the fenders of the American jeeps offended the cultural sensibilities of most Chinese, even the most Westernized elite. Prostitution became a problem. To decent

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people all of this was considered a very bad influence. Strong feelings of anti-Americanism emerged to become the normal attitude. After victory, as the United States aided the GMD reoccupation of North China, turning over vast amounts of surplus material to the Nationalists, the active opposition of many liberal Chinese grew stronger.85 Opinion toward America changed. The problems before had seemed only limited issues, but now this went directly to the core of ideas of national sovereignty and basic internal political questions for many people. Ironically, the very intellectuals who the United States was trying to encourage and woo in the promotion of a coalition government through the Political Consultative Conference were some of the people who became the most vociferous in opposition to the U.S. military assistance to the GMD and the accompanying outbreak of civil war. These people remembered the earlier past fixation of Chiang Kai-shek’s government on the annihilation of the Communists and recognized that civil war was bound to happen again as the Guomindang became stronger. How could democracy be brought about when a civil war raged? This became the question that lurked in many minds. And a corollary question was: how can the United States, which says it promotes our adoption of a democratic system, act in such a way to promote exactly the opposite, a non-democratic one-party system? These were troubling questions that hovered in the background of much thoughtful discourse in the late 1940s. Wu Han began to openly criticize America in his conversation because of the outbreak of fighting and U.S. support for the Guomindang. Since Wen had a closer relationship than Wu to some of the Americans in Kunming who were really interested in China and wanted to learn more about the culture he tended to feel more warmly toward individual Americans. Nevertheless, when the American troops and planes helped to move the Yunnan provincial troops to Manchuria at the end of the war, Wen’s son remembered hearing him proclaim loudly that the Americans should take their troops and go home. His father said “The Chinese people’s relationship to the Americans is not a relationship of father and son. . . . I can’t think of Americans playing the role of China’s father.”86 At the close of the war, Wen was invited to go to the University of California but he declined because he thought his country needed him more at home. He told friends, if he went it would be to tell the American people that they were wrong to support Chiang Kai-shek and help the Guomindang by moving their troops to Manchuria. In May 1946, Southwest Associated University closed its doors and dissolved itself. The three components of the refugee university resumed their original identities as Beijing, Nankai, and Qinghua universities, three of the major Chinese institutions of higher learning in the country. Each made its own plans to return to the north. Democratic League members who had worked together closely slowly found their way north to their respective institutions separately. But Wen Yiduo lingered in Kunming to wind up some Democratic League business and make arrangements to move his family.

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Wu Han and his wife flew first to Chongqing on 7 May with the help of Luo Longji who had been able to get plane tickets for them through a connection. In Chongqing they stayed at the Democratic League office while they waited for air tickets to Shanghai. Almost every day Wu participated in rallies opposing the civil war and advocating democracy. When he arrived in Chongqing, he and Yuan Zhen had gone immediately to pay their respects to Dong Biwu at the Southern Bureau office. Since China’s national capital had been returned to Nanjing, Dong was on the verge of leaving for Nanjing to participate in the Nanjing office of the Joint Liaison Commission of the GMD, CCP, and U.S. military which was being set up to administer the surrender of Japanese forces. Wu also called on Zhang Youyu, well known as a radical intellectual and member of the NSA, who as a Communist was the second in command of the Communist Party Work Group in Chongqing.87 From Chongqing, Wu and Yuan Zhen flew to Shanghai on June 9 on the second leg of their journey back to North China and their home at Qinghua University. These years in Kunming, nine for Wu and seven for Yuan Zhen, had been years of trial and tension for both of them and yet, years of love and personal sustenance together. The national wartime emergency and the crisis in intellectual life precipitated by the dislocations of war had challenged Wu Han. From the life of a cloistered academic he had turned to political activism engaging with the issues of the times. Yet he remained at heart the professional historian, scholar, and intellectual. Now he looked forward eagerly to returning to his home and to research and teaching in Beijing at the restored Qinghua University.

NOTES 1. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Interview 20. 2. Li Wenyi in Interview 20. Li Wenyi and Yuan Zhen joined the CCP together 3 March 1926. Yuan Fuzhi in Interviews 16 and 17. See chapter 5 in this volume for Yuan Zhen. 3. Interview 20. 4. Interview 20. 5. Interview 20. Li Qimin (1987), 73. 6. Interview 20. 7. Fei Xiaotong in Interview 8. Hu Hua (1980), 28:281–98. 8. Interview 20. 9. Zhang Youyu in Interview 65. Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979a, 1979b). 10. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 11. The basic statement of CCP United Front Policy in this period is Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” originally published 1940. Van Slyke (1967); Kui-kwong Shum, (1988). 12. Selected Works of Mao Zedong, hereafter SW, 3:34.

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13. SW, 3:31. 14. SW, 3:33–34. The selections used here have been chosen to emphasize the sense of the United Front that people outside of the party would have had at that time. 15. See Coble (1991), 289–376, for the NSA. 16. These are the so-called Seven Gentlemen (six males and one female) who were the NSA leaders arrested 23 November 1936 by the Nationalist government. Most of them became Democratic League leaders later. Wu Han worked with Shen Junru much later and respected him deeply. See Zhang Youyu (1981) for the role of the United Front Communist Party people in organizing the NSA; Stranahan (1992). 17. Fei Xiaotong Interview 8. Fei’s assessment of Yuan Zhen and her influence on Wu was the same as that of many other interviewees. 18. Interview 8. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 19. Interview 20. Wu Han, “Shuo shi,” “Lun tanwu,” and “Tanwu shi de yizhang.” 20. Both Fei Xiaotong and Li Yan commented pointedly on this in the interviews. 21. Interview 20. 22. Interview 20. 23. Wu Han, Ming Taizu [The Ming founder]. Text same as You “sengbo” dao “huangquan” [From monk’s begging bowl to imperial power]. 24. Interview 34. 25. Wu Han, “Lun tanwu” [On corruption], LSJZ, 15. 26. Wu Han, “Shuo shi,” LSJZ, 63–68. 27. Interview 20. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 28. Wei Ying in Interview 44; Interview, 119; Li Yan (1981); Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” For Wen Yiduo see BDRC3, 408–11; Kai-yu Hsu (1980). 29. Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng lishi wenxian, 591, hereafter Tongmeng wenxian. 30. Tongmeng wenxian, 5. Li Qimin (1987), 67. Van Slyke (1967), 171, translates this transitional league as the Federation of Chinese Democratic Parties. 31. Li Qimin (1987), 67. 32. The Period of Tutelage was the formal political period the country had been in since the end of the Northern Campaign of the Nationalist army and the institution of the Five-Power Government in October 1928. Ch’ien Tuan-sheng (1950), 130–39. 33. Tongmeng wenxian, 18–25. 34. Tongmeng wenxian, 31–34; Van Slyke (1967), 177–79; Ch’ien Tuan-sheng (1950), 359–62. 35. Li Qimin (1987), 74; for the Youth Party see Ch’ien Tuan-sheng (1950), 351–53. 36. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Interview 41; Li Yan (1981); Luo Ergang (1984), 6–12. 37. “Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng gangling caoan,” Tongmeng wenxian, 19 September 1944, 26–30. 38. Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979b), 4–8; Li Qimin (1987), 74; Interview 118. Translation of Shidai pinglun as Time Review is from the paper’s masthead. 39. Wu Han, “Zhiren yu zhifa.” 40. For Mao Zedong, “On Coalition Government” see SW, 3:205–70. 41. Both quotes from SW, 3:205. Van Slyke (1991), 232, discusses the two levels of meaning in the language of “On Democracy” (1939): Anglo-American liberal democracy and authoritarian, class-based democracy. “On Coalition” is discussed by Van Slyke (1991), 284–85, with the additional condition of the new CCP constitution

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(1945), which places Mao as the “unquestioned leader” of the party. The differing concepts of democracy in the United Front in different parts of Communist and Nationalist China and the shift from Anglo-American liberal democracy to the authoritarian, class-based variety is important in understanding the 1947 change in the United Front and in the way it was perceived by various sides. 42. SW, 3:209, 238. 43. SW, 3:259. 44. Zhang Youren (1984), 46–70. 45. Zhang Youren (1984), 53. 46. Zhang Youren (1984), 53–54. 47. Mao Zedong, “On Coalition Government,” originally a report given on 24 April 1945, SW, 3:205–70. 48. Zhang Youren (1984), 54–55. 49. Zhang Youren (1984), 55. 50. Interview 34. 51. Kai-yu Hsu (1980), 81. 52. Wen Yiduo (1951), 202. The descriptive material in this section is from Wei Ying Interview 44. Wei Ying is Wen Yiduo’s son, born Wen Lidiao. Much of the wording chosen for this section on Wen Yiduo reflects material from interviews with Wen’s family. 53. Wen Jiasi Interview 45. Wen Jiasi is Wen Yiduo’s brother and long-standing Democratic League member and leader. 54. Interview 45. 55. Interview 44. 56. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 57. Interview 44. 58. Liang Shuming and Zhou Xinmin (1946), 6. 59. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979b), 4–8; Hong Deming (1987), 34–37. “Minqing,” the shortened Chinese name for the DYL, entry Cihai (Shanghai, 1979), 4136. After 1949 the members transferred to the Zhongguo xin minzhu zhuyi qingnian tuan, later Hu Yaobang’s group. 60. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979b), 4–8. 61. Zhongguo gexiao dangpai xiankuang, 16. 62. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 63. Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979b), 4-8. 64. Pepper (1978), 44–52. 65. Israel (1998); Pepper (1978), 44–52. 66. Zhang Youren (1984), 58. 67. Israel (1998). Interview 147. 68. Wei Ying Interview 44; Israel (1998), 369–75; Hong Deming (1987), 47. Pepper (1978), 44–52. 69. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 70. Hong Deming (1987), 47; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 71. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 72. Hong Deming (1987), 43. 73. Israel (1998), 53. 74. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.”

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75. Spar (1992), 61–81. 76. I am indebted to Wen Yiduo’s son, Wei Ying, for an interview in which I gained much information about the relationship of Wen and Wu. For Wen’s polemical writings Wen Yiduo xuanji (Kaiming shudian, 1951). 77. Ch’ien (1950), 317–20, 375–81. 78. Ch’ien (1950). 79. Van Slyke (1991), 232, for definitions of democracy in China. 80. Interview 8. I am grateful to Fei Xiaotong for this interview in which he explained his relationship with Wu Han and gave me information about the circumstances of the letter. The letter: signed by Pan Guangdan, Wen Yiduo, Fei Xiaotong, and Wu Han, “Zhi Ma Xieer teshishu” (1946). 81. Pan Guangdan et al. (1946). 82. Fei Xiaotong Interview 8; Fei Xiaotong (1982), 47–48. 83. Israel, “The December First Movement” (u.p. manuscript), 72. 84. Wu Han, Lishi de jingzi, hereafter LSJZ. 85. Interview 44. 86. Interview 44. 87. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Interview 20. Interview 65. Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979a, 1979b); Zhang Youyu (1981).

9

R Historian as Radical1

A

fter the close of the academic year at the university and the dissolution of the wartime institutions in Kunming, most of the intellectuals soon began to leave this vibrant wartime center of intellectual and political life. They gradually found their way back to the coastal areas they had come from and prepared to move forward into the next phase of their lives and China’s national life. The next years were a time of seeking to fulfill their visions of individual and group life. For many it was a futile and frustrating experience, for others it became both a positive and negative struggle.

FAMILY REUNITED IN SHANGHAI Wu and Yuan Zhen arrived in Shanghai on their way back to Beiping ten months after the Japanese surrender, in the midst of the growing national crisis caused by the undeclared civil war in Manchuria and North China. Even so, at the moment they reached Shanghai, Yuan Zhen was foremost on Wu’s mind. In the last months in Kunming, her health had grown much worse. The diagnosis was uterine cancer and surgery was urgent. For this reason as soon as the university closed they had left Kunming for Chongqing where they waited for transportation to the coast. Because the situation on the Qinghua University campus and in the city of Beiping was still very uncertain it seemed best to go to Wu’s brother’s in Shanghai where she could have good medical attention in a hospital. His brother, Chunxi, had been in Shanghai with his family during most of the war. After he took their mother back to the home village in 1940, he and his family had gone to Shanghai where Chunxi, a Lianda graduate in 305

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economics and fluent in English, had found a job in the British concession. Unfortunately, after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese occupied the foreign concessions and imprisoned the British, conditions had become very difficult for them because he had no income.2 With the war over, the British had returned and he had found a good position in a bank. Chunxi had many business and professional friends in the concessions who came to the house, as well as schoolmates and friends from their native place in Yiwu and Jinhua. For him radical politics was no longer as intense an interest as in former years, although he belonged to the Democratic League in Shanghai. Now, at the end of the war the tables were turned—it was his elder brother, Chunhan who was immersed in political affairs. Although they had heard Chunhan was in the Kunming Democratic Movement, when Chunhan reached Shanghai and told them about the last years in Kunming, Chunxi and his wife, Meiying, were astonished at how deeply involved he was now in political matters. When they had left Kunming in the early years of the war Chunhan had no inclination to get involved in political affairs although he was critical of the government.3

RETURNING HOME, THE EIGHTH BRIGADE, AND QI JIGUANG While Yuan Zhen was recovering from surgery in the hospital Wu Han went home to Yiwu to Bitter Bamboo Pond Village (Kuzhutang) in Zhejiang to visit his mother and renew his childhood ties.4 He found his mother there alone, tending to the 30 mou of family farmland with the aid of a hired laborer, still living in the two storied family house on a narrow foot lane in the village. Her youngest child, Puxing, by this time an idealistic young girl of sixteen, was about to leave for Yan’an. The villagers were excited to see Wu again—the village was buzzing with talk of the Wu family and news of the two brothers and their sister who were no longer at home. Throngs of village children came to see him in the balconied courtyard of the Wu family home and brought him gifts of eggs, a special delicacy, to eat. Many people from the area came to pay their respects to the famous local son and Chunhan had gifts he had brought for them. His mother, who doted on her oldest son even though he had defied her wish that he not marry the sickly woman he loved, later told his brother-in-law, Song Ruji, how excited the villagers had been to see the little boy now grown to be a great scholar. One evening Wu held a dinner at the family home for his old friends and invited a blind storyteller to come to entertain them with tales of local heroes. It brought back memories of standing at the door of the tea house in Wudian, the neighboring market town, where as a child he had listened to the storytellers. Before he started home he had heard from his brother that their home village of Kuzhutang had been a Communist guerrilla stronghold in the war.

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This was the Eighth Brigade of the New Fourth Army, under the overall command of Chen Yi. According to Chen Yungfa, the flight of the local GMD when they were faced with the Japanese offensive along the Zhejiang Jiangxi railroad line (running through Yiwu County) in mid-1942 had made it possible for the New Fourth Army, with a foothold in southern Zhejiang, to extend its contacts with existing local guerrilla groups.5 This situation affected the Kuzhutang area. Wu knew the leader of the guerilla brigade was a kinsman, Wu Shanmin. While Wu Han was home in Kuzhutang he invited Wu Shanmin to his house for dinner and over the meal learned from him and the others what had happened in the area.6 After he returned to Shanghai Wu Han wrote three essays called “Returning Home” about the visit to his village and published them in the Shanghai Weekly. This series was of great interest to Democratic people in Shanghai.7 In the article Wu described the creation of a base in the village for the brigade and the use of his family home as the headquarters. The two founders of the brigade were his childhood friends. Many of the brigade members were from the area; some were cousins from his uncles’ families or from the wider Wu clan. Wu’s writing about the brigade reflects the local native place bond he felt with these men. In the vein of his earlier writings on Zhu Yuanzhang, he emphasizes figures in the Ming as forerunners of modern Chinese nationalism and protectors of its sovereignty. The Eighth Brigade resistance in China’s twentieth century was kin to the spirit of the Ming general Qi Jiguang’s Yiwu soldiers who had destroyed the Japanese and saved their homeland: After the Nationalist Army withdrew and let the sacred land inherited from our ancestors be devastated by the enemy at their will, this people’s force armed themselves and fought without yielding to the enemy in a life and death struggle for years to guard the hometown—they have carried forward the Yiwu people’s traditional spirit—encouraging the healthy tendency of Chinese nationalism. It was Yiwu’s three thousand brothers who composed the army organized and commanded by Qi Jiguang of the Ming Dynasty that annihilated the (Japanese) dwarfs.8

The local resistance had begun at the disappearance of the local Guomindang government when the officials pulled out after the Japanese occupied the area April 8, 1942. The Japanese soldiers had built blockhouses but the Yiwu people, unwilling to submit, soon destroyed several blockhouses and killed twelve Japanese soldiers. Ten days later the Japanese sent crack troops toward the neighboring local market town of Wudian. Warned of this, the people armed themselves with whatever weapons could be found: hoes, pitch-forks, shoulder poles, big knives, and air guns, along with a few landlords’ self-defense weapons, and came together, some 2,000 or 3,000 strong to fight the heavily armed Japanese. Because the Japanese did not know the land the peasants were able to hide among the hills and low places and

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attack in surprise. The result was the rout of the invading troops. The capture of seven guns by the Yiwu people was their first victory in the struggle and gave them modern arms. In reality their success this first time lasted for only a moment, for the next day the Japanese returned and took revenge by burning nine villages. It was out of the experience of these battles that an anti-Japanese self-defense force had been organized by the local people under the leadership of Yang Dehua, the enlightened son of a rich landlord. Not long after the local force was organized the Communist New Fourth Army under Chen Yi’s command sent CCP members to help Yang with the command of the group and renamed it the Eighth Brigade. The brigade continued for more than three years, until in August 1945 it was forced to withdraw when the Nationalists returned to accept the Japanese surrender. From the beginning of the brigade’s control of the area most local people had supported it with enthusiasm because it opposed the Japanese and helped to provide local security for them against banditry, not because of political ideology or land redistribution policies. The Japanese dominated the largest towns but this area had the advantage of being at the intersection of the borders of three counties. The brigade patrolled the roads, forcibly stopped merchants smuggling and prevented collaborators from selling material to the Japanese.9 While he was home Wu Han talked to many people from all levels. Men who fought in the battles, civilian personnel, the non–Eighth Brigade landlords, middle peasants, poor peasants, heads of the baojia. Many were illiterate, some had middle school educations. His mother, a villager, knew them all. The unanimous opinion regardless of their social status was that the Eighth Brigade was the best fighting group that had been seen or heard of. Although there were a thousand men in the Brigade, outsiders didn’t notice them, couldn’t pick them out, because they were part of the local landscape. Even though as many as one hundred people had been quartered at one time in Wu’s home in the walled courtyard, his mother told him they were courteous and didn’t use the family belongings. While the fighters were there, there were no bandits or robbers in the area nor was there any crop stealing, a real benefit for rural country people in those unstable times. He asked one middle-aged peasant how he had the courage to go out to fight and kill the enemy. The answer he got was: Nothing strange. I fought for us, and more important, we wanted to fight. If I didn’t go to fight, the enemy would have come and killed my parents, my wife and children, plundered my last rice and wheat and even would have burned my dilapidated house.10

From the experience of his village, Wu came to the conclusion that the reason “morale was high was because every fighter understands what they fight for. . . . Because the Eighth Brigade was from the people, belonged to

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the people, served the people, and lived in the midst of the people and it was an anti-Japanese army led by the CCP.” In a stirring tribute to his fellow villagers he wrote in his article about the brigade: It was they who inherited the glory of the Yiwu heroes led by General Qi Jiguang. It was they who had preserved this small, pure place for country and nation. It was they who had protected themselves, their people and sovereignty. It was they who had encouraged the healthy trends of the Chinese nation, and inserted a magnificent paragraph in the heroic and moving history of the AntiJapanese War.11

Although Wu saw them as an indigenous group motivated by selfprotection and patriotism, led by local clan people who happened also to be Communist, even as he wrote about them when he got back to Shanghai, they were being hunted as a “devil army,” by the local GMD to stamp out the influence of the Communist Party in the area. These guerrilla fighters, mostly surnamed Wu, who died fighting the Japanese enemy are honored by being named on the memorial column still standing on a hill near the village. Suddenly the news came to his house that the Yiwu County magistrate was coming to the village to see him. When he heard this he cut short his visit and left abruptly to return to Shanghai, fearing something might go wrong since the magistrate was a GMD official and his own reputation as a popular critic of the GMD was known far and wide. Wu Han remembered all too well the emissary who had been sent to Kunming from Yiwu to find him and offer the bribe of a GMD government position to silence his democratic activity. Wu had only spent four days in his home village with his mother. Little did he know that this would be the last time he would ever see her.

STOP THE CIVIL WAR! During his stay in Shanghai with his brother while Yuan Zhen regained her strength after the surgery, Wu met with many Democratic League people and old friends. Across the country the league members were committed to stopping the festering civil war. In the face of the increasing military clashes, ever since the Political Consultative Conference, the league had been pressing its role as a mediating party between the Guomindang and the CCP.12 Many Shanghai intellectuals who were critical of the Nationalists’ headlong drive to reoccupy the areas surrendered by the Japanese blamed the American envoy George Marshall for supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s policies that, they were convinced, were leading toward open civil war. The material aid being given by the Americans to the Nationalist military was promoting military clashes. Before he left Kunming, Wu Han had been turning out

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essay after essay, mainly targeted at halting the civil war, and he continued writing in Shanghai. In one published during a fifteen-day truce between the two sides, he appealed for a peaceful outcome for the whole nation: To stop the civil war more than two parties are needed, we need the people. In the past . . . we have made many mistakes . . . we thought the situation could be solved by a few political parties. The master of the state is the people. . . . We thought the problems of the country could be solved by allied nations. The Allies sent a lot of equipment, weapons, and transported troops to Northeast China to launch a large scale civil war. In one word our friendly allies arranged everything for us, everything for the civil war. Special envoy Marshall has done his best to mediate peace. Now we are facing the 15 days that will determine the future of China. . . . China will not allow civil war again. Civil war affects our whole nation, everyone’s life and safety, not only the problems of the Guomindang and the Communist Party.13

Eloquently, he begged the American people to use their full strength to stop their government providing weapons “to any country engaging in civil war” and, playing to America’s commercial interests, he wrote that if the war would stop it would not only help the Chinese people but it would also help the American people, “since only a peaceful, democratic prosperous China can become the market needed by the United States.” But Wu’s polemic was no more successful than any other centrist’s. The fighting continued, soon becoming a full-scale undeclared civil war. While he was in Shanghai many people in the Democratic League came to see him, among them Ye Shengtao, Shi Liang, and Zheng Zhenduo, the latter a mentor of Wu’s in his scholarly work in the 1930s and now the editor of the Shanghai Democratic League newspaper. Wu’s brother, Chunxi, was a league member and had also protected several Communist Party people in his home in the foreign concession. Chunxi was able to help his brother make connections with people he wanted to see, but GMD secret agents in plain clothes watched the house and followed Wu Han which made the family all very nervous because they knew Wu had been on the GMD hit list in Kunming.14 He wanted to get in touch with the underground Communist Party organization in Shanghai. Hua Gang was in Shanghai at the time and came often to talk with Wu. When Wu left Shanghai, Hua gave him money from United Front funds for transportation to Beiping. In these days Hua was speaking to the Agricultural Association about the new, less radical agricultural policy in the base areas that was related to Sun Yatsen’s theme of “land to the tiller,” a subject that Wu Han soon took up in his writing.15 Among the people Wu met in Shanghai was the leftist writer Feng Xuefeng. Although they were both from Yiwu County, this was probably the first time the two had met. Actually everything Wu did in Shanghai had a connection to democratic politics in some way. He went to many of the

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universities such as St. John’s and Datong, and the middle schools and the elementary school teachers’ unions to give political lectures. In late June he participated in the great mass rally at the railway station to see off Ma Shulun who, as a league member, was leading a group to Nanjing to demand the end of civil war.16

ASSASSINATIONS—“THE DARKEST TIME” The news of Li Gongpu’s assassination in Kunming reached Wu on 11 July without any forewarning of special trouble although he had known since the spring that there was a GMD blacklist including Li’s, his own, and Wen Yiduo’s names. Then, within days, when he had only just finished writing an essay mourning Li’s murder, the news of Wen Yiduo’s assassination reached him on 15 July. For the last three years Wu and Wen had been very close, sharing a sense of fervor and vision that was fueled by their relationships with many students. It was one of Wu’s students from Lianda in Kunming, knowing of their close friendship, who came to the house to break the news of Wen’s assassination to him. With his family around him Wu Han stood silently in place, stunned when he heard the news the student brought. After a few minutes he broke down, overwhelmed with grief. When he was able to think more clearly, he sat down to write an essay that expressed his anguish, titled “Grieving for Yiduo”: He was a poet from birth. He kept the character of a poet in his feelings and politically. He had a sense of justice and always talked fearlessly. His talk made people dance, awakened people and also made people worry about him. He attracted the hearts of thousands and thousands of youth. Every youth took him as a kind father or brother. They told him the stories of their bitterness, the injustices done to them and asked for guidance. Because of this the enemy was determined to put him in the place of the dead.17

This man Wu described was charismatic, beloved by many. Wen “had a character of steel,” He spoke out fearlessly about what was on his mind. In many ways Wu and Wen were alike, daring and emotional, frank and full of a vision of what was right. The two men had stood side by side in the student Democratic Movement and during the December First Incident. Wen was called the “Lion” and Wu the “Tiger” by the students who admired and followed them. But in Kunming that spring mysterious mocking signs had appeared, hastily pasted up on walls, that said, “Wen Yiduofu” and “Wu Hansiji,” meant to ridicule the two for sympathizing as fellow travelers with Russian Communism. Their student followers saw this as an ominous warning to them from rightists and cautioned them to take care. Unfortunately, by midsummer the students who had taken the responsibility of being bodyguards for Wen had already

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left Kunming. When Wu Han had bade farewell to Wen in their courtyard in May before he flew off to Chongqing with Yuan Zhen, Wen had said, “We’ll see each other in Beiping in two months. When you get to the Qinghua campus please go and look at the bamboo around my old house.”18 The last speech that Wen Yiduo made before he was killed was at the memorial meeting for Li Gongpu at Yunnan University. In his passionate way Wen had asked “Why has Mr. Li suffered such violent treachery? . . . He only used his pen to write some articles. He only used his mouth to speak. What he wrote, what he said was nothing but what any Chinese who hasn’t lost his conscience has to say. . . . Now Mr. Li was assassinated by reactionaries because he intended to win democracy and peace.” Prophetically, Wen seemed to dare their opponents, “You killed one Li Gongpu, but there will be thousands and millions of people! You saw that we have few people and little strength. To tell you the truth, we have great strength. . . . We have confidence that the force of the people will win victory. . . .” He continued, “You will come to your end very soon. Our dawn is before us, now is only the darkest time before the dawn. We have the strength to break out of the darkness and win the dawn. Our dawn is the end of these reactionaries!”19 Within hours after speaking these words and leaving the meeting, at the gate to the courtyard leading to his home, Wen was shot. At the time he was accompanied by his three sons who had been accompanying him for safety after his student bodyguards had left. One of them was also wounded by the assassins lurking nearby. Students nearby heard the commotion and carried Wen to a hospital but he was already dead.20 Across the country, Wen Yiduo’s death triggered people who supported democratic politics. Even intellectuals who had not taken an interest in politics before were rallied to oppose the Nationalists. The martyrdom of this well-known scholar and poet, beloved by students and admired by his peers, became a rallying cry for the Democratic Movement that crystallized outraged opinion against Chiang Kai-shek and his party. Although Wu knew it was dangerous, he still risked his life to give a eulogy for Wen in the city park in Shanghai at the Southwest Associated University alumni memorial meeting.21 A few days after Wen’s assassination, Wu met Zhou Enlai at Zhang Junmai’s house in Shanghai. They talked of Wen’s murder and of the Democratic league’s demand that the civil war halt so the nation could get on with building unity and a peaceful society together. Zhou told Wu Han that he encouraged the league to continue its work of mediation.22 Many members of the Democratic League and other democratic figures came to see Wu in the safety of his brother’s home in the foreign concession to talk about the assassinations and the danger to Wu himself. They talked about the strategy the league should follow, but Wu was heedless of the danger. After Wen Yiduo’s death those around him could see that he recommitted himself to opposing the GMD’s strategy of reopening the civil war.

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BACK TO QINGHUA AND HISTORY At the end of August, Wu and Yuan Zhen returned to Qinghua University in Beiping and moved into their first home together at the university. It was a faculty house with a little garden in the area called the Western Garden. This is on the road out of the campus toward the west and Yanjing University (today the Beijing University campus) and the haunting ruins of Yuan ming yuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) where students liked to walk. This was the Qing emperor Qian Long’s palace of European-style buildings that had been sacked by the British and French troops in 1860. The Wu campus house was modest but comfortable. But the Qinghua campus that Wu Han and Yuan Zhen moved back to had been left in a sad state by the Japanese army occupiers. During the military occupation the Japanese soldiers (3,000) had deliberately vandalized the buildings and equipment of the university, one of the finest university campuses in China. Then immediately after the Japanese surrender, the Guomindang military had turned the buildings into a hospital. In the months before the faculty returned, the university officials had been trying to make ready the facilities for the return of the university and the opening of the school term but funds were short and there was much to be done. The scattering and destruction of the library was one of the greatest losses.23 The Wu Han who returned to the shattered campus was no longer the eager, optimistic young scholar who had left, nor was China and the world the same as in 1937. Already the country was embroiled in an undeclared civil war, the people weary from nine years of outright international war, the Japanese occupation of their country, destruction, and poverty, lacking any

Figure 9.1. Yuan Zhen and Wu Han on the doorstep of their home on Qinghua University campus in Beiping, 1947

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real sense of what would be the best political system, but longing for peace and unity. The intellectuals, weighted with their deep sense of responsibility for the country, were tense with anxiety about the future but riven individually and collectively with division over the political direction the nation should follow. They were without any consensus on the goal at the end, and the road to take to reach the goal. There was no agreement on the content of the word, “democracy,” so often used loosely both as a symbol of modernity and to signify the ideal government that would be attained when stability was achieved or simply to signify opposition to totalitarian rule. As for the man, Wu Han, he returned to Qinghua campus married to a woman who was his spiritual partner and closest friend. The war years had been difficult years for him in daily life and family responsibility. He had also lost two of his closest friends, Zhang Yinglin and Wen Yiduo, both intellectual comrades with whom he had made plans for the future and shared parts of his heart and mind. Like Wu, both were outsiders to the mainstream culture but brilliant stars in their academic milieus.24 Most disturbing, his stellar career in historical research had been frustrated and interrupted by the fractures of the war experience and by his involvement in political activities. Now he came back to Qinghua University as a full professor in the history department, eager and ready to resume teaching and research in the restored department.25 The first year back at Qinghua he no longer taught Chinese general history, but advanced classes in Ming history and Song history. This allowed him to concentrate on his own special field, the Ming era, particularly Ming social history. To the history majors who had come back to Qinghua with him from Kunming he seemed very quiet now compared to the last years in Kunming. Most of the time he was tense, his brow knotted with worry. He was intense about everything but at the same time friendly, especially toward the students.26 The history department at Qinghua of course had fewer students than at Southwest Associated. There were nine professors but several were abroad; Lei Haizong was the chairman. Lei was much more moderate, even conservative, in his politics than Wu and perhaps it was for this reason that relations between them were sometimes strained. Lei and Sun Yutang taught Chinese general history. Shao Xunzheng, Chen Yinke, the White Russian Ge Bangfu, Wang Xinzhong, Liu Chonghong, and a professor surnamed Kong made up the rest of the department.27 After he had been back for a while Wu undertook revising and expanding his biography of the Ming founding emperor. He commented a few years after this that he never felt satisfied with his own works, although many historians and readers had been fully satisfied with the first version of the biography.28 When he had finished the first version of the biography in 1943, although he had copious notes from the studies he had already done, he had been limited by the sources available to him. Under the wartime condi-

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tions there were no archival facilities in Kunming, the archival collections in Beiping had been left behind and he had sold his own library. Now back in Beiping as he took advantage of the documentary collections in the libraries, the book took on more scholarly depth with additional material and footnotes. By changing the biography title to the Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang (Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan), he used the emperor’s personal name as the title to bring Zhu into the world of people and emphasize his humanity rather than the divine aspect of an emperor. Wu is very honest with his readers, as he was in the original volume, letting them know the biography is shaped by his authorial voice and this voice is related to the times in which he writes. Wu felt that his viewpoint now differed somewhat from the first book in which Zhu was a harsh, designing, cruel ruler and at the same time a hero driving out the non-Han invaders in what Wu called a revolution of national liberation. Now, after the Japanese surrender and the present context had changed, in Wu’s own words “Chiang Kaishek had initiated a full civil war,” his view of the Ming founder had also shifted somewhat. Writing for the current times, he now wrote about the ruler who “betrayed the revolution” he had led. He saw that “Ming Taizu and Chiang Kaishek really were similar in some ways. . . . At the time Zhu started the revolution, he had talked of the benefit for the masses of people, but when he became a ruler himself he changed his face to drive and exploit the people, even killing. He got rid of the bad, but he himself became an even worse ruler.” From this altered point of view Wu revised the book, doubling the length.29 Conceptually, his interpretation became basically political, viewing the economic situation from the standpoint of political power. Political oppression was the basic problem. He was also interested in the cultural aspect of the rise of the Ming. That is, it was the Han Chinese culture that triumphed with political reintegration after the collapse and defeat of the Mongols.30 Actually, before his death in 1969 his quest for perfection manifested itself in three revisions he made of the original biography. The very process of continued revision became an intellectual odyssey as he moved through successive interpretations. It was the interplay of politics and history that tied him to the subject of Chinese rulership, its nature and the interpretation of it as represented in the figure of the Ming founder. Of the four versions of the biography he would write before his death the interpretation in this version was the most negative view of Ming Taizu. Hu Shi’s conception of the best biographies as narratives of flawed heroes Wu was now taking to a high point.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS AND POLITICAL INTERESTS During these years, in addition to teaching and his historical research and revision of the biography Wu continued to write essays. In Kunming he

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had written some short pieces in the zawen style, particularly in two series entitled “Old History, New Comments” (“Jiu shi, xin tan”) and “Historical Talks” (“Shi hua”) which he collected and published in the volume, The Mirror of History.31 These pieces, using a historical lens for perspective, had immediate relevance to the current situation. While he was in Shanghai, Huang Shang, an editor of the Wenhui bao, had encouraged him to write articles commenting on education and culture in the manner of the zawen he had been writing in Kunming. After deciding to continue the series, Wu wrote several essays and sent them off to Huang in Shanghai, but these unfortunately seem not to have been published because the Wenhui bao was banned by the government for its liberal viewpoint at that point in the spring of 1947. The two Kunming series, “Old History, New Comments,” and “History Talks” were short zawen that took the form of history study notes. They were Wu’s creative experiment in combining descriptions of historical incidents in the past with contemporary comment on current situations, a form reminiscent of the ancient allegorical style described as “Pointing at the mulberry to abuse the locust” (Zhi sang ma huai). Huang Shang himself has suggested that the newspaper column of zawen Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Liao Mosha published in the early 1960s, Notes from Three Family Village, was a continuation and expansion of Wu Han’s “Old History, New Comments” of the wartime years.32 Comparison leaves little doubt these zawen from the 1940s were the forerunners of Wu’s later Three Family Village essays, both stylistically and thematically. Some of the very brief essays, often laden with irony, in the “Old History, New Comments” series were sharp attacks on flawed action in the past that had relevance in the present. In one he wrote about a dialogue between a master and a subordinate in which the underling knew the master was wrong but proceeded to flatter him. The reader gathered that flattery among cronies was common. Another was about two predatory officials, one a hungry tiger and the other a hungry eagle, who decided the taxes. Some were about themes Wu would pick up again in the early 1960s after the Great Leap disaster in the People’s Republic, particularly the behavior of midlevel bureaucrats. Thus in “Bao gong wenshu,” Wu, always an admirer of General Cao Cao at the end of the Han dynasty, wrote about Cao Cao’s concern with the reports of exaggerated success, multiplied by even as much as ten times, that were sent to him. When an official actually gave a true report, he received Cao Cao’s praise. Wu implied that this ratio of accuracy was true in the present. Another story, “Empty Talk and Actual Practice,” was aimed at ineffective officials. In the Song capital of Kaifeng people had talked endlessly about their fears of the enemy but nothing was ever done with the result that finally the enemy entered and occupied the city.33 Wu picked up these themes again in the 1960s to criticize incompetent officials. He had not been in Beiping long before he found himself torn between his academic and literary interests on one hand, and the pull of political

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activities. He complained bitterly about the demands made on him when he replied to Huang Shang’s invitation to continue the essay series: I would like to write the articles. The difficulty is that other people don’t think of you as an essayist, and assign many things which are beyond my reach to accomplish. On the one hand, I am tired as an ox or a horse and spend a lot of energy without reward. On the other hand, I want to find leisure time to write. Everyday I have to meet many people I am not acquainted with but who all have very lovely faces and who talk a lot about things which I cannot recall. Sometimes I am forced to take the platform or forced to march in the front of the demonstration ranks and other things. Therefore I can never write what I want to write, I can never read what I want. However, to whom can I complain? It is all because I am living in such a period as this. As long as I have time to write I will certainly follow your advice to write on education and culture.34

The pace of these years of teaching and political involvement was beginning to wear on Wu. Now he was back in Beiping longing for the quiet reflective life of a professor and writer but his own political stance and activities in Kunming, Shanghai, and now in the capital, led people in the democratic movement to certain expectations of his leadership.

Figure 9.2. Wu speaking to a memorial meeting for Wen Yiduo in Beiping, 1947, after Wen’s assassination

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Among the affairs pressing on him was the collection and publication of Wen Yiduo’s works. The poet and literary scholar Zhu Ziqing, Wen’s close friend, had also come to the same decision. Wen’s papers were shipped to Beiping from Kunming in November. Then Zhu Ziqing as the main editor, with Wu in a supportive role, began to edit Wen’s complete works in what was to become for them a joint memorial to Wen. In his diary Zhu recorded the progress of his work on the manuscripts. Wu felt that Wen’s political speeches and writings of the last few years should be included in the collection because Wen was both a scholar and a democratic fighter.35 By August 1948 the Collected Works of Wen Yiduo were published, just days before Zhu Ziqing’s death from kidney failure. Wu Han had written a colophon, “Ba Yiduo yiji” (Colophon on Wen Yiduo’s literary legacy), for the collected works. During the editorial process Wu Han and Zhu Ziqing had become close friends and political compatriots, and Zhu had begun to support the student Democratic Movement and the demonstrations against the civil war.36

DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE IN BEIPING Among the many Democratic League people who came daily to talk about the current political situation and the assassinations of Li and Wen were the leading members of the Beiping branch of the Democratic League, Shen Yifan and Wang Jun. There had been several other acts of terror committed against league members following the assassinations, also. Wu Han’s own safety was on league members minds.37 Wu was soon contacted by Xu Bing, a representative of the CCP in the Beiping office of the Tripartite Guomindang-Communist American Military Liaison Office. Xu Bing had been deputed by the CCP United Front Department to represent the CCP leadership to the Democratic League in Beiping. He had worked in the United Front ever since 1936 when he had been active in the National Salvation Association in Beiping along with Zhang Youyu.38 Among the meetings Wu attended was one to welcome Zhou Yang, a leader of the league of Left Wing Writers in the 1930s and now a representative in the liaison office. At this time Zhou was one of the dominant figures in cultural and educational circles in the border regions.39 Among leftist intellectual circles in Beiping there were Communist intellectuals, some of them local residents and some underground party members on specific missions. After the Peoples Republic was established in 1949 people were often astonished to learn who had been party members. For the first time underground members learned who their contacts in the clandestine “single line” communication system were in real life. On the other hand, those people in the liaison office had been open CCP members legitimately in Beiping to carry out duties connected with the Japanese surrender.40

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The Democratic League Central Committee office was in the national capital at Nanjing now. Across the north the league was represented by the North China branch but in the city of Beiping itself there was the separate Beiping branch. Wu plunged into local league activities when he returned to Beiping, but he quickly discovered there was deep disagreement among the leadership of the North China branch. Two of the branch leaders, Zhang Shenfu and Liu Qingyang, both early members of the Communist Party were critical of the CCP now and no longer members. Zhang’s open criticism of the party put him in contention with many who disagreed with him. A senior scholar and authority on Bertrand Russell, he had been a member of the very early Communist cell at Beiping University along with Li Dazhao. Arrogant and self-involved, Zhang had lost his earlier enthusiasm for Communism but not his political ambitions nor his conceit. He had contended with Shen Junru for leadership in the National Salvation Association in the late 1930s and now in the late 1940s he was competing against the philosopher, Zhang Dongsun, for the leadership of the North China branch of the Democratic League.41 Even in his undergraduate days at Qinghua Wu had been critical of Zhang Shenfu. Zhang’s arrogance and Western veneer had gone against the grain for Wu who had no particular interest in learning Western ways. According to Wu, the league members had decided that Zhang Dongsun was the better leader and elected him the chairman of the North China branch. Liu Qingyang became the Beiping branch chairman briefly in 1946, followed by Wu Han in October of 1946. After Wu sided with Zhang Dongsun, Zhang turned to Wu more and more for support.42 When Wu Han had returned to Beiping, coming into the Beiping League scene with impeccable Democratic Movement credentials as a revolutionary fighting scholar from Kunming, it was helpful to Zhang Dongsun who leaned to the left to gain Wu as an ally. Zhang, widely known as a philosopher and interpreter of Western thought, enthusiastically supported the idea of socialism and a planned economy for China. To him the American form of democracy was unsuitable. He was not afraid of communism for China, but insisted on absolute freedom of culture and thought. At this period Wu’s own thinking was very similar to Zhang’s ideas.43 Despite his overloaded calendar Wu took on editing Democratic League periodicals again as he had in Kunming. He and Zhang Guangnian edited and published the North China branch Beiping edition of the Democratic Weekly (Minzhu zhoukan, Beiping ban). Wu also took a major role in editing China Reconstructs semi-monthly (Zhongjian banyuekan) and the secret periodical, The Freedom Collection (Ziyou wencong).44 With the chaos of civil war more and more preventing a unified, stable government the league intensified its effort at opposing the fighting. In Beiping, Wu continued “bringing together and uniting intellectuals” to support the league goals of a stable government and prevention of civil

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war. The principal means of league action continued to be petitions to the national government signed by intellectuals and students, with rallies and demonstrations organized by students in the Democratic Movement always directed at the GMD government. The group of young and energetic professors who gathered around Wu were joined by a number of senior professors such as Zhu Ziqing, Jin Yuelin, and Chen Yinke.45 At one time Wu even thought fleetingly of winning over his teacher Hu Shi to support the Democratic Movement, remembering Hu’s great interest in the 1930s in liberal issues and his criticism of the GMD. Hu had recently returned from America where he had spent the war years as China’s ambassador to the United States, and had just assumed the prestigious position of the presidency of Beijing University. A few months before, when Wu was in Shanghai, he had written to Hu, also in Shanghai at the time, but no answer had come back. When he reached Beiping in the fall of 1946 he went to see Hu at Beida. “I—still cherished illusions about him at this time” he wrote cryptically later, describing what was a very painful encounter for him: “I went to Beida to see him. After we had said only a few words he left. After this I did not meet him again and severed the relationship.” Much later Wu heard that once when Hu was talking with someone he said, “it’s too bad Wu Han has taken the wrong road.”46 Long before Hu’s snub and rejection, the two men had been moving apart politically over the previous ten years, Hu Shi to the right and Wu to the left. When they were teacher and student in the early 1930s, Hu’s criticism of the GMD had been very sharp. The GMD had even labeled him an enemy at one point. Now he shared the same bed with the Nationalists, although perhaps not always happily, and Wu Han had become a leader of the left wing of the Democratic League. Yuan Zhen became even more harsh than before in her judgment of Hu Shi after Wu’s attempted meeting with Hu, according to Zhu Ziqing’s entry in his diary for 10 December 1946.47 Nevertheless, over the ensuing years, Wu’s loyalty to Hu Shi remained unswerving in spite of the split and political differences between them. During the anti–Hu Shi campaigns in the 1950s in the PRC there is no evidence that Wu Han denounced Hu Shi. According to his family until the end when Wu was attacked in 1966, above his desk in his study there always hung a pair of scrolls in Hu Shi’s calligraphy. While Wu Han was quite comfortable with his friendship and affiliations with people who were Communists, ideologically his ideas about the political remedy for China were those of the Democratic League. His “On Democratic Government” written in 1946 was compatible with the understanding of liberal Western democracy that the Democratic League espoused.48 He wrote about the democracy they were fighting for—it affected the entire existence of the individual—attitude and approach to life. He pointed to Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms as the kind of democracy that China wanted. The notion Wu had of Roosevelt’s thinking is similar to the view

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expressed by Roosevelt’s biographer, James MacGregor Burns: the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and from fear, combined together take as fundamental a bill of rights based on the satisfaction of economic need as well as political and religious freedom.49 The idea of equality was a major component of the content of “democracy” as Wu used it, as it had been in the democracy of the Rooseveltian freedoms. The people are the masters of the country; the government must be limited by the people. Most of Wu’s ideas of the democracy China needed, as expressed in his essay, “On Democratic Government,” were in fact corrections for faults and lacks in the Chinese political and economic situation, not systematic programmatic solutions for establishing representative democratic government in China. Wu stressed that democratic politics doesn’t depend on a favor bestowed from above but on the strength of the people to win it. In democracy in China there must be political freedom, freedom of thought, speech, press, assembly, travel, residency, performance, communication, and freedom of the person. While he included the right to vote and to be elected to office, what was wanted was economic democracy to own land and tools and be educated. There must be educational democracy, legal democracy, democracy for parties and groups.50 The sum total of his thinking about democracy was an imprecise kind of social democracy. Every one of these principles was a critical response to what was lacking under the Nationalist Party’s leadership. People from the democratic groups gathered often at Wu’s house informally to discuss events and politics. Under the threat of GMD suppression these gatherings took the guise of mahjongg and bridge parties to lend them a legitimate cover. Wu who was irrepressibly friendly and warm, loved to play cards so he ignored the danger. To gather at the Wu house was a pleasure for everyone. Always there were progressive publications, some from Hong Kong, lying on the table for people to read. Typical of the people who came to Wu’s home was a former student of his from Lianda, Zhao Zhaoxiong, by the late 1940s a young Qinghua teacher. Even though he had only attended a few meetings of the Kunming League, now that he was back in Beiping his interest in politics had grown. Dislike of the GMD was intense everywhere among intellectuals even those who had no particular interest in communism. People had become convinced that the Nationalists were unable to govern. Economically everyone was suffering; prices went higher every day, but salaries were low. In Kunming it had been possible to pick up extra work to supplement the low salaries but in Beiping this was impossible. As everything about life became more and more difficult the young teacher’s political interest had grown correspondingly stronger, until there was little else he talked about.51 Wu’s great talent at arousing and mobilizing intellectual opinion propelled him to the fore again in the capital, as it had in Kunming. An eloquent speaker in formal meetings Wu enjoyed informal discussions as well.

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Through his arrangements the Democratic League and China Reconstructs sponsored political discussion meetings, sometimes in his home. At one they invited people from the Soviet Union to participate and talk about the situation in Russia and the present situation in China; at another meeting the American professor Randolph Sailer of Yanjing University was invited to talk. Sailer was very liberal and sympathetic to the Chinese. He had risked his life during the anti-Japanese war to assist students fleeing from Japanese occupied Beiping to Yan’an and was very much admired by leftist intellectuals.52 Wu Han himself had not yet made up his mind on the political alternatives although he had learned a great deal by reading about the Soviet Union and its politics and culture.

WU HAN, THE STUDENTS, AND ANTI-AMERICANISM Wu was meeting informally day to day with students who wanted to talk about their lives and problems. Students from Yanjing and Qinghua began to gather in groups of friends to discuss the political situation and their disillusion with the ineffectiveness of the GMD. They came to the sanctuary of his small house in the Qinghua Western Garden compound to talk, sitting around on the floor of the main room completely covering it. In these days Zhu Ziqing remarked in his diary on how close Wu’s relationship was with the younger generation.53 Wu Han had resumed his relationship with the Democratic Youth League (DYL) when he returned to Beiping. His break with the more radical of the DYL leaders in Kunming over the unlimited strike they called during the December First Movement had been smoothed over. His judgment of the strike had been vindicated by both Dong Biwu in Chongqing and Zhou Enlai in Shanghai when they told him the Southern Bureau also had disapproved of the brash strategy as risking too much for a cause that would not succeed.54 With the rising tide of dissatisfaction over the civil war the Youth League had grown from its beginning in Kunming, into a part of the student protest movement across China. Back in the reestablished universities after the war, thousands of angry, militant students who increasingly blamed the Guomindang for the continuation of the civil war joined the exploding movement. The first crisis erupted very soon after the educational institutions reopened in the fall of 1946 over the assault and rape of a Beiping University student by two American marines on Christmas Eve, 1946. Outraged student opinion quickly crystallized into demonstrations that protested what became known as the Shen Chong Incident after the name of the girl. This was an emotional issue that quickly expanded to take the name of the Movement to “Protest the Brutality of American Military Personnel.” The movement tapped a reservoir of anti-American feeling that had been building and extended far beyond the radical students to include a large

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number of faculty and students. For Wu Han his underground link with the Communist members of the Youth League was a student, Xiao Song, who had become a good friend in Kunming and now kept Wu informed about the protests. Wu was excited by the demonstrations and told Xiao the campaign was very good, that he thought it was having a great influence.55 The whole affair and the way the university and government mishandled it, in fact, made many people very angry. The contrast between Hu Shi and Wu Han’s social and political attitudes can be seen in the different responses of the two to the emergency generated by the rape incident. Hu Shi, as president of Beida rather than defending the female student, who was a student at the university tried instead to maintain a neutral position that cautioned against judging her and questioning her moral standards as the Beida Proctor had been doing.56 This of course simply infuriated the students even more. In the spring of 1947 with escalating prices and economic chaos seriously affecting the well-being of the entire academic community, the Anti-Hunger and Anti–Civil War Movement erupted. A year later, in the spring of 1948, a series of antioppression, antihunger protests were held and more antiAmericanism erupted in the movement to protest the U.S. support of the GMD. Wu had participated in the earlier movements but by the spring of 1947 he was in such danger himself from the police that he no longer took part openly.57 In Wu Han’s view, in the three years from 1946 through the demonstrations in the spring of 1948, the DYL was the mainstay of what he called the Beiping Democratic Movement, “cooperating with them were progressive university teachers and leading was the Democratic League.” In his opinion the movement was led solely by the Democratic League without mention of the Communist Party.58 During these years he saw the Democratic League and the Communist Party as two distinctly separate entities. But even as he claimed credit for the league as a separate organization, he knew full well that the league itself was dependent on the CCP for financial support.59

COLLAPSE OF PEACE NEGOTIATIONS In the spring of 1947 negotiations seeking a peaceful resolution of the civil war between the Guomindang and the Communists collapsed. The talks had been stalled for some time. General Marshall was recalled by President Truman 6 January 1947 terminating the American mediation efforts. Marshall had been convinced that only through the participation of a liberal opposition group in China could there be a guarantee of good government and of progress toward stability.60 Although Marshall’s notion of a “liberal opposition group” had little resemblance to the nature of the tiny elite Democratic League, nevertheless this conception of the key nature of

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the third group had fed the league intellectuals’ image of themselves in China’s political future. The previous November, just after the universities reopened in Beiping, the Nationalist government had unilaterally announced its call for a National Assembly, completely ignoring and undercutting the Political Consultative Conference in which the league had played a major role and leaving no basis for the constitution which the Consultative Conference had been drafting. The league saw that this was a maneuver to circumvent the conference and the proposed democratic constitution. The league chairman, Zhang Lan, accused the GMD of acting as a “threatening victor” and of trying to “lure” the league to its side. The Beiping branch of the League, chaired by Wu Han, backed Zhang in a statement refusing to participate in the National Assembly the GMD was calling. Their reason for refusing was that the requirements to halt the civil war and reorganize the government demanded by the Consultative Conference for adoption of a new constitution had not yet been met. The Beiping branch statement made clear that for them this was necessary for “achieving peaceful unification.”61 Democratic League members had watched in despair as the possibility of a break became more certain. In January 1947 in an interview Wu had implied the possibility of realignment of the third force. He told the reporter that with the Democratic League’s loss of the Youth Party and the Minshe (Socialist) Party the previous fall, when the GMD issued the call to the National Assembly, the so-called Third Force could no longer play the role of mediator because it was too weak. He thought the old Third Force was now really nonexistent and predicted a new Third Force would probably be established to represent the segment that was neither Nationalist or Communist.62 Following the breakdown in negotiations, the Guomindang government began to tighten its control and notified the CCP representatives in Nanjing that their presence in government-controlled territory was no longer desired and the Communist Party publications must cease publication.63 The Communist representatives in the liaison offices in Nanjing and Beiping were withdrawn to Yan’an by the CCP. This final step to open civil war was taken in February 1947. At this time, Xu Bing, who was leaving with the liaison group, talked with Wu Han. Xu wanted Wu Han to leave with them for Yan’an because he would not be safe if he stayed in Beiping. Wu, however, was not yet ready to drop his work and join the Communist side. In his words he “thought it wasn’t urgent, furthermore I had a great deal of work to do and wasn’t willing to leave. I would change my pattern of work a bit. I would not participate in mass rallies or in the ranks of the demonstrations.”64 Before the Communist Military Liaison group was withdrawn from Beiping, some of the league people met with them in a forum called by Meng Yongqian, a league member with Communist Party membership. General Ye Jianying and Xu Bing were there. Wu Han, as well as about twenty other

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Democratic League members attended. In his speech to the group Ye undertook to reassure the audience by analyzing the situation. He predicted that Chiang Kai-shek’s army would certainly be defeated and the people be victorious. In his judgment there was no rational reason for Chiang to launch a military campaign: his soldiers’ morale was bad, there were serious insurmountable contradictions between his military strategy and his army’s strength, and between the central army and other warlord’s troops. On the other hand, General Ye said the People’s Liberation Army’s just cause had won political support from the people and its military strategy and tactics were flexible. Coming from one of the most respected of the Communist military leaders these words made the already left-leaning league people at the forum think seriously and optimistically about the future although most were still clinging to the idea of a coalition.65 Another meeting followed. This was a farewell banquet for the liaison office representatives, Ye Jianying and Xu Bing, and the leaders of the Beiping Democratic parties and various independent people with no party affiliation. About thirty of the democratic people attended including Wu Han, Pan Guangdan, Fei Xiaotong and his brother, Fei Qing, Shen Yifan, Zhang Xiruo, Zhang Dongsun, Xu Deheng, Lei Jieqiong, the artist Xu Beihong, and the political scientist Qian Duansheng. General Ye Jianying spoke to them about the unwelcome possibility of full scale civil war. He reminded them of the success of the Communist forces in resisting the ten-year campaign of the Nationalists against the Chinese Soviet region. Now the people oppose civil war and want peaceful construction of a new China. This is what the Communists insist on, but the Nationalists go against the people’s will. If they go on and launch a full-scale war the situation will quickly be beyond the control of the GMD. He also told them that in the event of war, for strategic reasons at the beginning the Communist armies would give up some areas but would win victory in the end. His closing words were “We believe that after several years we will meet our friends in Beiping.” After Ye’s speech Zhang Dongsun, Wu Han and Xu Deheng representing the league spoke in response and the group applauded enthusiastically.66 For these people at this moment the respect paid to the intellectuals and the rational appeal made to them by the CCP leaders at these two meetings was in glaring contrast to the way the Guomindang government had been treating them with suppression and terrorist tactics. For many years constant censorship, police hunts, and outright attacks, even assassinations, the GMD’s calculated circumvention of the Political Consultative Conference to call for the National Assembly in a manner designed to exclude them, all this had created a wholly adversarial relationship between the Nationalists and the intellectuals. The Nationalists seemed determined to create enemies of many members in an elite social group that actually had historically always been considered

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necessary for the ruler to attract as allies. Repeatedly through Chinese history, the rulers or would-be-rulers who did not have the literati-intellectuals on their side had lost or never gained legitimacy. The ancient shi or scholars had always lent legitimacy to the rulers. Because of this ages-old Chinese pattern, modern intellectuals innately assumed that they were properly legitimators of political regimes. In this present era of the 1940s, the Communists, from the reshaping of the Second United Front and the publication of “On Coalition” by Mao Zedong had thought inclusively about the intellectuals, in fact, had courted many of them. Their strategy had been to work with the Democratic League particularly and to this end had seen to it that the league members received special positive attention. These farewell meetings with the withdrawing liaison representatives, on the eve of what all now realized was going to be full-scale civil war with an outcome that would be decisive for China’s future, confirmed to the intellectuals at the meeting how valued they were by the Communist leadership. Despite all of this many present still entertained their fervent hopes for national unity in a coalition government. At this point after the CCP Liaison group withdrew from Nanjing and Beiping in February 1947, the Nationalists’ army moved quickly. Yan’an was taken in mid-March by the GMD Army after it was evacuated by the Communists. On 4 July 1947, the Nationalist government proclaimed the Communists to be in open rebellion. With this, Nationalist victory meant the necessity of suppression of the Communists by military force. In response a full-scale counteroffensive was launched by the Communist armies.

DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE BANNED On 28 October 1947, the Democratic League was banned by the Nationalist government. When the convocation of the National Assembly to adopt a constitution was announced by the GMD, this unilateral step nullified the agreements that had been previously reached among the delegates at the Political Consultative Conference. Many in the league condemned this and refused to participate in the Assembly. In the eyes of the GMD this act of refusal placed the league in opposition to the GMD and thus completely on the side of the CCP.67 There could be no middle ground in Chinese politics at this point in the mind of the Nationalist Party. When the league was banned, in order to protect the security of league members, some of the League Central Committee people in Shanghai, particularly Huang Yanpei, negotiated an agreement with the Nationalist government that there would be no arrests if the league headquarters would quietly dissolve and the league disband. This compromise was engineered and carried out in Shanghai without participation of the Beiping League or the North China branch.68

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After the news of this action by League Central Committee people in Shanghai reached Beiping the league members met to discuss the situation at Zhang Dongsun’s home. When Wu Han, as chair of the Beiping branch, the second in rank in North China at the time, opposed the disbanding, the meeting deadlocked and ended in a split. Zhang Dongsun and Zhang Shenfu, as leaders of the North China branch, proceeded to announce the disbandment of the branch in the newspapers. At this, the left wing of the Beiping group in a working committee led by Wu Han decided “you can disband your part, we will carry on ours.” With this the Beiping branch of the league, led by Wu Han, went underground as a splinter group, meeting often at his house. They had a radio receiver provided them earlier by Xu Bing so that broadcasts could be received from the liberated areas. Once this left-wing league group had gone underground the radio became an important link with the CCP controlled areas for them and for the students. Written copies of the broadcasts were made and mimeographed to circulate news from the border areas widely and counteract rumors circulated by the GMD.69 Following the league being outlawed, many of the league leaders in central and south China left for the safety of British-ruled Hong Kong where they reestablished the league. In January 1948, they held the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Democratic League in Hong Kong and repudiated the disbandment agreement of the Shanghai League leaders with the Nationalist government. In the measures the league Central Committee adopted, the Nationalist Party’s leadership of the government was rejected and Communist Party leadership acknowledged. Whether intentionally planned or not, this became a solid step that led to the Democratic League’s future participation in a coalition government led by the Communist Party in October 1949.70

UNDERGROUND IN BEIPING After Wu took the Beiping branch of the league underground in the fall of 1947, activities were hidden from view; meetings were held at his house clandestinely and special care was taken to keep the membership list secret. Since there normally was lots of activity at the Wu home, these comings and goings didn’t attract undue attention, news of the liberated areas received on the short-wave radio kept up their enthusiasm. Wu helped many students who wanted to flee to the border area get the necessary falsified documents and disguises and found transportation for them. Some of these people hid in his home or were helped by other people such as his progressive American friend, Professor Robert Winter, an exile who had taught at Qinghua for years and often went to the Wu home. The students were then passed on from the Qinghua University neighborhood

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outside the city walls to his sister-in-law, Yuan Xizhi, the wife of the wellknown scholar and calligrapher Rong Zhaozu, who lived in the center of the city. They stayed with her while she arranged transportation and disguises and Rong cleverly fashioned the necessary phony identification passes by carving a printing block out of a bar of soap which he then dissolved each time after printing the passes. When outfitted with papers and disguises, the students were helped on their way on the next leg of their journey to the Communist-held areas.71

CALL FOR A NEW POLITICAL CONSULTATIVE CONFERENCE In the spring of 1948, Wu Han received a special visitor in his home at Qinghua University. While teaching his classes in Ming History he had been working intensely on research and rewriting the biography of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming dynastic founder. The atmosphere in Beiping was tense. Student demonstrations agitated the city and waves of fear spread everywhere after police raids. Wu had been staying away from the demonstrations assuming a low profile so as not to call attention to himself. His visitor was an underground Communist Party member sent to talk with him by the Communist Central Committee. Zhang Wensong, the messenger, came to bring Wu news of the party’s May First Declaration. This was a call for certain representatives from the democratic parties and groups to come to the liberated area to discuss with key CCP members the calling of a Political Consultative Conference and the formation of a people’s coalition government. The Communist leadership was courting some twenty-nine democratic individuals, one of whom was Wu, whose voluntary participation was considered vital to the meeting’s success.72 Zhang Wensong was working under Liu Ren at this time, ultimately directed by Zhou Enlai who was supervising United Front activities. Zhang had not previously met Wu Han, although he had heard about him in party circles.73 In the following years, Zhang would come to know Wu well, even to enduring the same detention quarters in the Cultural Revolution and the same terrifying struggle attacks from the masses at Wu’s side for at least a whole year. In 1948 he knew that Wu maintained very close connections with the party even though identification with Communists could be tantamount to a death warrant in Beiping. Certain underground workers in Beiping had been asked to personally contact and invite several of the Democratic people including Fu Dingyi, Mao’s old teacher from Hunan Teachers’ College, Professor Zhang Xiruo, and Professor Wu Han. After Zhang told Wu about the planned Political Consultative Conference, and asked his opinion Wu was silent for some time pondering the situation and then spoke. “It isn’t the proper time yet. The meeting should be held after Nanjing (the GMD capital) is captured when the Liberation Army has

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crossed the Yangtze.” He explained that in the nineteenth century when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’s campaign thrust northward from Nanjing to Beiping, had they actually reached the capital at Beiping and taken it they would have been successful in overthrowing the Qing. But inability to reach the capital had prevented their victory. This was the key to success. Using this historical analogy, he explained that this meeting should be held after the capital of Nanjing was captured, it was too early now. Although he declined to go to the liberated area, nevertheless, he willingly accompanied Zhang to talk with Zhang Xiruo, Xu Deheng, and other professors who were Democratic League people about a consultative conference.74 In sending this emissary the Communist Party had made clear to Wu that he was important to them and that they were concerned about his safety. Before this visit from Zhang, Wensong Wu had had a narrow scrape with GMD secret agents who had arrested a man who implicated Wu under interrogation. Mei Yiqi, the Qinghua president, had been enlisted by the GMD secret agents to talk with Wu to trap him into incriminating himself. When Xu Bing heard about this he telegraphed money to the woman at Qinghua who was the Communist contact person for Wu Han so that he could leave Beiping. However, Wu, even then, was not yet ready to leave and turned the money down.75 Years later Zhang Wensong commented to this author on Wu Han’s reason for advising against the holding of a political consultative conference in the spring of 1948, “It was impossible for him to understand the political need to speed up liberation, to use the conference as a spur.”76 In Zhang’s view Wu’s reservations were those of a political historian, not a political strategist. In fact, at that moment in the spring of 1948 (before the People’s Liberation Army [PLA] victories in the three crucial military campaigns of Liaoning-Shenyang, Huai-Hai, and Beiping-Tianjin) there was no certainty that the PLA would be successful in the end or that a Communist government could be established. They were also the reservations of an intellectual who was instinctively cautious about committing himself irrevocably to an enterprise whose purpose might never be fulfilled, a man who thought as an observer not an agent, not yet fully decided and unified in his own thinking about the future of the nation and where he fitted into it. In any case, the conference was not held until over a year later when the situation had already been decided by military action. Zhang’s comment on using the new consultative conference as a “spur” to “liberation”—that is, victory in the civil war—reveals the importance of the United Front in the CCP’s thinking as they prepared to win victory. The content of this “liberation” included the construction of a new political order for China. For this new political order in the minds of the CCP Central Committee strategists, particularly Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the participation of the man Zhang was inviting, and others like him, in a redefined United Front was necessary.

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WU HAN: A KEY FIGURE IN THE TRANSITION TO A NEW UNITED FRONT The answer to why Wu Han was needed as a participant in the new consultative conference and in redefining the United Front was partly in his early history. He was known and well liked as an intellectual by Dong Biwu and other top party leaders involved in planning the consultative conference. His activities in Kunming had shown him to be a man of fearless, principled criticism of Chiang Kai-shek and the GMD. The part he had taken in the December First Movement and the demonstrations leading up to it along with the “left-leaning” professors, such as Wen Yiduo, had been important to the growth of the student movement. Wu’s leadership had been especially important in the initial period of the “progressive” DYL, which had become distinctly radical by 1946–1947. When Wu returned to Beiping to teach at Qinghua University in 1946 he had wholeheartedly joined the Democratic Movement in Beiping. Wu and other democratic centrist people had worked closely with the Communist representatives in the Liaison Commission in Beiping much as the democratic people earlier during the War of Resistance had worked with the Southern Bureau in Chongqing.77 Each of these experiences had shown the underground leaders his mettle and his convictions. These leaders in the Chinese political culture were completely convinced that the participation of the elite intellectuals was necessary to the success of a new political order. After civil war broke out, Wu Han had been a key person in the organization of intellectuals’ support for the United Front. He was credible with many senior intellectuals first of all because of his reputation as a brilliant scholar and secondly as a political activist. On the other hand, there were many younger intellectuals and students who identified with him and saw his frank opposition to the Nationalist Party leadership as akin to their own position as activists. These people looked to him for leadership in opposing the GMD. When Wu was placed on the GMD Blacklist as an enemy to be erased the Guomindang had actually legitimated and confirmed him as a heroic intellectual fighter in the eyes of their opponents. When the Democratic League had been suppressed by the government in the autumn of 1947 and leftist league members established the exile Democratic League in Hong Kong, Wu’s refusal to go along with the government order, staying, as he did, in the city and taking the splinter group of the Democratic League Beiping branch underground on his own initiative, had validated him as a courageous radical league leader. Yuan Zhen also played a part in the attention and respect that was shown to Wu by the Communist leaders. The role she and her sister had taken in the core group of early women revolutionary students around Dong Biwu at Hubei Women’s Normal School and their path breaking membership in the Socialist Youth League was recognized by the CCP leadership, particu-

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Figure 9.3. Yuan Zhen and Wu Han in Beiping at Qinghua University, 1948

larly because the old revolutionary intellectual Dong Biwu was one of the inner members of the Central Committee.78 Through Yuan Zhen and her sister’s friendship with their teacher, Wu Han had become friends with Dong. The two scholars naturally respected each other. Dong’s friendship and respect for Wu should not be underestimated as a factor validating him. Also through his sister-in-law, Yuan Fuzhi, who was close friends with Deng Yinchao, Zhou Enlai’s wife, he had a personal channel to Zhou. The network of personal relations that drew Wu and these CCP leaders together was strong and established a sense of mutual trust, a vital factor in Chinese political culture. Wu’s central abiding interest and role in the interpretation of Chinese history and culture also increased the Chinese Communist leadership’s respect for him. Even though he was not a political theorist, clearly he was interested in social democracy. As a historian of China he shared with others who valued China’s culture and history a deep-running concern about the present and future of the society and country. By the late 1940s, he was becoming more and more aroused by the need to protect China’s national sovereignty and unity.79 Although Wu was not antiforeign, neither was he pro-Western nor

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pro-American. As Beiping university students became more anti-American in their demonstrations Wu also had joined the hue and cry, until with the campaign of denunciation and rejection of the American food aid sent to bolster the GMD regime, in the summer of 1948, he and Zhu Ziqing were openly identified with virulent opposition to the American government policy of aiding and supporting the GMD.80 Wu was seen as an important ally for the Communist leadership who were actively identifying key nonCommunist intellectuals to work in redefining the United Front. This took on added weight as tension grew between the Communist regime in formation and the United States over the continuing American interference in what the CCP and its supporters considered to be a civil war with the Nationalists that foreign powers had no right to interfere in.81

NOTES 1. Portions of this chapter discuss aspects of Wu Han’s life that I have discussed in Mazur “Intellectual activism in China during the 1940s: Wu Han in the United Front and the Democratic League,” (1993), 27–55 and “The United Front redefined for the party-state: a case study of transition and legitimation” (1997). 2. Interview 52. 3. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Interview 130; Xiao Song (1984), 71–82. 4. Interview 113. She had a hysterectomy. Women tubercular patients were subject to uterine problems and, lacking adequate medical attention during the war, an existing condition had grown worse. 5. Chen Yungfa, (1986), 512. 6. Interview 113. For Wu Shanmin see Yiwu xianzhi, 663–64. 7. Wu Han, “Ji diba dadui—huanxiang sanji zhi yi,” “Zhe daonan—huanxiang sanji zhi er,” and “Zhen kong de xiangcun—huanxiang sanji zhi san.” Interviews 34, 35. 8. Wu Han, “Ji diba,” in SSRW, 146. The present author’s visit to the village included visiting the monument and shrine to the dead in the brigade located at the spot where they defended the village against the Japanese. Most of the names were of the Wu clan. The fighting spirit of the Yiwu warriors was famous long before this anti-Japanese war and people from the area are proud of this spirit down to today. More than one person has suggested to me that Wu Han’s bold nature and fighting spirit was strongly influenced by his consciousness of this spirit. 9. Chen Yungfa (1986). 10. Wu Han, “Ji diba,” 158. 11. Wu Han, “Ji diba,” 161. 12. Tang Tsou (1963), 421. 13. Wu Han, “Jueding jinhou lishi de shiwu tian.” 14. Interviews 52, 58. 15. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Pepper (1991), 231, quoting the Shanghai Economics Weekly 3, no. 16, 17 October 1946 (CPR, 31 January 1947). 16. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; BDRC. Yiwu xianzhi, 667–68.

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17. Wu Han, “Ku Yiduo.” Other essays by Wu in Minzhu zhoukan, Qunzhong, Wen cui, and Wenhui bao. 18. Zhang Youren (1984), 63. 19. Wen Yiduo (1951), 204–7. 20. Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:413; Interview 48; Interview 44. 21. Zhang Youren (1984), 64. 22. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Zhang Youren (1984), 64. 23. Freyn (1940), 20–23. 24. Interview 68. 25. An instance of Wu’s being waylaid by politics in his scholarly career was his abandoning his project of a Ming History after a clash with the censors. After receiving an invitation from a press and writing the first section of a Ming History [Ming shi] in 1941 he was forced to withdraw it by the GMD censor over the use of the Ming-era term “Red Army,” uncomfortably like the name the Communists were called. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 26. Interview 147. He did teach Chinese general history in 1947–1948, according to Interview 59. 27. Guoli Qinghua daxue yilan, Dierlei, (1947), 9. 28. Wu Han, “Wo de zhixue yu sixiang shi zenyang jinbu de,” 19. For more detail on the four biographies see Mazur “The Four Zhu Yuanzhangs”: (1997), 63–85. 29. Wu Han, “Wo de zhixue,” 18. 30. The interpretation in the two later versions (1955 and 1965) was conceptually basically economic. 31. Wu Han, Lishi di jingzi (1946). 32. Huang Shang, “Yishu jiu xin—jinian Wu Han tongzhi” (1979), 51–56, originally published in Wenhui bao, 25 March 1979. This column, written in the 1960s, was a focal point for the criticism in the early Cultural Revolution in the late spring of 1966. Their authors were accused of traitorous action to criticize the CCP and Mao Zedong. In fact, the content of the columns is directed mostly at improving various aspects of society and the bureaucracy. Wu Han was one of three authors of SJCZJ, the other two being Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha. See Cheek (1997). 33. These zawen were published in the appendix of LSJZ. 34. Wu Han to Huang Shang, 4 December 1946; contained in Huang Shang “Yishu jiu xin” (1979) 4. 35. Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:434–512. Zhang Youren (1984), 65. Wu Han wrote a colophon, “Ba Yiduo yiji” [Colophon on Wen Yiduo’s literary legacy], in Wen Yiduo quanji. 36. Zhu Ziqing (1998–1997), 10:445–512. 37. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Shen Yifan (1979), 26–28. 38. U.S. Department of State, The China White Paper, August 1949, 627–32. This office was the Juntiaobu Zhong-Gong daibiao banshichu; the central liaison office was in Nanjing. 39. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Zhang Youyu (1981), 12; BDCC, 236; BDRC, 1:431–35. 40. Xiang Zemin (1979), 49. 41. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Qian Jiaju letter to present author, 14 July 1990. Zhang Shenfu and Liu Qingyang were lovers and erstwhile husband and wife. Schwarcz (1992).

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42. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng Beijing shi weiyuanhui zhongyao wenxian xuanbian, 193. 43. See Pepper (1978), 186–87; for Zhang Dongsun’s biography see BDRC. 44. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 45. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; for Zhu’s relationship to Wu see Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:445–512 passim. 46. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 47. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:434. 48. Wu Han, “Lun minzhu zhengzhi.” 49. Burns (1970), 34. 50. Wu Han, “Lun minzhu zhengzhi.” 51. Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:456–57; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Interview 157. 52. Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:490; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Xia Rende zai Zhongguo, especially Hou Renzhi (1985) and Zhang Weiying (1985). 53. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:439. 54. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Zhu Ziqing (1988–1997), 10:439. 55. Xiao Song (1984), 79. 56. Pepper (1978), 52–58. Wu Han, “Guanyu kangyi Meijun baoxing de yijian.” 57. For the movements Pepper (1978), 52–78; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Bodde (1950), 22–25. 58. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 59. Tang Tsou (1963); Pepper (1978), 80–93, for Communist and other influences in the student movement. 60. U.S. Department of State, The China White Paper, August 1949 (1967), 217–20. 61. Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng Beijing shi weiyuanhui zhongyao wenxian xuanbian, 8. 62. Renwu zhi (January 1947). 63. Pepper (1978), xviii; Van Slyke (1967), 198. 64. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 65. Mu Kuizhong (1981). This meeting was held at the home of Mu Kuizhong. Pepper (1978), 188–95. 66. Shen Yifan (1981). 67. Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng lishi wenxian, 357–60. 68. Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng lishi wenxian, 362. 69. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Hu Yuzhi and Li Wenyi (1979b). 70. Tongmeng wenxian, 365–78. 71. Interview 146; Interview 143. This was described vividly to the author by Rong Zhaozu and Yuan Xizhi. 72. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 434. For a May 2 version of the declaration see Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tongyi zhanxian wenjian xuanbian, 197–98. 73. Zhang Wensong Interview 148. Although Zhang is Peng Zhen’s brother-inlaw, this had nothing to do with the mission. 74. Zhang Wensong Interview 148; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 75. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Interview 148. 76. Zhang Wensong Interview 148. 77. Zhang Wensong Interview 148. 78. See chapter 5 in this volume.

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79. Wu later stressed his attacks on Chiang Kai-shek in referring to his writing. However, fundamental to his criticism was his deep concern about threats to the nation and national unity. It was the ruler’s weakness and incompetence in the face of internal and external threats that underlay his attitude toward Chiang. For example Ming Taizu (1944), the successor version Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (1949), and his works like “Lun shidafu,” stressed the historical theme of national unity and exemplary rulers and intellectuals who had tried to lead the nation out of catastrophe. Pepper (1978). 80. See Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng Beijing shi weiyuanhui zhongyao wenxian xuanbian (1991), 16; Zhu Ziqing riji in Zhu Ziqing quanji. for anti-Americanism shared by Wu and Zhu Ziqing; also Chen Xiaochuan (1991), 316–22. 81. Ying Ruocheng Interview 59. Yang Kuisong (1992), 17–34.

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y the late spring of 1948 Wu had reached a decision, made his plans and was preparing to leave Beiping. According to Qinghua University rules, he was entitled to a year’s leave of absence since he had already taught for eight years. At the beginning of the summer he applied and received permission for a year’s leave in the United States. However, it was not to America that he was preparing to go, but indirectly to the North China Liberated Area.1 He set the time for September or October. Wu had decided to support the Communist side of the civil war but had no intention of giving up his position at the university. He would continue in the history faculty at the university, the most important part of his life, when the crisis was over. At thirty-nine, he had a long, full career of teaching and historical research ahead of him. The general mood in Beiping that spring strongly opposed the Nationalist government and favored the Communists. Several cities in Manchuria had fallen to the Communist army in March. In central China, Loyang, and Kaifeng in Henan Province fell to the CCP counteroffensive in the late spring. The area controlled by Communist armies expanded almost daily. The CCP had launched a rectification campaign in December 1947, designed to curb excesses in land reform and urban policy to allay liberal allies’ and students’ fears of Communist excesses. A foreigner observed that the prevailing mood was complete disaffection with the Guomindang government, blaming it as the cause of everything that was wrong: it was unable to rule, unable to provide economic relief, and it was corrupt. Since people thought that nothing could be any worse than what they were suffering at the hands of the Guomindang they no longer feared Communism.2

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Daily life had turned into a survival struggle. Inflation spiraled higher day by day, even by the hour. The only thing to do was to take one’s pay on payday and rush to the market to buy rice since tomorrow the value of the money would fall further. In the city it was not uncommon to open the door in the morning and find a body “stretched out starved to death on the doorstep.” American students visiting two professors’ homes on the Qinghua campus on the same afternoon were made acutely conscious of the problems of life for even the highest strata of intellectuals when they saw the dramatic disparity between the comfortable living conditions in the nearby, identical campus homes of the American professor Robert Winter who was living on a Rockefeller grant and that of an eminent Chinese professor who had only his university salary to provide for himself and his family. “The attractiveness of the American’s furnishings—wall-to-wall carpeting, full beige drapes, beige-covered couches, an aquarium, beautiful flower arrangements, and paintings to blend in with the beige motif” struck them in comparison to the poverty of the Chinese professor’s bare home. “Siamese cats, sprawled on the chairs or prowling the floor, added the last touch” in the first house. “In startling contrast, when [they] reached the Chinese professor’s house. . . . [they] found bare floors, no drapes, and no softly glowing lamps. Only a single, unadorned bulb hung from the ceiling” lighting the room with “garish light, and an ugly, potbellied stove almost in the center of the room looked antiquated and inadequate in contrast to the central heating in the home [they] had just left.” Their Chinese host told them “Don’t let that stove fool you. . . . I’ve had it ready and waiting since the beginning of November, but here it is mid-December and I can’t afford coal to burn in it. Perhaps you had better keep your coats on while you’re here.”3 Although the home was not Wu Han’s, his was no different. Life had become more difficult in every way as the months passed. However in spite of the difficulties of living and the danger the threat of secret police action was to him personally, Wu was in no rush to leave Beiping. He must finish revising and expanding the biography of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, and there were other research and writing projects and his speaking activities before he could leave. There were several new political essays to be finished and published together in the collection Events and People (Shishi yu renwu) in July. 4

SEMINAR ON THE STRUCTURE OF POWER WITH FEI XIAOTONG At Fei Xiaotong’s invitation, Wu had been participating in a faculty-graduate seminar in the sociology department at Qinghua during the academic year of 1947–1948.5 Fei had planned it as a Malinowski type of seminar for joint faculty and student participation, a new experience for academics in China. It

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was on a subject which deeply interested Fei, the structure of power in traditional society. He knew that Wu, his old friend and colleague from Yunda in Kunming, had long been studying historical aspects of political and economic power. In the weekly seminar Fei and Wu each read papers and several graduate students and young teachers, about twenty participants in all, also presented papers. After each presentation there was group discussion and then a final summary. The seminar proceedings were published in Shanghai under Wu’s and Fei’s names in late 1948, although some of the papers had been published earlier. One of the young sociology teachers, Yuan Fang, had known Fei and Wu Han since the early 1940s in Kunming when the democratic journal Freedom Discussion (Ziyou luntan) had been established at Yunnan University by Du Maiyuan, Pan Guangdan, and Yuan Fang. Yuan was a student of Fei’s at Yunda at that time. Wang Kang, the last editor of Ziyou luntan before the Guomindang destroyed the paper, was now also teaching in the Qinghua Sociology Department and participated in the seminar. Several of these young seminar participants became well-known sociologists later such as Yuan Fang, chairman of the Beijing University Sociology Department in the 1980s. The four papers Wu Han gave were on the power of the literati-officials (shidaifu), of the gentry (two papers), and of the emperor. According to Wang Kang, a debate developed between Wu and Fei over Wu’s point that the basis of gentry power was economic; Fei opposed him. In Wu’s social history contributions to the seminar he analyzed past society using historical examples to illustrate his points and relating these to the present. In his paper on the scholar-officials, he equates these literatiofficials of the past with intellectuals in the present.6 The intellectuals’ place in the Chinese political world, an issue that had attracted Wu since his earliest paper at China College in 1930, had become of ever greater concern to him in the last years of the civil war. Wu turned what began as an acerbic analysis of the shidaifu (scholar) strata in the past into a harsh indictment of the inability of intellectuals historically and contemporaneously to cope with the political and social problems of the masses of society. In spite of his point that intellectuals failed in their responsibility, nonetheless he still accepted the intellectual class in its powerful role as a leading part of society, standing in the middle between ruler and ruled, facing both ways, the anointed literati class with an inevitable political role. What induced Wu to see the traditional intellectuals as a positive influence were those exceptional individuals, the heroes, who “died for their beliefs, died for the authority they were defending. Although they failed, they had character, had guts, had souls.”7 For Wu some stood out as heroic examples: Fan Pang and Chen Fan of the Han, Xu Yuan of the Tang, Wen Tianxiang of the Song, Yang Jisheng, Yang Lian and Zuo Guangdou, Shi Kefa of the Ming, and Tan Sitong of the Qing. His biographer, in viewing this as well as other works of his in this period, cannot help but be convinced that it was his conception of the intellectuals’

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role throughout history and his evaluation of their strong points and shortcomings as a group and individually that underlay Wu’s own participation in the United Front. In the conclusion to “On Scholars” speaking of the intellectuals he says: When we look at history at the times of dynastic change, at these times when the old decayed and the new proceeded ahead, times of great political disorder, behind all of this there was great force for social reform. It was at these times that men were tested. Today may be the greatest time that we are tested. After all the people are tested, including ourselves, we see many like Yuan Dachen and Qian Qianyi and also many like Tan Sitong, Fan Pang. History will record all of these and we are all the witnesses of history.8

In the role of the literati-officials in traditional society he found meaning that resonated in the present historical moment and the intense social and political change they were living through in the here and now when “two different kinds of social thought are being tested in the progression of history—let time test them and tell who is right.” Continuing he wrote “History is without feeling. Let unfeeling history test those who always talk about feeling.” He issued the challenge that they had to “hope that the intellectuals of this time, that is the new literati-officials, will be worth a little more . . . and will not be like those who lost their dignity . . . worth nothing.”9 In another essay, “On the Wuxu Reforms” written for China Reconstructs under the penname of Liu Mian (a penname related to the one he would use years later to write of the Ming official Hai Rui) on the eve of his sudden flight from the city, Wu’s thinking shifted away from a centrist position in the direction of a more revolutionary solution. The pressure of the news from the battlefront, the threat of police terror and arrest, the collapse of positive government relevant to ordinary life had been affecting all thinking people. Wu drew a critical parallel between the people who now continued to advocate the middle way (the Third Force) and the constitutional monarchists and Protect the Emperor Party of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in the era of the Wuxu Reforms in the 1890s. Those reforms, according to him, had been limited to form without addressing the content of the suffering and demands of the people. Rather than these constitutional monarchists, on the contrary it was Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary program that had been the right one for the country. The target of Wu’s criticism here is the empty form of the renovation advocated by contemporary intellectuals who “take upon themselves the responsibility of political reform and deny that the responsibility rests with the top.” He was becoming convinced now that if the top leadership is not determined to carry out real change nothing will happen. “The scholar-literati of fifty years ago today are called intellectuals. The dance has changed, the names have changed, but the basic nature has not changed. They still advocate reform without turmoil, advocate reform that

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doesn’t depend on the ruler.”10 More and more Wu was becoming convinced the role of the ruler was crucial for real change. The central question that both Fei Xiaotong and Wu Han dealt with in the Qinghua seminar was the source of power and the people’s relationship to power. According to Fei Xiaotong the meaning of democracy to people in that time was that democracy must deal with the people’s problems. This was what they believed the Chinese Communists wanted to do. This idea of democracy meant working for the people economically and politically. Fei stressed pointedly that this democracy “emphasized for the people, not by the people.” In other words this was not Western participatory democracy but government responsible for the people, an idea promoted by the political philosopher Mencius. A good emperor is for the people. Fei used as an example of the way this kind of democracy works the Kaifeng official, Bao Gong (Bao Zheng). Bao was the Song dynasty Qingguan or pure official, who cared about the people. Bao Gong was also a favorite model of Wu Han’s. Fei wrote in 1947 in Xiangtu Zhongguo, his classic study on village life, that the peasant needed this kind of good emperor and clean officials and no corruption.11 In discussing his ideas of the late 1940s retrospectively with the present author in the 1980s, Fei said: “The people’s wishes and needs are for this. The idea of the good emperor became collectivized in the Communist Party.”12 By 1948, Wu also had come to recognize the need of those who really wanted reform to work with the top ruling power to accomplish needed reforms. But for Wu Han, along with this aspect of the relationship between the top and the intellectuals, came the ancient responsibility of the intellectuals not only to support the ruling power but also to assist the ruler through criticism. Wu had every reason to believe from his experience in the United Front that his ideas were compatible with the Communists’ conception of coalition government within the Front as it was understood in their contemporary present of the late 1940s. At about the time he was coming to his decision to go into the Liberated Zone in the summer of 1948, a lecture he gave at Yanjing University on “Changes in Contemporary China” revealed how much his ideas had changed. He speaks of the current political situation under the condition of Guomindang political control and the Communist victories in the civil war. After outlining social change in the last hundred years, contrary to his earlier thinking, he indicts the so-called Third Force between the Nationalists and the Communists, that is, the bourgeois intellectuals, for criticizing both the parties for their ideologies but never offering a new way to save the country. He firmly separates himself from these Third Force people and positions himself to their left, favoring a more radical solution. They live in a fool’s paradise and seek a temporary peace as had the royalists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. He condemns them as the middle, disdainfully calling them today’s liberal elements who want change only in form and wording. Little

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Figure 10.1. Wu Han, blacklisted by the Guomindang, on the eve of fleeing Beiping for the CCP liberated zone in summer of 1948

change has taken place in the past hundred years under the guidance of such people. As for the future he said: A new society and a new country will be founded only if the social nature of China is changed thoroughly and the few employers no longer exist. In the new society everyone will be a producer and there will be no parasites. As Sun Zhongshan said, “The cultivator will have his own land.” In other words, farmers will possess the tools of production. In this way, a new society and a new country will be founded.13

It is clear that Wu was ready to turn away from the moderates and ally with the Communist leadership as were a number of other intellectuals who had given up on the Nationalist leadership and were looking to the Communists as the only available solution to the need for social change.14 FUGITIVE IN SHANGHAI On 19 August, the GMD agents organized a frenzied sweep of universities in Beiping hunting for people on their blacklist. Wu Han was one of 249 people on the list to be arrested and imprisoned. Although he was able with the aid of friends to escape capture for the moment, the narrow escape from the police was frightening. He decided to leave for Shanghai without any more delay, intending to go on to Hong Kong to join the Democratic League people there. It was his plan to go with the Hong Kong group representing the whole Democratic League to the Liberated Area. Fei Qing, the editor of

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China Reconstructs, a league member and Fei Xiaotong’s brother, was one of those who helped Wu flee from Beiping.15 His plan to join the league people in Hong Kong was thwarted, however. The day he reached Shanghai he learned the way was blocked by new regulations requiring photo identification. Already blacklisted, there was no way he could leave the country without being arrested. As before, he stayed with his brother in the safety of the international concession. The first evening Zheng Zhenduo came to Wu Chunxi’s home to see Wu and immediately telephoned several friends to let them know Wu was safe in Shanghai. They ate together at a friend’s house where they talked over possible alternative plans for Wu. He was warned that government plainclothesmen were everywhere. Democratic League people were often followed. Zheng, himself was not safe since he was known to the secret agents as the former editor of the Shanghai edition of the banned Democratic Weekly. Wu and his friends always met in secret. One day Zheng Zhenduo went with Wu to buy a fountain pen. The clerk asked if Wu wanted his name on the pen. Naively, Wu said he did and began to write the kou at the top half of the wu character when Zheng grabbed the pen and quickly wrote out the characters for “Chen Bo” for Wu—Wu’s style name, giving him a blank stare that said, “you are too careless.” This was Wu’s style name which many old friends called him. To help him pass the time and escape from boredom Zheng loaned him books from his abundant library and insisted that he not walk about in the city. Through Zheng a trip to Suzhou to ramble through the old city was arranged with several other people. He stayed in Shanghai more than a month waiting until he finally received a letter from Beiping that everything had been arranged for his safe passage through the city.16

SEEDS OF A FUTURE SPLIT As he prepared to leave, several of the Shanghai Democratic League leaders: Chairman Zhang Lan, Huang Yanpei, and Luo Longji asked Wu to carry a letter to the Liberated Area. The main point of the letter was that the league wanted to participate in the new government but “if the Democratic League participates in the coalition government it must preserve its right to withdraw and become a party in opposition.” Their intent was to negotiate with the Communist Party now for the shape of the future. At the time, Wu willingly carried the letter for the Shanghai league leaders. However, he later wrote that “at that time I was not able to debate and criticize this kind of action which ran counter to the theory of New Democracy and the principle of coalition government.” In other words, although in 1948 he had seen nothing wrong with their idea and even supported it, after the CCP

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party-state was formed Wu came to realize that the Communist idea of coalition government allowed no opposition parties. When he agreed to take the letter Wu emphasized to the three league members that “this opinion must have the agreement of Democratic League leaders, Shen Junru and Zhang Bojun, before it can be the position of the League and be submitted to the Communist Party Central Committee.” Shen and Zhang were the leaders of the rump group in Hong Kong who had reestablished the league after it was banned by the GMD and Wu wanted to position himself with this left-wing group in the league. As it developed, when he actually reached the Liberated Area at Shijiazhuang, since Shen and Zhang had gone instead from Hong Kong to Manchuria by sea in order to enter the CCP-controlled areas safely, it was impossible to consult with them. He simply handed the text of the Shanghai league people’s position to the United Front Department in Shijiazhuang as they had asked him to do.17 Contained within the incident involving the letter that Wu carried was not only the crux of the most important issue that would affect the Democratic League after the establishment of the People’s Republic, that is the independence of the league, but also the forerunner of a basic disagreement between Wu Han and Luo Longji which eventually erupted in the ugly attack Wu made on Luo and Zhang Bojun at the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957.18 In 1949, the issue of the independence of the democratic parties and individuals in the coalition government appeared to have been resolved by the Communist Party when the new Political Consultative Conference (PCC) of the coalition was convened in August under the solid unitary leadership of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, the issue proved not to have disappeared but only lay dormant in the minds of some league members until, with the opening of the Hundred Flowers period in 1956, abundant criticisms of party and government policy were raised by numerous intellectuals. Criticism was expressed even more fully in the Party Rectification Campaign precipitated by Mao Zedong, in the spring of 1957. Only when the CCP campaign against the “rightists” got into full swing in June 1957 was the issue of the independence of the democratic parties and groups completely stifled and stamped out.19 In 1948 in the Shanghai meeting with Zhang, Huang, and Luo, Wu had willingly agreed to transmit the letter. It needs to be kept in mind that in the fall of 1948, none of these Democratic League people had the slightest idea of what the real nature of the coalition government of the People’s Republic would be nor how the United Front would change after the new government was formed. Although in the light of subsequent events these leaders’ demand for “the right to withdraw” in retrospect seems utopian and politically naive, in 1948 many in the league, including Wu, still believed that there could be some kind of real coalition in which democratic groups cooperating with the CCP would contribute in the United Front.

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INTO THE LIBERATED AREA: MAO ZEDONG, ZHU YUANZHANG, AND WU HAN When he reached Beiping, Wu found that travel arrangements had been made for him by Liu Ren. Robert Winter, the American exile and professor of English literature at the university, a good friend of Wu’s, provided the money to hire a car for him to leave Beiping to join Yuan Zhen who was waiting in Tianjin to begin the dangerous journey into the Communistcontrolled area.20 Disguised as a wealthy merchant and his wife, the two were guided by a circuitous route to cross GMD army lines and enter the Shijiazhuang liberated area where the leadership of the Communist Party was based. At one of the GMD checkpoints Wu’s new pen caused a problem once again. Since Parker pens were associated with scholars, but not merchants, when the soldiers noticed the shiny new pen in his pocket they began to question him. Everyone in the group held their breath until the guard was satisfied and waved them on. Wu Han and Yuan Zhen were two of fifty-five Democratic Party and independent democratic people who gathered in the Shijiazhuang area in Hebei in early November 1948. At the same time the Hong Kong Democratic League people had gone by boat to Harbin, Manchuria, now controlled by the Red Army where another group of democratic people was gathering.21 Wu and Yuan Zhen were given living quarters with the other non-Communist people in the village of Lijiazhuang near the Shijiazhuang CCP Central Committee headquarters at Xibaipo. Much to Wu’s surprise, after his arrival Mao Zedong invited him twice to come alone to his quarters to talk and later Zhou Enlai met with him.22 Although the democratic people arriving were usually welcomed at receptions by Mao and Zhou, it was unusual for so much attention to be paid to individual members of the Democratic League by the highest leaders. Wu told Mao he had brought with him a copy of his newly completed manuscript of the revised biography of the Ming founding emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, which he had left with the publishers in Shanghai. Mao told Wu he would like to read the biography. Even though this was the moment the great, and as it turned out, decisive battle of Huai-Hai in central China was beginning,23 Mao took the time to read Wu Han’s biography, Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan and then spent two evenings with Wu talking intently far into the night. According to Wu’s memory of the conversations, the two talked about the worker-peasant alliance in the present, the significance of the People’s Democratic dictatorship, and especially about Zhu Yuanzhang and Wu’s interpretation of the Ming founder and the men around him.24 Mao told Wu he admired the biography and he let Wu see he considered Zhu Yuanzhang a particularly relevant historical figure at this point of time. The widespread traditional conception of

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the “good emperor” which Fei Xiaotong had referred to in his Xiangtu zhongguo two years before is indicative of the common currency about rulership among many people at this revolutionary moment. From Wu Han’s session with Mao it is apparent that the importance of history, of national unity, and of the ruler in history, was also very much on Mao Zedong’s mind even as the critical battles that would open the way for establishment of the Communist state were being fought and won. In their discussion about Zhu Yuanzhang and Wu’s biography of him, Mao pointed out to Wu what he considered to be a mistake in his interpretation of a figure, the monk Peng Yingyu. Mao, it seems, had endowed this figure with great symbolic importance. Peng had been a leader of the Red Turban Army of insurgents in the late Yuan and an ardent fighter in Zhu Yuanzhang’s national revolution at the end of the Yuan dynasty. According to Wu’s narrative in the version then at the Shanghai printers, Peng had left the campaign when it had attained success and disappeared from the base area. Mao insisted to Wu that his data was inadequate; he was convinced the monk must have actually fought on bravely for his country. Significantly, Mao went to considerable effort to make the point to Wu that the loyal fighter would have stuck it out to the end and not given up as, he thought, all fighters for the national revolution should do to serve the people.25 Although Wu had missed the evidence, and the point as well, in his research, still the principle of loyalty to the national revolution was entirely within his own interpretation of the peasant movement which Zhu Yuanzhang had led. Furthermore it matched his own inner predilection for loyalty to the national revolution which Mao Zedong and the Communist Party were leading. Mao had touched a responsive chord in Wu Han’s nature that subsequently had a powerful influence on him personally. His own conception of the intellectuals as the “spirit of the nation” and his growing conviction that the country needed the strong leadership provided by the Communist Party leaders for the national revolution resonated with what Mao had to say about the monk Peng. All that had been missing was his own personal commitment to the revolution. Whether Mao intuitively sensed this or coincidentally chose to make his observations about Peng because of his own ideas about service to the revolution, nevertheless, the effect on Wu personally was the same. Mao’s focusing on Peng inspired Wu and, at the same time, induced him to restate his own relationship to the revolution then and for the future. For Wu, this Yuan monk in the transition to the Ming era became a metaphor representing the loyalty demanded of the revolutionary fighter in his time. A year later he wrote that when he was writing the biography “I admired this man very much and thought he was meritorious because he withdrew. He didn’t revolt in order to become an official, he was really a great person.”26 Raised as his father’s son who remembered his father’s failure and his detestation of official life, it was very difficult for Wu Han to think

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of official position as a coveted role. His own idea of the role of intellectuals in the nation as critics and teachers did not include their service as officials. But after Chairman Mao had pointed out that a strong revolutionary would not shrink from the demands of the situation, for Wu the monk became a symbolic representation of someone who did not meet the demand for personal sacrifice made by the New China United Front. He wrote in 1950 after having been appointed vice mayor of the capital city, “I will not praise the monk Peng again (for retiring). I have already responded to the orders of the people and will serve the people in the Beijing municipal government.”27 Whether he ever actually uncovered documentary evidence for the monk’ s continued participation in the campaign is uncertain.

THE CHARISMA OF MAO ZEDONG Wu Han left the sessions with Mao exhilarated by the charismatic leader and inspired to study Lenin’s and Mao’s writings. He had undergone a kind of transformation for he suddenly became deeply desirous of becoming a member of the Communist Party and immediately wrote Mao requesting to join the party. However, the Central Committee leadership had something else in mind for key intelligentsia like Wu Han. They were needed as non-CCP people in the New United Front. No coalition can exist without cooperating leadership of the elements of the coalition outside of the leading element. Mao answered Wu on 14 November in a letter, “We agree to your request. Only implementing it at the right time is still worth study. Comrade Enlai will talk with you about the particulars.” In a few days Zhou Enlai met with Wu and discussed his request to join the party.28 Essentially, Zhou’s message to Wu was that the democratic people were needed in the United Front outside of the Communist Party to help with the formation of the coalition the CCP was defining for New China. As a consequence Wu had to wait to join the party until Mao reactivated his application in 1955, finally becoming a party member in 1957.29 At Lijiazhuang where he and Yuan Zheng were taking refuge, Wu read Mao’s collected works and Lenin’s State and Revolution and took part in small group discussions. For the first time he learned the “magic weapon” of criticism and self-criticism and began to understand “democratic centralism, the principle of from the masses and to the masses.”30 This time spent by the democratic people in the Liberated Area was actually a training period meant to prepare and mobilize them for future activities in the New United Front that would take shape in the next months. In 1955, Wu wrote that by the time he had left the Lijiazhuang area he could shout along with the party cadre “Long live Chairman Mao,” even though when he had first arrived hearing the cry had only reminded him of the abhorred cry “Long live! Long live!” proclaiming support for Chiang Kai-shek under the GMD rule.

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He accounted for being able to enthusiastically shout a cry that had formerly meant support for the “autocratic” Chiang government which he strongly objected to, by explaining with deep sincerity that, “I did not understand the difference in the essential nature of political power. The Guomindang’s was in opposition to the people, the Communist Party’s was to serve the people.”31 In this Wu remained constant in his conviction that power concentrated in the ruler, a ruler who cared for the people, was the only possible course for China. Not long after arriving in Lijiazhuang, Wu Han sat down away from the discussion and training meetings to write an article to be published in Beiping for the students in the Student Movement.32 He wrote of meeting new friends and experiencing a new spirit, of finding freedom that he hadn’t had in Beiping. In Beiping, he had been forced to hide the books he read. It was difficult to find a safe place to discuss a controversial issue. In Beiping letters from friends were not received and travel was difficult for him because he wasn’t safe from secret agents. Now, he no longer has these anxieties and caution disappeared. But still he knows “that freedom is relative.” Those who have been in the Liberated Area a long time take the freedom they have for granted. Conditions of life are good, food plentiful, the currency stable. Obviously all of this was in sharp contrast to the roaring inflation and scarce goods in the areas controlled by Chiang. In the article he raises the issue of freedom of thought, which he knew students were concerned about, but takes the position, ambiguously, that it is not a problem: “no one will be responsible for whether what you want to study is in accord with practical requirements and the people’s interest.” He illustrates this by saying the CCP government never interferes in the Liberated Area with the worship of the large number of Catholics who live near Lijiazhuang. He tells the students their desire to oppose foreign imperialism and feudalism would be satisfied in the Liberated Area. This, of course, was a major issue with the students. Here there are no foreign soldiers, no foreign goods, foreigners must obey the same laws and regulations here and are treated fairly. The weapons and cars from the United States that are in the Liberated Area have all been captured from the GMD. Under the new land reform policies, the feudalism of the landlord class has been wiped out by land reform and the peasants liberated. He closes by saying he looks forward to seeing them again soon. The picture Wu was painting for the students back in Beiping of life in the border region on the eve of victory was far better than conditions in the GMD areas.

UNITED FRONT REDEFINING33 After the victory of the three major battles in 1949, more than anyone else on the Central Committee, Zhou Enlai oversaw planning for the forma-

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tion of the new revolutionary party state and its national government.34 The unprecedented move of the Communist Party and its political regime from the rural areas in which it had grown and triumphed into an urban environment, for the first time since it had been driven out of the urban centers in 1928, was only overshadowed in importance by the more abstract transformation it was undergoing from a revolutionary party and army into the ruling political power which would organize and control a China united for the first time in more than five decades. The pace of the civil war was proceeding much faster than anyone, including the Communist leaders themselves, had ever expected. The very speed of this success had increased the speed of the drive by the Communist leadership to win over prestigious intellectuals and industrialists and people of stature, particularly people who were not pro-American.35 During this period of the collapse and disintegration of GMD rule the New United Front was being redefined pragmatically. In the new coalition the paramount party—the Communist Party—following an ideology that underwrote the use of authoritarian power on behalf of the good of the people and the nation—would rule and the groups outside of that party would assist the paramount party in its self-assumed responsibility for the people. On paper, this was in some ways actually not all that different from the arrangement of power in the Confucian autocracy of dynastic China. Without the Communist leadership’s conviction about the necessity of the intellectuals’ participation in the party’s crucial move into the cities from the country and in the establishment of the national state, people like Wu would never have been given the roles that they were to have. As a leader of the Democratic League and a key person in the left wing of the league Wu Han became a part of this redefining United Front as soon as he arrived in the Liberated Area in early November. Besides his meetings with Mao and Zhou there were also meetings about the Democratic League. Wu was one of the earliest of the democratic people to arrive in the Shijiazhuang area. The previous month before Wu’s arrival, the CCP Central Committee in Shijiazhuang had wired to the CCP Northeastern Bureau in Manchuria an updated list of people who were to be invited to the new PCC when it was held. That Wu’s name was listed fourth among the fifteen names from the Democratic League indicates that at that moment Wu was considered to be one of the key league leaders.36 The reason for this is evident in the way the league evolved over the next few months. The Hong Kong democratic people had gone by boat to Manchuria, by then under Communist control, at about the same time that Wu entered the border area in Hebei. The first group to reach Manchuria from Hong Kong included Shen Junru and Zhang Bojun.37 Soon after their arrival in Harbin several of these leaders reached a common agreement with Gao Gang and Li Fuchun, leaders of the CCP Northeastern Bureau, on the basis of cooperating

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parties.38 The agreement dealt with the opening of the new PCC which was to be the first step in the creation and empowerment of a new government. According to the agreement the new PCC was to discuss and complete the common program for New China and deal with the organization of the temporary central government of the new state. Preparation for the PCC was to be carried out by a preparatory committee, for which the organization regulations would be drafted by the CCP, thus insuring control over the organization of the PCC by the Communist Party. From the point of view of the Democratic League people participating in drawing it up, this agreement promised the beginning of realization of the plans for constitutional government that had been laid at the 1946 PCC and later thwarted by the Nationalist government. One provision of the Harbin Common Agreement is of particular interest in regard to the new basic relationship of the league and the CCP that we have seen beginning at this time. Units with minority views were to have the freedom not to sign or to withdraw from the preparatory committee, a provision similar to the principle in the request made by Zhang Lan and Luo Longji which Wu Han had brought to Shijiazhuang. Since Zhang and Luo were still detained in GMD controlled Shanghai, unable to safely leave, this provision must have been added at the insistence of the league people in Harbin or written into the agreement by the CCP Northeastern Bureau people. However, although these democratic people may have gained documented acknowledgment of the right to withdraw, practically the principle of democratic centralism would prevail in any case since any minority would be excluded from the political arena if it withdrew. This agreement was the initial step in the process which established the preparatory committee for the PCC and the Common Program, the provisional constitution of the new Chinese party-state. It was the beginning of the founding of the civil state of the Peoples’ Republic of China. After the Common Agreement was signed in Manchuria, in the Hebei Shijiazhuang Liberated Zone, the main center of activity, four leaders of the Democratic League met with the head of the CCP United Front Work Department, Li Weihan, to discuss the next steps in the reorganization for the league.39 These four were Hu Yuzhi, Wu Han, Han Zhaoe, and Chu Tunan. Of the four, both Hu and Chu had long been secret Communist Party members while being league activists. The subject of discussion can be deduced since three days later a cell of the first Democratic League at Shijiazhuang in the North China Liberated Zone was formed by Hu Yuzhi and Wu Han and several others. The League-CCP group formulated recommendations about league activities and telegraphed them to the league people in Harbin and also to the Democratic League headquarters still in Hong Kong. Their recommendations were: first, they must recruit a broad new force of members to guarantee the progressiveness of the league, so that it would become a revolutionary alliance of the various classes in the cities of the liberated

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areas; second, the political standpoint of the league must be in accord with the Communist Party in the new Consultative Conference in order to destroy the old forces and build a new China; and third, in the liberated zones cells of the league must be organized and general branches established as well as the headquarters moved to the Liberated Zone.40 These recommendations of the Lijiazhuang league people, working under the oversight of Li Weihan in the United Front Department and ultimately of the CCP Central Committee, prescribed the parameters of the league activities in the period that was about to open. In the rapidly developing events of the time, although these plans assumed a long-term existence for the league in the Liberated Zone with establishment of branches and cells, the military and political situation changed rapidly. By early January the outcome of the Huai-Hai battle between the Guomindang and People’s Liberation Armies (PLAs) was a stunning victory for the PLA. Then, after winning the battle of Tianjin very close to Beiping, the Communist army moved swiftly toward Beiping and occupied the area to the west of the city to prepare for occupation of the historic capital city.41

COMPETING NEW YEAR’S LETTERS Nationalist generals soon began asking Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate peace and regroup their forces south of the Yangtze. In his New Year’s Day message to the nation, the generalissimo offered to negotiate with the Communists for peace in an effort to buy time, but rather than accept it this was seen as a plot by the CCP and by the leftist Democratic League members.42 Mao Zedong also wrote a New Years article, “Carrying the Revolution Through to the End.”43 Mao particularly wanted “unanimity and cooperation, not any ‘opposition faction’ or the pursuit of any ‘middle road.’” In fact, it was to prevent just this sort of occurrence that the United Front was being redefined.44 Since the success of the tide in the civil war military and political struggle was “forcing all social strata to decide their attitude,” the inclusive United Front became an even more critical part of party strategic policy in the moment. There was a strong sense that final victory was in sight, meaning that the reunification of the country was imminent. The participation of the democratic parties in the United Front at this moment was crucial for solidarity.45 Mao’s closing paragraphs in his New Year’s message read: In 1949, the Political Consultative Conference . . . will be convened, the People’s Republic of China will be proclaimed, and the Central Government of the Republic will be established. This government will be a democratic coalition government under the leadership of the Communist Party, with the

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participation of appropriate persons representing the democratic parties and people’s organizations. “These are the main concrete tasks which the Chinese people, the Communist Party of China, and all the democratic parties and peoples organizations in China should strive to fulfill in 1949. We shall brave all difficulties and unite as one to fulfill these tasks.46

Mao’s speech had an exhilarating effect among the democratic people. While there were those who preferred to follow the Nationalist retreat, the charismatic appeal of the United Front and the opportunity of inclusion in the new polity was impossible for many intellectuals to ignore in the atmosphere of patriotic excitement over the PLA’s crushing of the Nationalist armies and the deep-set longing for peace and unity. In Mao’s key “Statement on the Present Situation,” released publicly a few days later, among the eight terms given for the peace negotiations the final term pointed to the United Front as the basis of the emerging state.47 It called for convening a political consultative conference and the formation of a democratic coalition government. In the opinion of the democratic people who were anticipating victory and the formation of the new government, even though they knew the CCP dominated this polity in formation, still the very word “coalition” in their understanding meant there would be some place in it for them—more legitimacy than they had ever been accorded under Nationalist rule. At this juncture, however the possibility of negotiation with the Guomindang threatened the conception of the redefining United Front and made the possibility of a split among the people in the Front an immediate crisis. The CCP Central Committee and United Front Work Department (an office of the CCP) worked hard to avoid this. Zhang Lan, Luo Longji, Shi Liang, Chen Mingshi, and Huang Yanpei, all senior league leaders and members of the League Central Committee, at that moment were still trapped in Shanghai by the GMD Army where they remained until rescued by the Communist underground just before the fall of Shanghai.48 Huang and Luo had negotiated with the GMD in 1947 when the party was banned by the GMD. The CCP Central Committee appears to have feared that some of these people in the center who had prestige among business and academic circles might yet cooperate with the GMD to negotiate peace. The peace feelers of the GMD were also viewed by the league compatriots waiting it out in Lijiazhuang as an effort to divide their Democratic Front.49 In order to make very clear their support for Mao’s Eight Points, the Democratic League people once again declared their attitude toward peace, even going so far as to appoint themselves as spokesmen for the people’s will, invoking “the people’s will of the whole country” in support of the Eight Points for peace negotiations.50 Stepping back to look at this period from the vantage point of many years later, the evidence indicates the highest Communist leadership was convinced it was beyond the party’s ability to accomplish establishing the new state alone.

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Great effort was made to make the league people feel they were included. In its internal affairs during this transitional period, the CCP Central Committee recognized a need to give guidelines to its own members about how to deal with the democratic people to insure their participation in the common effort. These people must be dealt with thoroughly, frankly, and faithfully; they must be accorded credibility. Reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s earlier writings on the United Front, a party directive said, “We must also ask their criticism and opinions to strengthen the spirit of the common effort.” The party must give reports to the democratic people, hold meetings with them, they can exchange opinions with any responsible CCP comrades, they can contact people freely. “For many problems our responsible comrades should consult with the responsible people.”51 What the Communist leadership seems to have wanted in this transformative period was clearly a two-way communication in the “common effort.” To carry it out the old cadres in the Communist Party who felt they had won the revolution and were its custodians and resented outsiders butting in had to be persuaded and reeducated. UNIFIED DECLARATION On the eve of Beiping’s peaceful fall to the Communists through negotiation the democratic people of various parties and groups issued a historic document, the Unified Declaration, “Our Opinion of the Present Situation,” signed by fifty-three leading individuals including those in Manchuria. Among the signers were Wu Han and Yuan Zhen, his wife. The commitment was total. It said “In the process of the People’s Liberation War we would like to make our contribution only under the leadership of the CCP. . . . Between revolution and anti-revolution there is no possibility of compromise . . . none of the eight conditions can be omitted.”52 Nonetheless, still trying for a negotiated peace a few days later in Shanghai the authorized GMD negotiators Zhang Zhizhong and Shao Lizi talked with Democratic League president Zhang Lan seeking the league’s mediation.53 This time the league response by Zhang Lan to this political quagmire was unequivocal, “In the previous struggle between the two parties, we were the third party, but now the situation has already changed completely. Now it is a struggle between revolution and anti-revolution and we stand on the side of revolution, hence we cannot be mediators.”54 With that statement the Democratic League leaders in Shanghai came completely aboard the new United Front of the CCP. VICTORY AND BEIJING SURRENDERED With the collapse of the GMD armies and Chiang Kai-shek’s withdrawal from Nanjing in central China on 21 January, the Guomindang commander of Beiping, General Fu Zuoyi, had no choice but to surrender. Significantly,

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one of the two negotiators who had shuttled between General Fu and Lin Biao, the CCP commander, was Zhang Dongsun, chairman of the North China branch of the Democratic League, now far from reluctant to participate in arranging the city’s peaceful surrender without destruction from artillery bombardment or bombing.55 At Qinghua University when the announcement of the peaceful settlement of the siege of Beiping was made on 23 January the campus was in an excited uproar. That evening the students marched in a torchlight parade on the campus which had virtually been a miniature liberated area for some time. Both faculty and students had long been alienated from the GMD and many faculty actively supported the Communists.56 Sometime in late December Wu Han had moved back to Shijingshan, by then the location of the PLA headquarters and close to Beiping. A student from his Qinghua general history class unexpectedly ran into him there while training for the student street drama groups that would enter the city along with the PLA occupying force. The sight of Wu dressed in his new dark Zhongshan suit, enthusiastic and happy, made an indelible impression on the student, Ying Ruocheng. Wu was popular with the students—he was known by them as one of the “democratic professors” at Qinghua. He had with him two students who had accompanied him in the Liberated Area. In the words of his student, Ying Ruocheng, who later became a nationally and internationally famous stage and movie actor, director of capital theater groups, as well as national leader in the arts: “It was obvious when we saw him at Shijingshan that he had considerable influence, he was already head of some sort of group. We asked him if he were going back to Qinghua then. Wu just smiled and said, ‘It’s up to the leadership.’ He was already talking as if he were cooperating with the leaders. It was clear to us that he was to take part in the entry to Beijing and had come to Shijingshan to meet important leaders.”57

TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO BEIPING On the evening of 31 January 1949, at the moment the PLA actually gained access to the city, Zhou Enlai telephoned Qi Yanming, the leading party secretary for the United Front from the CCP Central Committee headquarters, and instructed Qi to take about fifteen key Democratic people into the city immediately to lay the groundwork for the beginning of the new PCC.58 Zhou’s sense of urgency was related to the key nature of this conference for the establishment and legitimacy of the new state. In the eyes of the people of the world the participation of these people from the United Front in the takeover of the city was needed as a symbolic representation of the so-called coalition government that was about to be formed by the Communist Party and the democratic parties.

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Among these fifteen people designated to enter the city was Wu Han, as the head of the Beiping branch of the Democratic League. On 3 February they took their place in the ceremonial entrance parade into the city. Crowds of bystanders watched the “monster victory parade . . . a spectacular show,” in the words of a Western observer. The immediate presence of Communist power in the municipal area was represented by the Military Control Commission under Marshall Ye Jianying’s command and, of course, the PLA garrison. Ye Jianying also took over the city mayor’s office the following day.59

MILITARY OCCUPATION REPRESENTATIVE AT QINGHUA Wu’s position as chairman of the Beijing branch of the Democratic League was not the only reason he was an important figure in the United Front. Another very special reason Wu was a key person at this time was a consequence of his position as professor at National Qinghua University. After entering the city, Wu Han’s first public responsibility was in the surrender of the city as the representative of the Military Control Commission to “receive” National Qinghua University from the university authorities.60 It certainly helped that he was a Democratic League leader, but the central reason for his importance in this role was as a member of the Qinghua University faculty working in the United Front Coalition. A smooth takeover of the university, one of the major national educational institutions, was acutely important to the occupation of the city and to the future establishment of the state. Qinghua educated many of the leading intellectuals and scientific people in the country. It had been a main source of leadership of the student movement that was a principal factor in the rising tide of public criticism that contributed to the GMD defeat. At this juncture control of that student movement was essential. Qinghua’s faculty was prestigious and influential among intellectuals. The successful takeover of Qinghua University would be a prototype for other universities in Beiping and across the country. The crucial nature of education in the reproduction and shaping of culture historically had always been well understood in premodern China and, if anything, was now even better understood as critical to its future by the Chinese Communists.61 On the eve of defeat in the month of December 1948, trying to replicate the moving of the universities to locations safe from the Japanese enemy in the late 1930s war against Japan, the Guomindang government had ordered Qinghua and Beijing National Universities to move to the South. However, the great majority of the students and faculty at Qinghua, hoping for a Communist victory, had simply refused to leave.62 After university president Mei Yiqi fled, the university was left in the hands of the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Professor Feng Youlan.63 Soon after the PLA’s bloodless

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takeover of the city, the Beiping Military Control Commission began taking possession of all of the government assets, including every organization in the city.64 Representatives of the commission were sent to each of the institutions. Wu Han was designated as the commission’s representative for Qinghua University. Qinghua was now to become a people’s university and the plan was that Wu Han was to be the agent of that transformation. One day Qian Junrui, the director of the cultural office, had suddenly appeared at Qinghua and announced to Dean Feng Youlan that Wu Han was being designated as the Military Control Commission representative. After this, the university administrative council was actually in Wu Han’s charge, according to Feng Youlan, who Wu effectively displaced.65 The transition was according to the prearranged plan made by the CCP Central Committee for all of the universities. Because Wu was a distinguished member of the university’s own faculty, because he was well respected by many of the faculty and very popular among the students as a “democratic professor,” as well as completely trusted by the highest level of the Communist Party, he was considered by many to be ideal for the position.66 After Feng Youlan resigned as dean, the university administrative council made Wu Han the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and deputy chairman of the council. Faculty and students at the university had wanted Wu to be chosen for these posts because he was influential with the CCP and the university faculty and students knew he would have the best interests of the university at heart in the changes that would be coming. The radical students also knew that the Communist Party wanted him elected to these positions. His appointment was widely considered to be a good choice.67 Even though Wu had been a full professor for only three years, he now also became the chairman of the history department. Altogether, these new positions at Qinghua meant a meteoric rise for him in the emerging newly politicized academy.

A KEY ROLE IN THE RECONSTITUTION OF THE DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE Although it was his identification with Qinghua that first linked him openly and officially with the establishment of the new regime in Beiping, all of Wu Han’s responsibilities in the United Front stemmed from his role in the Democratic League.68 After the Democratic League people waiting in Manchuria for safe access to Beijing came into the city on 25 February, all of the league people lived together for a short time in the Beijing Hotel. These days were a real reunion filled with the exuberance and happiness of old friends reunited again. People who had been separated for years saw each other again. Wu’s longtime friend Qian Jiaju later wrote of his feeling of relief, “From now on I ended the

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life of an exile in the Guomindang White Zone and began a new life in New China under the leadership of the CCP and began a new chapter in my life history.” Wu and Yuan Zhen and Hu Yuzhi met their old friend Li Wenyi, whom they had not seen since Kunming days. Zheng Zhenduo was there; he and Wu rounded up several old friends with whom they sat around happily talking and drinking wine. When the first bottle was gone Wu went out and bought five liters of wine which they downed in celebration.69 Within days after the triumphal entry into Beiping a small, key meeting on United Front plans for the Democratic League was held with Wu Han and Hu Yuzhi representing the league again, as they had in the planning meetings at Shijiazhuang, and for the CCP Peng Zhen as secretary of the Beiping Municipal Communist Party Committee, Ye Jianying as mayor of Beiping and first deputy party secretary, Zhao Zhensheng—second deputy secretary, and Qi Yanming—the top CCP official in the Central United Front Work Department. Wu Han was the only non-Communist from the Democratic League (Hu Yuzhi was a dual member) at this United Front meeting called to discuss plans for the league’s future. The focal point of the meeting was the discussion by Wu Han and Hu Yuzhi with the others on “the policy for strengthening the League.” This was the second meeting within a short time in which Wu and Hu Yuzhi had met with top Communist Party leaders on the plans for transformation of the entire Democratic League. The discussion held here determined the first phase of the Democratic League’s life under the New Democratic United Front.70 From other indications the content of the discussion can be surmised: the need for the expansion of the membership was discussed once again; plans for the reunification of the league leadership were among the ways of “strengthening” agreed on since moves to reunify the fragmented league began almost immediately with Wu’s involvement. Peng Zhen and Qi Yanming reported immediately to the CCP Central Committee on the plans made at this meeting. After receiving the reports the CCP Central Committee telegraphed approval but cautioned that “you must pay attention that the reform in the Democratic League must proceed stably and not hastily, because the mass basis of the Democratic League is too weak and the constituent elements at the highest level are complex.”71 “Complex” was an understatement. The Central Committee’s specifying that Hu Yuzhi and Wu Han must “pay attention” to this problem may well have been due to certain reservations over Wu’s impulsive nature, which, it has been reported, some saw as arrogance when he was difficult to control and wouldn’t follow what was expected.72 Wu was representing the league at this meeting because he had led the working group of the Beiping league that maintained underground operations during the last year of the civil war, but he was known to have serious disagreements with Luo Longji, Zhang Shenfu, and others. There was also the need to get Zhang Lan and the Shanghai people fully aboard the new setup.

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Still, in this interim period when the league was being reconstituted, published evidence indicates that Hu Yuzhi and Wu Han were the core link to the group, expediting and guiding the renewal of the Democratic League with the blessing and guidance of the CCP Central Committee. Wu Han seems to have been intent on helping to insure the continuing existence of the Democratic League and its inclusion in the coalition being defined by the CCP Central Committee to establish the party state. His key position behind the scenes certainly lent him a sense of mission and of a special relationship with the league and the Communist Party that would contribute later to his special position in regard to both. An announcement was made 5 March by the Temporary Working Committee of the Beiping league (headed by Wu Han) that it had been decided to transfer the Hong Kong headquarters of the Democratic League to Beiping, a symbolic step toward the future unity of the league.73 The critical problem was that the senior central leadership of the Democratic League, scattered in several places, had to be reconstituted and unified if the party was to carry real weight with intellectuals and take a credible role in the United Front of the new state in formation. Among the leaders, Huang Yanpei was now in Hong Kong but would soon arrive in Beiping. Zhang Lan, the national chairman of the league before it was banned by the GMD, was caught in Shanghai which was still held by the Guomindang, as were Luo Longji, Shi Liang, and others. Shen Junru and Zhang Bojun, founders of the rump league in Hong Kong after the 1947 banning, had by then reached Beiping.74 Among those who had remained in Beiping all along was Zhang Dongsun. Although a member of the league Central Committee for years, Wu Han’s own activity had mainly been focused at the local level and his strength now was as the leader of the Beijing branch. He had never taken a major role at the national level. At the same time that moving the headquarters to Beiping was announced, a temporary working committee of the league headquarters was formed “to prepare for the opening of the league Fourth Central Committee plenary meeting and to represent the league to the outside world.” The prestigious former league Central Committee leaders began to take their places. Shen Junru and Zhang Bojun, both widely respected in the league, were elected to cochair the headquarters Working Committee. Wu Han, Xin Zhichao, and Shen Zhiyuan (the latter two both CCP) took the position of secretaries, making sure that the league marched together with the CCP. Mao Zedong was informed by telegraph that this working committee would carry out the leadership of the headquarters and guide all of the affairs of the Democratic League. Speaking for all the league, even though the leadership was still not fully assembled in Beiping, the telegram said that the Democratic League would like to accept the leadership of the Communist Party in the “great cause of the New Democratic Revolution.”75 In the interest of knitting the league together again the Secretariat (Wu Han’s post) then wired Zhang Lan, Luo Longji, and Shi Liang that the league

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headquarters had founded the Temporary Working Committee and “looked forward to their early arrival in Beiping to join the leadership.”76 The first step in handling the Democratic League “complex constituent elements at the highest level” had been taken. By early April the headquarters Working Committee decided the best way to get the work accomplished was to form a small working group with Huang Yanpei (now in Beiping) as chair and Zhou Xinmin, Zeng Jiaolun, Wu Han, Xin Zhichao, Shen Zhiyuan, and Li Xiangfu as members. (At least Zhou, Xin, and Shen were CCP.) This group produced a report on the reorganization of the Democratic League central working organization that Huang Yanpei gave to the enlarged league Central Committee on 9 April.77

CROSSING THE YANGTZE During April once again there were peace talks going on between representatives of the Nationalist government and the CCP. The leaders of the democratic groups in Beiping were briefed by the CCP United Front Work Department and consulted on issues related to accepting the surrender,78 then suddenly peace negotiations collapsed when the GMD would not accept the CCP terms. At this point Mao Zedong and Zhu De made the watershed announcement that the PLA, poised on the north side of the Yangtze River, was ordered “to march to the whole country,” that is cross to the south side of the river. Zhou Enlai and Li Weihan rushed to inform the leaders of the democratic parties and groups of the breakdown in negotiations and the Red Army’s crossing of the Yangtze. The response of the league leaders was a united declaration supporting the action. On the same day Nanjing fell to the CCP armies.79 Within days, Zhou Enlai again met with the principal democratic group leaders to report the military situation and discuss the method of accepting the surrender of the two metropolitan centers of Shanghai and Guangzhou.80 Although it might seem Zhou’s efforts were merely a formal courtesy, from the careful attention at this critical moment to frequent communication with the democratic leaders about the progress of the war and the negotiations for surrender and arrangements for the transfer of political authority, it is evident that the CCP Central Committee was eager to encourage and retain the participation of the democratic leaders and their groups and to include them in the reshaping of the polity. For the CCP leadership it was a critical necessity to include the intellectuals who were needed for China’s unity. Among the ranks of the democratic people there were many who were influential in the urban world themselves and had contacts with those who were. The state builders assumed that for successful construction of state authority there must be stability. An essential component of stability and state building was the confidence and cooperation of the business, industrial,

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and educational spheres. Uncooperative business and industrial sectors and streets and campuses filled with demonstrating students would not further unity or contribute to stability. The CCP leadership particularly needed to be sure that the intellectuals’ support did not go to the Nationalists at this crucial moment and from the positive aspect the intelligentsia were needed as participants in the coalition that established a legitimate party-state.

DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE IN THE NEW UNITED FRONT As the league was being reconstituted from its fragments, the CCP Central Committee took the step to issue a watershed policy directive to define and clarify (although with inherent contradictions) the Democratic League’s scope and nature in the New United Front: The Democratic League must be neither a one class political party nor merely an alliance of laboring people . . . , it must become a political alliance in the broad sense of various democratic classes (including the petit bourgeoisie class and the liberal bourgeoisie class). Its constituents should mainly include intellectuals, including from high school students to university professors, various liberal professionals, scientists and staff members.

The role of key leaders like Wu Han was described and the reason for them made explicit: The key members and the leadership core must consist of revolutionary intellectuals . . . who will unify around them the mass of liberal individuals and even some of the rightists who have some position and influence. The manner of work should not use organization methods to control but rather educational methods to persuade them to sincerely support the new democracy.81

Despite the statement the league was not to be a one-class political party, the directive confirmed and institutionalized the elite character of the Democratic League that had been its nature throughout its existence but had never before been explicitly stated. An important element of the directive was that it signaled the future reliance on education to reform (“persuade”) the attitudes of the league members and confirmed the pattern of dependence on key “revolutionary” league leaders for guiding the league in the intended direction of the United Front. Wu was cast as a “revolutionary” leader at that time, a description he found very satisfying in the atmosphere of the moment. The league’s essential function in the coalition was to manage a key part of society, the intelligentsia, in the new state being launched. From Shanghai the league leaders, Zhang Lan and Luo Longji, free now to speak out after they were extricated on 24 May just before the fall of the city, issued a public statement on the objectives of the new democratic revolution

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which will build the democratic political power of the Chinese people.82 A few days later Zhang Lan telegraphed Mao, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai, and Dong Biwu to congratulate them. He took special pains to point out the indispensable nature of Shanghai for the development of the new democratic country. Soon Zhang and Luo arrived in Beiping and Mao, welcoming the two, replied that “the center of the future work is reconstruction” and unity of effort was needed for this.83 These communiqués between league and CCP people were in the spirit of coalition. However, with the 25 May policy directive on the nature of the league, it is clear where control of the United Front was to lie. Irregardless of the disavowal of “organization methods to control” and the favoring of education to “persuade” (a truly Confucian choice), the agent who laid out the scenario of this opening act of the new party-state was the (Legalist) Central Committee of the Communist Party, albeit a benevolent party central. The United Front provided the conception of coalition. From the construct of coalition would come not only unity but also legitimation for the partystate that was being founded. The Democratic League and the other small parties in the coalition, representing the intellectuals (shidaifu) thus symbolically legitimated the new state.84 In the redefinition of the United Front, Wu had played a quiet but key part through his background role in the reconstitution of the national Democratic League. By 27 May when Shanghai fell, the league had been knitted back together, close to its original leadership on the national level. Furthermore in the city, now in the process of being reborn once again as Beijing (no longer Beiping) and being reconstituted as the national capital, there also was a strengthened Beijing branch of the league under a leader, Wu Han, unequivocally committed to following the leadership of the Communist Party.

IN THE SUNLIGHT AGAIN: BEIJING BRANCH OF THE DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE The first meeting on 15 May of the Beijing municipal branch of the league after the CCP takeover of the city was held at Beijing University in the Cai Yuanpei Memorial Hall. Beijing University at that time was in the center of the city, to the north of the Imperial Palace. Wu Han was elected chairman, partly because he had been the incumbent head of the Temporary Working Committee of the branch during the civil war which had guided the group underground during the ban. A member who had been at the meeting said he was elected Because he was energetic and respected, the people at the meeting knew he was progressive. The Communist Party wanted him to be the Chairman. The Branch members who were already CCP especially wanted Wu Han. Many of

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the other League members wanted to join the Communist Party at that time. These people trusted him. Some of the members took the initiative to make him the chairman.85

Shen Junru and Zhang Bojun, league Central Committee members, spoke to the assembled members, describing the political lines and working policy of the league at the present stage. In his report on the previous three years of meeting as an underground branch of the league Wu said, “After the liberation of Beiping the comrades of the Democratic League once again can see the sunlight. The Beiping branch can now be active in the free atmosphere.”86 The participants saw the new United Front was beginning to function. The pace quickened as a series of think tank sessions or forums of nonCommunist and Communist experts were held during the spring to discuss key economic transition problems in the construction of the state, especially the administration of the business and banking center of Shanghai which controlled the main financial resources of the country. The participation of the high level Communists Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, and Chen Yi, in these meetings showed that the CCP leadership obviously took these meetings very seriously, convinced they were necessary. The question of how to accept the surrender and transfer of Shanghai was one of the main subjects under discussion, a subject that Zhang Lan continued to be concerned about in the formation of new China.87 Much later with the advantage of hindsight, Qian Jiaju, speaking as an influential economist who had participated in these meetings in 1949, tellingly evaluated the government he had served in: It was indeed a coalition government. Many non-Communists participated in the political power but the Communist Party kept strict control. . . . All of those who want to understand Chinese political history must understand this. Even though a lot of non-Communist people assumed positions of leadership the actual power was in the hands of the deputy leaders who were Communist Party members.88

“A NEW CHINA—A NEW PEOPLE” There were other forums involving the democratic people in the fields of education and the press as participants. In the education field Wu was involved by virtue of his position as head of the Beijing Democratic League and his positions heading Qinghua as dean and deputy director of the Qinghua University Council. At the beginning of June, to supervise the transformation of education, a higher education commission of Northern China was founded with Dong Biwu as chairman. Wu Han served as one of nine people on its standing committee.89

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Besides his roles in the league and at Qinghua, another important basis for Wu’s prominence was his rapport with student political groups. Because in the last difficult months of the civil war he had continued helping students to leave the city for safe locations in Communist areas his popularity among students on the Qinghua campus was immense.90 This enthusiastic respect from students in turn energized him and drew him ever more to the left. The avid leftism of Qinghua students contributed to the flourishing Communist influence in Beijing. At the surrender there were in the city 3,000 underground Communist Party members and as many as 5,000 students in peripheral youth organizations.91 Without a doubt, Wu Han’s activities contributed to the number of students involved. After the establishment of the municipal government in the spring a plan defining the organizational nature, responsibility, and establishment of the Youth League was provided in a CCP Central Committee directive. The Democratic Youth League (Minqing) that Wu and Wen Yiduo had been instrumental in organizing in Kunming as the youth group of the Democratic League was absorbed into the new Democratic Youth League (Xin minzhu zhuyi qingnian tuan) which held its first meeting 11–18 April, in Beiping. The widespread student movement of the former years was the core of this new group.92 At the founding meeting Wu Han was elected as the secretarygeneral, designed as an honorary position. In fact, in the PCC that actually founded the new state in September 1949, Wu represented the nationwide Federation of Youth, including the above group, rather than the Democratic League.93 He continued his relationship with the federation as an elder and advisor during the following years. Wu’s participation in the actual Political Consultative Conference in the fall seems to have been mainly formal. It was this great meeting that formally established the new party-state, passed the Common Program and elected the highest officials of the People’s Republic, all of which had been worked out by the Central Committee and in the PCC preparatory meetings.94 In the nine months from the occupation of Beiping until the founding of the new state of the People’s Republic in October Wu’s full-time occupation was as Qinghua University professor of history, chairman of the history department and dean of the university, and key member of the council administering the university, the last two together equivalent to being the de facto president of Qinghua in Feng Youlan’s later view. Wu’s most salient participation in this formative stage of the coalition was his informal involvement in many aspects of the reshaping of the nebulous entity of the polity.95 The founding of the new state, for the non-Communist people in the coalition in 1949–1950, meant a vital sense of taking part in the redefinition and reshaping of the political and social institutions of the sovereign Chinese nation—a deeply meaningful experience for these people who had waited so long and cared deeply about their country and people. As did many others at the time, Wu Han wrote and spoke of the sense of optimism

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and the changed mood of enthusiastic support abroad in the land: “Now everyone is in high spirits—everyone is devoted to work and is studying enthusiastically—In the past nine months everything has been changed, a New China! a New People!”96

NOTES 1. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 2. Rea and Brewer (1981), 249; Pepper (1978), xviii–xix. 3. Rickett and Rickett (1957), 9–10; Interview 111. 4. Wu Han, Shishi yu renwu [Events and people], 1948. 5. This description of the seminar is from Fei Xiaotong in Interview 8; Yuan Fang in Interview 143; and Wang Kang in Interview 119. All of these were participants, each of them recalled and described the seminar meetings with great interest. The proceedings of the seminar were published in book form. See Wu Han, Fei Xiaotong, et al., Huangquan yu shenquan [Imperial Authority and Gentry Power], 1948. 6. Wu Han, “Lun shidaifu,” published first in Qinghua xunkan 6 Feb. 1948, 5–9. This version was probably the original version given in the seminar and differs from the Huangchuan yu shenchuan version. 7. Wu Han, “Lun shidaifu,” Qinghua xunkan, 9. 8. Wu Han, “Lun shidaifu,” Qinghua xunkan, 9. 9. Wu Han, “Lun shidaifu,” Qinghua xunkan, 9. 10. Wu Han, “Lun Wuxu bianfa.” The “top” or shang could also be translated as “ruling power.” 11. The good emperor bears a similarity to Franklin Roosevelt and idea of the Four Freedoms who many in China admired in the 1940s. In the letter Fei drafted to General George Marshall and signed by Wu Han, Fei, Pan Guangdan, and Wen Yiduo in 1945 he refers to Rooseveltian democracy. In Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu zhongguo, first published in 1947 and translated in From the Soil by Gary C. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, 112, the good emperor was likened by Fei to Roosevelt investing in the nation’s future with the Tennessee Valley Authority. 12. Fei Xiaotong Interview 8. 13. Wu Han, “Jindai Zhongguo shehui bianyi.” 14. Pepper (1978). 15. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 16. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Wu Han, “Yi Xiti xiansheng.” Xiti was Zheng Zhenduo’s style name often used by his friends. 17. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 18. Wu Han, “Wo fenhen! Wo kongsu!” [I detest! I accuse!]. See chapter 12 in this volume. 19. MacFarquhar (1974–1997), vol. 1, for background on this period. 20. Yang Jiang (1987). 21. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan”; Interview 20. 22. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan” and “Wo kefu liao.” 23. The Communist armies won the battle of Jinan, 14–24 September. Manchuria fell 5 November. The Huai-Hai battle began 7 November.

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24. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Wu’s biography of Zhu Yuanzhang had first appeared in Yunnan during World War II, as a popular biography, Ming Taizu [The Ming founder]. Later he had expanded and rewritten it as a scholarly work, changing the title to Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan [Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang]. This was the 1949 edition. The biography underwent two more revisions, 1955 and 1965, before his death but only the 1965 version was published during his lifetime. 25. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 52; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 26. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 50. 27. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 52. 28. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” at Mao Zedong’s request, Wu was secretly admitted to the CCP, March 1957. The information is from Zhang Wensong who saw the letter from Mao in Wu’s file in the Beijing Shiwei Interview 148. 29. See chapter 11 in this volume. 30. Wu Han, “Wo kefu liao,” 51. 31. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 32. Wu Han, “Gei pengyou de yifeng gongkai xin,” 35–37. 33. For a more detailed discussion of this period and Wu Han’s part in it, see Mazur, “The United Front redefined” (1997). 34. Jin Chongji et al. (1989). 35. Ying Ruocheng in Interview 59. 36. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 475. 37. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 475. 38. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 488. The Common Agreement was dated 25 November 1948. Seymour (1987), 9–10, has also noted the CCP’s approach to the United Front as involving cooperation with other parties in a multiparty structure. 39. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 493. 40. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 494. 41. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 498. The Battle of Huai-Hai ended 12 January, a total disaster for the GMD. The PLA had defeated all thirty-nine American equipped divisions. Clubb (1964), 291. 42. Li Weihan (1986), 2:654. U.S. Department of State, China Whie Paper (1967). 43. SW (1965), 4:299–307. 44. SW (1965), 301–2. 45. Li Weihan (1986), 655–56. For Leninist regimes’ thinking on inclusion: Jowitt (1975), 69–96. 46. SW (1965), 4:306. 47. SW (1965), 4:315–19. 48. SW (1965), 4:539, for Huang Yanpei’s extrication. The others got out 24 May, just before the fall of Shanghai. 49. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 526; this is in a telegram, 25 January 1949. 50. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 517. 51. A directive to the Northwest Bureau, 22 January 1949; in Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 519–20; for the document Jiefang zhanzheng tongyi zhanxian wenjian, 240–41. 52. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 520; document in Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng lishi wenxian, 505–8. 53. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 526.

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54. Tongmeng wenxian, 509. Zhang Lan refers to the 1946 Political Consultative Conference and the cluster of events around it in which the Democratic League and other third parties enjoyed being mediators, independent of the two major parties. 55. Barnett (1963), 331. 56. Rickett and Rickett (1957), 12; Feng Youlan in Interview 9; Ying Ruocheng (1999). 57. Ying Ruocheng in Interview 59. 58. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 533. 59. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” For a description of the occupation of Beiping see Barnett (1963), 339–57. 60. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 61. For a theory of cultural reproduction which is relevant to China in this period, see Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1990). 62. Qinghua daxue xiaoshi gao, 498. According to Interview 9, only three faculty members left Qinghua. 63. Feng Youlan (1985), 122. 64. Barnett (1963), 340. 65. Feng Youlan (1985), 123. Feng Youlan in Interview 9. In “Wu Han zizhuan,” Wu refers to his title as deputy military representative, but according to Feng and others he was effectively the leader of the administrative council. This is borne out by Qian Jiaju (1986), 176, in which Qian says that Wu hired him to teach Marxist economics and Wang Yanan, the translator of Marx’s Ziben lun, both for the department of economics. 66. Liu Guisheng Interview 27; Feng Youlan in Interview 9. 67. Interview 27. 68. Minzhu tongmeng Beijing shi wenxian (1991), 194; Interview 9. 69. Interview 20; Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 544; Qian Jiaju (1986), 170–72; Wu Han, “Yi xiti xiansheng.” 70. Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tongyi zhanxian wenxian xuanbian, 260. This was no doubt also an important meeting for the future relationship of Peng Zhen and Wu Han—it was one of their first meetings, if not the first. 71. Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tongyi zhanxian wenxian xuanbian, 260. 72. Zhang Wensong in Interview 148 mentioned criticism of Wu within the CCP highest level for being impulsive and arrogant but it seems likely that this criticism was really directed at his independence and bold attitude. 73. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 549. 74. This has been reconstructed from Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 549, 550, 552, and 586. For the fall of Shanghai on 24 May see 586. 75. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 549–50. 76. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 549–50. 77. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 567. 78. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 569. 79. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 576. 80. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 579. 81. For the full document (25 May 1949) Jiefang zhanzheng shiqi tongyi zhanxian wenjian xuanbian, 267. Also Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 586. 82. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 588. 83. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 591.

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84. Mazur, “The United Front redefined” (1997). 85. Interview 64. The esteem due to the years he had supported and worked closely with young radicals was demonstrated by a man who had been his student and had later become a league member. Zhao Gengqi (1986), 7; Minzhu tongmeng Beijing shi wenxian, 194. 86. Wu Han, “Minmeng Beiping shi mengyuan dahui dian zhijing Mao Zhuxi Zhu Zongsiling.” 87. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 565; Qian Jiaju (1986), 177–80. For Zhang Lan see Tongmeng wenxian, 530. 88. Qian Jiaju (1986), 181–83, 191–92. Qian Jiaju soon was appointed as the vice director of the Central Private Enterprise Bureau, actually running it under the head, Xue Muqiao. 89. Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 592. 90. Interviews 9, 20, 64. 91. Zhao Gengqi (1986), 1. Ying (1999). 92. Shao Pengwen and Hao Yingda (1985), 319; Zhao Gengqi (1986), 7; Cihai (Shanghai, 1979), 4136. Later this group was known as the Zhonghua quanguo qingnian lianhe hui (All China Federation of Youth), and was under Hu Yaobang’s wing. 93. Zhang Wensong (1984), 3–4; Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” 94. For Zhou Enlai’s speech about the significance of the PCC, Li Yong and Zhang Zhongtian (1988), 601. Zhou refers to the PCC as the concrete formation of the United Front. 95. Krasner (1988), 86. 96. Wu Han, “Xin de zhongguo, xin de renmin,” 18. Pepper (1978) describes this enthusiasm also.

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n the early spring of 1949 two men came to Wu at his home at Qinghua University on a special mission. One was Liu Ren, the head of the North China underground Communist Party in the Nationalist-controlled areas during the civil war, and the other, Xiang Zemin, an underground Communist Party member in the circle around Zhou Zuoren at Beijing University and an assistant to Liu Ren during the anti-Japanese war. According to Xiang, they went “to ask him to be Vice Mayor, to see if he wanted to be Vice Mayor of Beijing.” Wu did not say no. In fact, he agreed to serve when needed; he showed them “he was willing to help because of the Revolution.”1

FROM PROFESSOR TO BEIJING VICE MAYOR At this point there was not yet an established national government nor any permanent Beijing municipal government. This was a time of planning and organizing for the future national and municipal governments. Liu and Xiang had been sent to talk with Wu Han because the CCP Central Committee wanted an academic, a professor, in the position of one of the vice mayors of the city that was going to be the national capital, Beijing. Beijing and its governance was considered important as the prototype in planning for the future of political institutions across the nation that was being established. Although Mao and Zhou Enlai were undoubtedly involved in the decision to ask Wu, certainly it was Dong Biwu, still the head of the North China government in this transitional time and one of the core members of the CCP Central Committee, who had a major role in the selection of Wu while he was participating in forming the government of the new state. 369

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The municipal government in formation would change over the next few months before it was finally established as the formal government of the city. At the point of this contact with Wu, Ye Jianying, the head of the Military Commission, was serving concurrently as the acting mayor of Beijing with Xu Bing as the only vice mayor under the authority of the North China government headed by Dong Biwu since the new state of the People’s Republic had not yet been formed. Ye only served a short time, then Nie Rongzhen became mayor. In April 1949 Zhang Youyu (Dong Biwu’s former lieutenant in the Southern Bureau) was appointed by the North China government to take Xu Bing’s place as the vice mayor in charge of day-to-day municipal operations. During the 1950s in this position of first vice mayor, it was Zhang who actually ran the Beijing municipal government rather than the mayor, Peng Zhen. Peng only took the position of mayor in February 1951, although he had previously been municipal party secretary.2 After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the capital city government administered the municipality of Beijing and its six-county area. Not only did Beijing once again become the capital of the national government of a unified China for the first time since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, but it was as well, the first metropolitan area in which the new Communist regime formed a municipal government.3 While what was done in Beijing did become the model for other cities, it was also unique in all of China. With dual responsibility as the seat of the new revolutionary regime and as restored historic national capital symbolizing the unified Chinese nation-state, the city and everything connected with it was significant in the eyes of the people and the national regime. Wu’s multiple roles as academic, educator, historian, and political figure in the coming years were deeply affected by his own relationship to the city as a longtime resident, reaching back to the 1930s when he had first come to the ancient capital city from the south as a student. A sense of the rightful restoration of Beijing, the capital ever since the Yuan dynasty, as the modern capital of the nation pervaded the atmosphere of the whole city and symbolized for many young people what they had fought for.4 In November 1949 Wu Han was formally appointed as vice mayor of Beijing after the formal establishment of the People’s Republic on 1 October. At the time of his appointment he was actually in the USSR as a member of the Chinese delegation to the Soviet celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution. Wu was representing China as a member of the new United Front coalition that was carrying out the “leaning to one side” policy of relying on the Soviet Union which Mao Zedong had just enunciated. He first heard the news of his appointment by telegram in Moscow.5 Even though in the spring he had told Liu Ren he would be willing to serve as vice mayor, when he got the news of his actual appointment he had second thoughts. In fact he had decided he didn’t want to take the position. As soon as he returned to China he saw Premier Zhou Enlai and begged to

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be excused from the post. Zhou, who knew that Wu had been using his pen to mobilize people for years, appealed to his loyalty to the nation and played on his sense of responsibility to the people and the revolution by telling him how much he was needed for the job. In spite of Wu’s reluctance, there seemed to be no way to avoid the appointment and still remain true to his own ideals for the intellectuals’ responsibility to the people. He was trapped by his own principles. The explanation for Wu’s change of heart comes from Feng Youlan, the philosopher and fellow Qinghua University faculty member, and is underscored by observations of his students, friends, and family. According to Feng who had known him since he was a student, Wu had hoped to continue as an academic and educator after the new government was established. Working with him on the Qinghua faculty, Feng recalled that he thought at the time that Wu “was hoping to be Qinghua University president in the environment of the new China. Feng could see that Wu wanted to stay in academics; he did not want to be Vice Mayor.” Wu had taken Feng Youlan’s place as acting academic dean of the university during the transfer of the National University to the incoming CCP authority. Feng noted that Wu’s relationship with the students was especially good, partly because he was young himself and had a very outgoing personality. The students liked him. But once Wu had reconciled himself to the appointment as vice mayor his motivation became “to serve the country because Zhou Enlai asked him,” according to Feng. That Wu knew Zhou, not only as a top leader of the CCP but also as a personal friend through the connections of his wife and her sister, Yuan Fuzhi, with Zhou and Zhou’s wife made him more subject to the obligations of loyalty. The reason for the choice of Wu Han as vice mayor, in Feng Youlan’s opinion, was “First, because in the policy of coalition government, the role of the third parties was important. Secondly, as the head of the Beijing Branch of the Democratic League, he must take that position in the coalition government.” In Feng’s explanation the vice mayoral position Wu was being appointed to was directly related to the United Front. This meant it was inevitably the responsibility and role of the person in the position of head of the Beijing branch of the league to be the vice mayor of Beijing in the coalition government because the league was an essential part of the United Front. Feng’s frank comment implied Wu had no choice: “Wu Han did not want to leave academic circles but he had the Democratic League position.” Because of this commitment and his role in United Front politics he must leave academia and take up the duty of vice mayor.6 Furthermore, had Wu withdrawn and stepped down, while he would have protected his own time and scholarly career, he would have negated his own ideas about the role of intellectuals in the Chinese polity and his political stance of the late 1940s and in so doing denied an integral part of his own character and beliefs. It seems he was pulled in two directions internally by his own conflicting values.

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Wu Han, Democratic League leader, speaking to a league meeting in Beijing,

Wu’s appointment to the post of vice mayor in the capital city had both symbolic and practical political and administrative dimensions since the roles of chairman of the Beijing Democratic League and vice mayor in the Beijing municipal government were both directly related to the coalition. Since Wu believed profoundly in coalition government and had stood publicly in favor of the coalition, his own actions required him to serve, much as the Monk Peng Yingyu in Wu’s biographical narrative of the Ming emperor was supposed to have stuck it out (in Mao’s opinion) with the revolutionary campaign of Zhu Yuanzhang in the fourteenth century.7 Furthermore, from the practical aspect of administration, the municipal position needed someone distinguished and capable from educational and cultural circles because the duties involved were supervising education and culture and bridging the distance between the party and those circles. To those in academia it seemed to be much to academia’s benefit that one of their own take the position rather than a party functionary. Although Wu enthusiastically supported the “New China” with its coalition including the small democratic parties and groups, the place he took in this new party-state meant a very different life from that he had formerly led as an academic. Although when he first agreed he had assumed it would be possible to retain his life at the university, it was not long before it became evident to both him and Yuan Zhen that his official status in the new government meant that their lives must change.

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AN INTELLECTUAL PARTICIPATES IN THE COALITION In looking at Wu Han’s life in the early years of New China, while it is obvious his participation as an official in the new government was framed by the reformed United Front, nonetheless his commitment to history and education clearly remained the central core of his life. Patriotic concern for his country motivated his willingness to change the way in which he fulfilled this commitment by entering official life. Since his student days Wu had concentrated every effort on life as a professional scholar. But during the wartime and civil war years his submergence in Chinese history gradually had become far more than simply involvement motivated by detached scholarly interests. As with many of the intelligentsia, the divisions within China, its weakened state after nearly two decades of war, and the poverty of people’s lives were deeply troubling, shaping and driving his willingness to be involved in the solution. None could deny the crisis that confronted them as individuals in a culture and as a country. Some, such as Hu Shi, solved the need for action in 1949 by fleeing the country for Taiwan or Western countries. Some, like Chen Yinke, turned away from the possibility of active participation in the solution to a reclusive life of thought and writing. Others, such as Fei Xiaotong, wishing to be useful to their country, moved forward to participate and yet waited to be dealt with by the situation as it took its new shape. In the crisis more and more Wu had been motivated by his personal need and that of his country for a unified peaceful state that could provide a stable, secure environment for life and Chinese culture. The vocabulary he used reflected this concern in words related to nation and national unity more and more frequently, but it would be a mistake to take Wu’s idea of guojia or “nation” as similar to divisive cultural nationalism in the late twentiethcentury sense.8 The central content of Chinese culture for Wu Han was not that of a hostile competitive state at war culturally and politically with its perceived enemies, but rather that of the unity of culture in a society that has the form of a sovereign unified nation. The two themes of a unified coalition of political groups under the United Front and the importance of education and culture in social life for the benefit of the people and the unified nation underlay his thinking and that of many of the intelligentsia, and continued to do so in the coming years even as political pressure built and the political scope narrowed. Wu’s acceptance of appointment as vice mayor of Beijing was in keeping with symbolic and practical aspects of the political changes the CCP leadership was undertaking in this opening phase of the new state. The appointment of the chairman of the Beijing branch of the left of center Democratic League, Wu Han, to the post of vice mayor in the Beijing municipal government, was one of many similar appointments of left-centrist

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intellectuals such as Qian Jiaju, Zhang Xiruo, and Luo Longji to official positions, all fulfilling the Communist Central Committee’s planning for the new government.9 Wu Han’s own willingness to participate in the new regime through the United Front, as we have seen, had been conditioned by his historical view of the Chinese polity. For him in the last years of the civil war the intellectuals’ relationship to the Chinese political realm had assumed even greater importance as the specter of a divided, fragmented China threatened life more every day. In his 1948 article “On Literati-officials”10 written while he was still resident in Beijing, he had criticized intellectuals harshly, charging that they had been unable to cope with the political and social problems of the mass of society. But significantly, he had never challenged the Confucian principle that the man of honor is morally obliged to be concerned about his ruler and the way the country is ruled. On the contrary, he accepted and participated as a leader in the intellectual class in its powerful leadership role in society and advocated strenuously that the intellectuals must perfect their performance of their role. This group was the class without which the rulers could not legitimately rule, the stratum between ruler and ruled that, as the morally anointed literati class, consistently had taken an inevitable role in the Chinese polity and in the legitimation of the state in the past. It would continue to take this role in the Communist present, and, as affirmed negatively by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, would continue in a key role by being the targets for destruction in the future. It was this conception of the

Figure 11.2. Wu Han and other members of the Democratic League with Zhou Enlai, October 1949: (left to right) Shen Zhiyuan, Wu Han, Zhou Enlai, Shen Junru, Chu Tunan, and Jian Bozan

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intellectuals’ necessary sociopolitical role that underlay Wu’s participation in the United Front. In his historical view the intellectuals were bound, historically and morally, to take a major role in any change in the future Chinese political culture. That meant, as events unfolded in New China, Wu found he must participate. When we refocus the biographer’s lens a decade and a half later we see the fateful consequence for Wu of this participation as the CCP regime, led by Mao Zedong, moved radically left. In the prologue of the biography we glimpsed Wu in November 1965 when disaster descended on his life and family circle as he became the initial target of an attack engineered by powerful political forces at the center concealed from his view—forces that were to soon precipitate the Great Cultural Revolution. Although the exigencies of history do not suggest that it was inevitable that Wu be chosen, nonetheless it was not a random choice of the radical left aiming at circuitously attacking an opposing faction that made Wu the initial focal point of the advance troop of the ultra-leftist attackers—an attack that seemed at first to be spearheaded by Yao Wenyuan’s essay criticizing Wu Han and his opera, “Hai Rui Dismissed” in November 1965.11 The final series of events that became a great irrational cataclysm for the people of China will not tell us very clearly why Wu ended up on the stage as the first target if we only look at the wide screen. But if we leave macrohistory and look at small pieces of the larger canvas, at the detailed cameo of Wu Han’s own history, the reasons for his being taken as the initial target can be related to the particulars of who he was and what he thought and stood for.12 Because of the values he represented and his bold outspoken stance, by the mid-1960s Wu had come to personify the threat intellectuals were perceived to be by Mao Zedong and others promoting the ultra-left ideology of class struggle.

LEADER OF THE BEIJING DEMOCRATIC LEAGUE As the chairman of the Beijing branch of the Democratic League from 1949 until he was removed in 1966, Wu held one of the most directly influential third-party posts in China in terms of carrying out the task of influencing members of the league to support the CCP and representing the league to the Communist Party and the public. The Communist ruling group, aware of the residual Nationalist support that remained in the mainland after the flight of the Nationalist government to Taiwan and not yet confident of the support of the educated leadership, knew full well that it needed the solid support of the liberal intellectuals. That the league, especially the Beijing branch in the capital, was a significant factor in the leadership of the politically oriented intelligentsia was evident in the pains taken by the CCP to ensure the Democratic League was reoriented toward it.13

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The league, as the party of academics and intellectuals, became the arena for reforming their thinking about politics and their relationship to the state. Many Chinese intellectuals were already predisposed to loyal action by the high moral valuation placed on self-cultivation as the basis of loyalty in traditional Confucian political culture, especially as conveyed in the classic of the Great Learning (Da xue). This canonical Confucian work stressed as the fundamental moral act the individual’s duty to perfect himself in order to be loyal to family and ruler. After the founding of the People’s Republic, “New China” as the new regime was optimistically called, many people readily participated in thought reform as a way to express their solidarity and contribute to the unification of their country. As time went by many recoiled from the extent and ends to which self-criticism was taken in the multiple campaigns mandated by the Communist Party. But at the beginning, swept along by the tide of national unity that Communist victory fostered and by the excitement over what was popularly perceived as the construction of an optimistic new social and political order under the vanguard leadership of the Communist Party, many intellectuals did not question their responsibility for self-examination and thought reform. In the earliest phase of thought reform Wu Han was one of the willing leaders. For those who found the transformation more difficult and dragged their feet the essays of centrist intellectuals such as Wu Han, Fei Xiaotong, Feng Youlan, Huang Shang, Zhang Zhizhong, and others were published for people to read as models. During this early period of thought reform, by his own example, by his writings and his considerable persuasive ability Wu willingly took a very active role in the reeducation of intellectuals, especially his associates in the Democratic League and in academic circles. His article, “I have overcome my ‘supraclass’ viewpoint,” was a “how to do it” moral suasion example for fellow intellectual’s thought reform in the early 1950s.14 In these early years he spent time with old friends like Shao Xunzheng and other colleagues counseling and encouraging them over the rough places in adjusting their thought to the new Communist ideology. In the emerging polity, for Wu Han who was considered at this time to be one of the two or three most prominent historians in the People’s Republic, Democratic League identity remained his political identity. Still, in the public eye his association with the league was gradually linked with his active official position of responsibility in the municipal government even though within the league in educational and cultural affairs he participated as a league leader not a government official.

VICE MAYOR: EDUCATOR AND CULTURAL LEADER The appointment to municipal political office in 1949, plunged Wu into a new type of academic activity for him as well as new official responsibilities.

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These challenges tapped abilities that experience had never called for before from him. In this new situation he proved to be a talented administrator as well as educator and academic leader. Tao Menghe, by then vice chairman of the Academy of Science, and a mentor of Wu’s when he was a young historian and leading light in the New History research group in the 1930s, extolled him as having the nature of a scholar-statesman (guoshi) able to carry out important responsibilities in difficult situations.15 At the beginning of the new city government before Peng Zhen became mayor, as only one of two vice mayors, Wu’s responsibilities were far from ceremonial according to Zhang Wensong who was in the corresponding position in the Municipal Communist Party Committee.16 From the beginning, behind the scene in Beijing city government, although he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party Wu was considered to be a “key party member outside of the party” (dangwai de dangyuan) by the highest party leaders, and especially by the Beijing Municipal Committee. According to the people who worked with him in the city government, his responsibilities and the trust shown him reflected the status he was accorded informally. Regularly a part of party Municipal Committee meetings, he was routinely circulated party documents in his area of responsibility.17 Wu had responsibility for supervising the administration of education, culture, and health in the entire area of the municipality which included the city and the six-county area beyond the central city. Since education was a major concern of the party and the closest to his own interests, it received more of his time. Within a few years the health function was, in fact, delegated to someone else. According to Zhang Youyu, from 1949 until 1957, Zhang, himself, as the first vice mayor and Wu as the second vice mayor carried on the heavy operational responsibility for administration of the municipal government of the capital and six surrounding counties that after 1957 it took seven vice mayors to manage.18 Parallel with Wu were Communist Party officials such as Zhang Wensong and Liao Mosha who dealt with policy matters controlled by the CCP but in which Wu participated, according to Zhang Youyu. Wu served in the post of vice mayor for sixteen years, from 1950 to 1966, longer than any other Beijing municipal official including Peng Zhen, until he was removed by Mao at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Although, since the Cultural Revolution the prestige of the vice mayoral position of Beijing has been diluted, in the pre–Cultural Revolution period the post carried much greater responsibility and prestige. In a country where hierarchical rank had always been important, despite the egalitarian ideology of the CCP regime, ranks still determined a great deal. Official positions were all ranked in a system of twenty-four official cadre ranks. Because the capital Beijing was directly under the central government and had the same rank as a province, Wu’s rank of seven was relatively high, the level of a vice minister in the central government or deputy governor of a province. With the rank went prestige, honor, and responsibility.19

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But there was a factor for Wu, without doubt, that raised his exposure level much higher. The importance of the city, in addition to being the model for other cities, was also due to the concentration of party power in the capital city and the close relationship between the central party organization and the Beijing party organization. Peng Zhen was a key member of the national power center in the Standing Committee of the CCP Central Committee while concurrently holding the positions of mayor and head of the Beijing party Municipal Committee. This meant that whatever happened in the city of Beijing quickly received attention at the highest central level. Nonetheless, although Peng Zhen was mayor, according to the first vice mayor, Zhang Youyu, actually Peng was seldom in the municipal party office and had little to do with daily operational aspects of the city administration.20 Descriptions of municipal affairs by participants in the city and party (shiwei) offices, at least those within Wu Han’s orbit, seldom include Peng Zhen as one of the participants. Although in the past great attention has been paid by students of this era to Peng as the single significant figure in Beijing municipal affairs, probably based on newspaper accounts and structural charts, on closer study it is clear that this was not the actual situation. Only when major issues involving Central Committee policy flared up such as in late 1965 does Peng come to the center of municipal events. There was actually a broad arena of Beijing municipal activities that extended far beyond his direct involvement. In the everyday contacts of organizations and people with the city government it was other officials in the city government and the CCP Municipal Committee such as Zhang Youyu and Wu Han who were involved. As the second vice mayor and the municipal government official in charge of educational and cultural affairs Wu Han had oversight responsibility for the bureaus under his supervision. On policy matters he worked in tandem with people in the party Municipal Committee in parallel positions such as Liu Ren, Zhang Wensong, Deng Tuo (after 1957 when Deng moved over from the People’s Daily), and Liao Mosha. Involved in overseeing the educational reforms in Beijing that were part of the national educational reforms, according to his secretaries Wu spent a great deal of time inspecting and supervising conditions in schools in the city and rural areas outside of the city.21 To augment educational resources available to the people of Beijing he inaugurated a number of new programs which grew into lasting educational and cultural institutions aimed at providing more educational and cultural resources for the ordinary people of the city. The Beijing radio university which later was transformed into a television university and reached tens of thousands of students was one of the new programs. The after-school play school in Beihai Park; the Beijing Normal Academy to train teachers; the Beijing Half-Work Half-Study school for juvenile delinquents (forerunner to the nationwide establishment of schools to re-educate juvenile delinquents), and the establishment and construction of the Beijing planetarium were

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among others. As vice mayor, Wu undertook major initiatives to sponsor the establishment of each of these over the years he was in office. Today most of these institutions still exist as formal municipal institutions.22 Particularly interesting is his work to establish the first school for juvenile delinquents in the PRC. This school incorporated the philosophy of reform of delinquents through education developed by the Russian educator Anton Makarenko. Wu Han and Yuan Zhen had read about Makarenko’s project rehabilitating juvenile delinquents in the Soviet Union and took a great interest in the work.23

WU HAN’S LIFE IN NEW CHINA Although, when he had been appointed vice mayor, Wu Han and Yuan Zhen had assumed they would be able to keep their home at Qinghua University on the outskirts of the city and maintain their lives as academics, his new post in the municipal government soon made it necessary for them to move into the center of the city. Yuan Zhen especially had wanted to stay at Qinghua where she would be among their academic friends and be able to work on her own research, perhaps even teach when she was in good health. The happiest years of her life had been as a student at Qinghua. Both of them found it difficult in the beginning to accept the necessity that they must move into the city and leave behind university life. At first Wu Han tried to commute to his office from Qinghua by car. But he sometimes missed important meetings. Living far out at the edge of the city, he found made it very difficult to develop close relationships among the party people in the city government. He was given the cold shoulder by some of the lower ranked comrades who were apt to be proprietary about the party and government arena which they considered to be the precinct of CCP members. He was often snubbed—sometimes he had no one to eat lunch with. They looked down on him as an outsider, not wanting to let him into their circles, probably because they didn’t feel natural with intellectuals and resented the interloper who they assumed had not undergone the years of revolutionary hardship they had. Finally, after the Wus were urged by Zhang Youyu, the first vice mayor, to move into the city in order to make the transition smoother for Wu they took the big step to give up their university home and move into a courtyard compound on Toufa hutong in the center of the city. The compound had been taken over from the former Guomindang owner by the Beijing city government for its top cadre. They were given a courtyard with the rooms around it and the rest of the compound was occupied by Zhang and other families in the municipal government. This move into the city center proved to be a decisive turning point in their lives. Not only were they separated physically from Qinghua, but also from

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their old friends in the university and the Democratic League and from Wu’s students, always a source of vitality for him. These people seldom came the long distance into the city to the house in the official compound now to visit. On a daily basis they were surrounded by people who had party or official government connections. Gradually Wu made good friends among his cohorts in the Beijing municipal offices and with senior people in the central government and party like He Long, Chen Yi, and Deng Xiaoping. Wu was a very convivial person—he loved to drink and play cards and to fish. Over the next years he and Deng Xiaoping often were partners in bridge and played together regularly. The men he played with often gambled at bridge and sometimes played drinking games. In one game the loser had to crawl through the kneehole of a desk in the room while everyone, players and kibitzers watched and joked. More than once Deng Xiaoping was the loser. Yuan Zhen’s elder sister, Yuan Fuzhi and her husband, Chen Yu, a high level Communist Party leader from Guangdong (who later became governor of Guangdong) were living in Beijing in the early 1950s. It was a great joy for Yuan Zhen to have her sister nearby again. Chen Yu was a member of the CCP Central Committee and Minister of Coal Industries in the national government. Although from very different social backgrounds, Wu and Chen Yu admired each other and got along well. Chen had been a poor laborer and a leader in the Hong Kong Seamen’s Strike in the 1920s. One reason the two got along well was their direct, matter-of-fact personal styles. The two couples often spent time relaxing together on weekends, occasionally going to visit and have dinner with Dong Biwu, the sisters’ teacher. Dong admired Wu Han and, in turn, Wu respected him, a man who combined being a scholar and steadfast revolutionary leader.24 Dong represented the best in the Communist Party to all of them. The two Yuan sisters were fondly regarded by their teacher who looked out for them. In the interaction of private and public, as a revolutionary figure Dong’s high regard for Wu Han was a great boon to Wu’s official career in the 1950s. However, in these years while their friendships with officialdom were expanding, their relationships with old friends and relatives who were not members of high political circles became distant and alienated. Many of their Qinghua friends like Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu and even some of their own family members, such as his brother-in-law, the historian Rong Zhaozu (Yuan Xizhi’s husband), felt like outsiders when they went to Wu’s and Yuan Zhen’s house in Toufa Alley or later after they moved to Beichang Street near the palace. When they rang the bell at the gate the gate man would eye them suspiciously as he asked for their identification. After they eventually were shown inside the family quarters they were likely to find Wu with strangers who demanded his attention, leaving them feeling ill at ease. Visiting about personal news and the informal conversation about intellectual subjects they had so often enjoyed with Wu in the past was simply impossible. Wu seemed remote and much changed from the relaxed, talk-

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ative friend they had known. Yuan Zhen held herself aloof and seemed to Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu to feel superior even though she had been Yang Jiang’s roommate and good friend at Qinghua. In fact, many of their old friends soon gave up trying to see them because they felt uncomfortable and unwelcome in the atmosphere of surrounding officialdom. Some even lost their relationship with him because of his political position and isolation from their lives.25 Years later in recalling Wu several of their old friends still remembered their surprise at how different Wu had become. Wu appeared to accept his high status and the way it set him apart from others, even family members. Following the Great Leap in 1958, during the time of famine which came to be called the “Three Years of Disaster,” grain was rationed but special high quality grain was provided for high-ranking officials. When family members gathered together at his home for the New Year Festival they were shocked that Wu and Yuan Zhen ate the highgrade rice granted to him as an official in front of them while at the same time the guests (all of the same sociocultural level and of the same family) were served the inferior rice available for ordinary folk. They expected to all be served alike, however simply, at the New Year family celebration, but Wu and Yuan Zhen did not even acknowledge the disparity or seem embarrassed. This was indeed very different from his former behavior toward his family.26 Wu’s relationship with his Zhejiang hometown which he had left long ago as a student had become even more distant after 1949, although he never completely forsook his ties to his home village. His mother, the only one in the family who had remained in the village, died in the family home in Kuzhutang in 1949, after suffering a severe stroke. In the first year of the PRC during the 1950 land reform campaign, as the eldest son in his family Wu wrote to the Yiwu County government to present his family’s land and home to the people of Yiwu County. Ever since his father’s death in 1933 Wu had been the head of the family of his mother, brother, and two sisters. By 1950 since all of them, except his brother Chunxi, lived in or were about to make Beijing their home, the home in Yiwu was no longer needed by the family. Wu Han asked his brother, Chunxi, who was still in Shanghai, to go to the village and supervise shipping his father’s books to him in Beijing so he could have them in his study. Giving the family home to the county government actually was only recognition of what had already happened—the land having already been appropriated by the local government. But symbolically it meant that Wu relinquished any claim to the land or to land-based identity as a villager, thereby affirming his own urbanization and total separation from his rural past. The villagers memory of Wu and his family remained strong, however. In the 1980s the Wu family home in Kuzhutang was still preserved by the villagers as a local museum and memorial to their illustrious son. After his mother’s death Wu Han arranged through his brother that a tombstone be

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placed on the family burial ground in the low hills just beyond the village. He asked Shen Junru, the national chairman of the Democratic League, to write an inscription to be carved on the family tombstone. The stone still stands today where it was placed exemplifying the respect Wu felt for his family and symbolizing his primary association with the Democratic League, even at a time when such sentiments about family were thought by many to be feudal remnants. For himself, Wu Han had always loved children and as he grew older longed to have his own. While he had the eldest son’s responsibility to perpetuate the family line, his own need to have children near him to love and care for sprang from his own nature. He was a warmhearted outgoing person who gained inner strength from giving care and pleasure to those he loved. In the late 1940s he had thought of adopting a child but Yuan Zhen, not open and easy going by nature and still plagued by serious illnesses, was not as eager to bring children into their home as was Wu. He partly satisfied his enjoyment of children by his close relationships with his brother’s and two sisters’ children. Sometimes the oldest nephew or niece who each lived at Wu’s house at different times went with him to visit friends on the Qinghua campus, or later accompanied him on working field trips to schools in the six-county municipal area or when he went fishing with friends in the city government at Changguan lou or when he screened films as the city cultural official. When he had an evening at home he took great interest in their homework and brought them fruit and snacks to eat while they studied. The younger children in the family kept fond memories of his gathering them together for an ice cream party at the Beijing Hotel or a trip to the park.27 But even though he enjoyed them immensely, these informal family relationships did not fulfill his need for his own family. At the end of the 1940s he made an agreement with Chunxi, his brother, to adopt his eldest son, Wu Xuan, the eldest child in his generation in the family. This was a plan that would have pleased his mother in her last days very much because she was very fond of Chunxi’s first son. In the first months of 1949 Wu Han brought the nephew, Wu Xuan, to Beijing to live with them and entered him in a Beijing school while they still lived on the Qinghua campus. A student of Wu’s was sent to bring the boy to Beijing from Shanghai to live with Wu Han. Wu’s brother was happy to agree to the adoption for the good of the family but it was very difficult for the boy’s mother, Meiying, to agree to give up her son. The two brothers actually negotiated a formal agreement for the adoption. Then, after Wu Xuan had lived with them for some years, there was a change of heart. As the boy grew older and more independent minded, Wu and Yuan Zhen decided that adopting outside of the family would be better and they relinquished their claims to his nephew in favor of adopting an orphan. For Xuan by then a young man, to be first pulled into Wu Han’s little nuclear family and then pushed out later as a young man was a confusing and painful experience.

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Figure 11.3. Wu Han holding his adopted daughter, Xiaoyan, circa 1957

After this, Yuan Zhen agreed to adopt a child but specified it should be a pretty baby girl. A lovely baby was brought to them from an orphanage in Beijing and they gave her the name Wu Xiaoyan. Several years later, still wanting a son, he persuaded Yuan Zhen that they should adopt another child. The orphanage brought them a fine male baby who had been abandoned in the railway station. To this little son they gave the name Wu Zhang. Wu paid great attention to the two children, even carrying little Xiaoyan in his arms to the pediatrician Dr. Hu Yamei when the little girl was ill. Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, had recommended his own family pediatrician, Dr. Hu, a prominent and warmhearted woman physician, to Wu Han, the concerned father, when the baby girl became ill. Wu would

Figure 11.4. Yuan Zhen and Wu Han with their daughter, Xiaoyan, circa 1963

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not entrust anyone but himself to take her to the doctor so he came in his car to Dr. Hu’s office with the tiny little girl in his arms.28 As the children grew, the doting father spent time with them whenever he could find a few hours from his work.

AN ACADEMIC’S LEADERSHIP IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE Even though Wu’s time was mostly absorbed by the responsibilities of his government position, not all of his activities were related to his municipal government post. Public awareness of his official status, his leadership role in the Democratic League, as well as his academic prestige all lent weight to projects he undertook beyond his duties in municipal office. By the mid-1950s the political landscape had changed as the CCP Central Committee leadership had moved beyond its commitment to the concept of coalition government. As the national and provincial Peoples Republic governments were established this left the centrist party people in the United Front–based coalition working in a shell that existed in name only. Still, complex relationships within the polity took many years and a major shift in political direction to fully reflect this change. During this period networks of informal relationships among leaders and intellectuals contributed to the phenomenon of public space for participant action that remained in place despite the deep constitutional shift to a totalistic one-party government underway in the polity. This encouraged individual participants to continue to assume that the possibility of their contribution as individuals in the polity remained in place. In truth, for some like Wu curtailment of their influence and actions in public space didn’t occur until much later with the actual onset of the Cultural Revolution.29 For others the limitation came much sooner. In this period the Beijing branch of the league, to which a number of the intellectuals in the capital belonged, was a common meeting ground for many of the centrists who were active United Front participants. Because the nature of the league was more than a political party in the members minds, this meeting ground provided public space for non-league activities of the members. Due to the weight given to relationship networks (guanxi wang) in Chinese society, Wu’s informal influence was widespread among league members and extended far beyond. While directly involved in his municipal office in areas of standard setting for educational institutions and policy administration of CCP policy at the primary and secondary education level,30 at the higher education level his influence was more informal and augmented by his own long-standing reputation in academia. This was even truer in the cultural/academic sphere. His influence was mainly through his professional contacts with colleagues in university and league circles and through his personal reputation and activity in cultural

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and academic circles, buttressed, of course, by the prestige of his current official office and league role.31 For example, Wu’s interests in Chinese history and culture, although well known at the center, nonetheless were relatively unfettered by bureaucratic and organizational structuring. Untiring and fully convinced that he was in harmony with the aims of the Communist polity and leadership, he freely used his prestige and platform without constraint to encourage the practice of history education and study and to encourage preservation of historical sites and publication of important texts.

AT HEART ALWAYS THE HISTORIAN Two projects in historical publishing and research that held great relevance for Chinese historical identity and for future historical scholarship were organized and guided by Wu in the mid-1950s. One was the compilation of the first modern historical atlas of China, the other the punctuation, editing, and publication of Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) (1084). During the first meeting of the National People’s Congress in 1954, Mao Zedong and Wu were talking about historical subjects. Mao had commented to him about reading Sima Guang’s Comprehensive Mirror which he admired. He thought it could be read critically by people now despite its embodying the viewpoint of feudal rulers. He wondered if Wu could recommend good maps to refer to when he was reading historical texts so he would know where the places he was reading about were. Wu told him about a series of maps created by Yang Shoujing in the Qing dynasty and said that he thought they could be revised and republished for readers’ use. Mao was enthusiastic about the publication of a historical atlas and encouraged Wu to carry it out. Wu also brought up the idea of publishing a modern punctuated edition of Sima Guang’s history.32 Both of these massive projects were initiated and accomplished under Wu’s aegis, but he was personally more involved in the atlas because it was a complex project. The Sima Guang Tongjian punctuation and publication project was undertaken under a committee of twelve editors brought together by Wu Han and supervised by three chief editors of which Gu Jiegang, Wu’s teacher and mentor of the 1930s, had the major role of chief proofreader (Zong jiaodui). The Zizhi tongjian by Sima Guang (1019–1086), a general history of the past up to the time of its writing in the Song and one of the most important historical works ever written in China, had never before been punctuated and published in modern format as a complete history although historians had been discussing the need for its modern publication for decades.33 The atlas project gradually grew into the preparation of a multivolume historical atlas of China, eventually titled Zhongguo lishi ditu ji. Wu asked

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Tan Qixiang, a colleague and historical geographer at Fudan University in Shanghai and also a former student of Gu Jiegang, to head the atlas project. This historical atlas was planned to fill the need for a modern historical atlas mapping China’s territory during successive past eras. Although Mao encouraged Wu to take responsibility for these two projects, the idea for them originated with neither Wu nor Mao. While the initiative for compiling and publishing the atlas in the 1950s had truly been Wu Han’s, Gu Jiegang had been talking of creating a modern historical atlas even in the 1930s and Wu had been influenced by his teacher. It can indeed be said that Gu Jiegang’s influence over these two projects was great. First Wu enthusiastically organized a board of eminent historians, which he and Fan Wenlan, his close associate since the 1930s, coheaded, for the Tongjian project, but he took great care to supervise both projects himself, particularly the atlas. The Zizhi tongjian was completed within a year in 1956, but the atlas, Zhongguo lishi dituji (Chinese Historical Atlas), encountered multiple problems and was not completed and published until after the Cultural Revolution and after Wu Han’s death. From the beginning Wu encouraged his colleague and Gu’s student, Tan Qixiang, to undertake the compilation of the atlas. Tan found the production of the atlas to be fraught with cartographic and historical dilemmas about place names, boundaries and territorial claims over time. He began with the Qing dynasty map prepared by Yang Shoujing, known as the Yangtu, which Wu Han had thought to be the best starting place despite Tan’s cautionary advice to him from the beginning that it was not adequate as the basis for a modern historical atlas. True to Tan’s prediction, by June 1955 the Yangtu had proven unworkable. This was partly due to the inaccuracy of the base plates which were not the product of modern surveys done with scientific instruments.34 Nonetheless, long after the decision had been made to make new plates the project was still referred to as the Yangtu project, leaving some later historians with the mistaken impression the project was founded on the old Yang Shoujing atlas. For the historical geographers working on the atlas the question of national boundaries at various points in the past proved to be an extremely sensitive political issue in the 1950s and 1960s involved with national identity, borders, and contemporary twentieth-century foreign policy.35 Tan Qixiang, according to his biographer and student, Ge Jianxiong, credited Wu Han and Wu’s steady and persistent leadership and oversight of the atlas project from 1954 to 1966 with the eventual publication of the eightvolume Zhongguo lishi dituji long after Wu’s own death.36 Ironically, Wu Han’s name, sad to say was omitted from the atlas when it was published in 1974–1976 because at the time it was published he was still classified as a traitor. His rehabilitation was yet to come. Among his other historically oriented professional activities during the 1950s, Wu Han initiated and energetically promoted the excavation of Dingling, one of the Ming tombs beyond the city boundary. For this project,

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which Wu saw as an important way to show the people how cruelly the rulers had exploited the people to build the tombs that glorify the ruler, he had received Zhou Enlai’s approval. However, some of Wu’s closest academic friends saw it very differently—as a project it provoked great controversy among historians and scholars. Zheng Zhenduo and Xia Nai, both now holding national official positions, especially thought it unwise to open the tombs to potential destruction by the air considering the level of archeological technology and resources available in China at that time.37 Preservation could be very difficult they feared. In another spirited, but divisive debate Wu participated in the public discussion of the removal of the ancient Beijing city walls. As an advocate of the removal of the walls to facilitate the movement of traffic he supported Mao Zedong’s encouragement of modernization of the city. On the opposite side were many of his academic colleagues, particularly Liang Sicheng, the city planner and son of Liang Qichao, the late Qing, early Republican historian. Drawing on his scholarly interests and prestige as one of the best known of the PRC historians in the Beijing academic arena, along with Jian Bozan, Wu led the organizing of the Beijing Historical Association. He was aided by the journalist and scholar, Deng Tuo, who had been transferred to the Beijing Municipal Committee in 1957. The association began as an academic forum to hold annual conferences for the presentation and discussion of members’ papers afterward publishing the proceedings in scholarly book format.38 Wu’s organization in 1935 of the Historical Research Association in Beiping was a forerunner in his own life experience of the formation of this 1950s association. Among his academically oriented activities, he independently initiated the planning and editing of a multivolume popular history series, Zhongguo lishi xiaocongshu, that was distributed all over China for many years.39 The publication of this series was partly the result of a long-standing passion of Wu’s from his earlier academic life and partly related to his contemporary role as educator responsible for the educational system in the capital and model for the nation. The series was a forerunner to the simplified popular histories that were one of the principal components in post-Dengist history publishing. Within the first three years beginning in 1960, 150 of the little volumes were published and sold all over China and then later collected into a large volume. In Wu’s life, taking a longer view, this project was an off-spring of the planning for the series of popular histories that Wu and Zhang Yinlin had discussed during the years at Qinghua in Beiping and in Kunming in the late 1930s and 1940s but not been able to carry out because of the war and Zhang’s premature death. Despite the fading of the United Front in the political landscape, Wu’s place in the public space described by the United Front community of interest enabled him to continue to take a leadership role in many projects in the 1950s and early 1960s. Even long past the time when the Communist

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leadership dropped its stress on the coalition of the front his individual network of varied relationships gave him an unusual amount of space and prestige and provided him with entrée to the views of upper echelon party people as well as to those of established scholars and intellectuals. Notwithstanding his success at carrying this off and in accomplishing much within his official area of activity as vice mayor, there was also a negative side. While this seeming independence and prominence in public space provided the opportunity for acting on his own agenda within the framework of the United Front and gave him a sense of satisfaction and of permanence, it also placed him in a very public and vulnerable position after the late 1950s as the party leadership’s commitment to the United Front disappeared and the leftward trend stressing class struggle strengthened, pushed by Mao in the 1960s. After all, the coalition that was the core manifestation of the United Front was set up and defined by the Communist Party. It was the party that controlled the power to change the ground rules of the polity at will. It seems Wu Han didn’t recognize the signs and import of this shift as there are no indications he gave consideration to the situation as time went by.

TAKING UP THE HISTORIAN’S PEN AGAIN Although it was difficult for Wu Han to make the shift to bureaucratadministrator at first, by the mid-1950s he had become reasonably accustomed to dealing with the administrative responsibilities of his municipal post as a cadre in the new Communist party-state. He had long since developed a good working relationship with the party officials in the city government. With government reforms in educational institutions still underway his oversight duties in the capital municipal area encompassing six counties as well as the city itself were extensive. The parameters of his post also included cultural affairs in the city which meant he was concerned with many activities, even screening movies. Wu went abroad with groups of officials and academic bureaucrats such as Guo Moruo to represent the educational and cultural facets of China. His first trip was in November 1949 to the Soviet Union as a member of the PRC delegation to Moscow to honor the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. When they returned Wu and the author, Ding Ling, a member of the delegation, edited a collection of glowing accounts of their impressions of the Soviet institutions they visited.40 He was also a member of later official trips to Egypt and India. By 1954 Wu began to be able to take time away from administrative duties to work on his own historical writing projects. The first project he undertook was a revision of his biography of the Ming dynasty founder, Zhu Yuanzhang.41 The 1949 edition, which had been widely praised and published by several presses, was out of print. Rather than simply have it reprinted he

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Figure 11.5. Wu Han, vice mayor of Beijing, on a cultural mission to Egypt for the People’s Republic of China in 1958

decided to revise it. Wu had been deeply impressed by the singular attention Mao Zedong had paid to his second version of the biography in late 1948 in the Liberated Zone on the eve of the most important battle in the civil war. The subjects of national unity, revolution and loyalty, of class structure and economic issues had been focal ideas in their discussion of the biography. After a year’s work on the manuscript, in which he introduced class analysis interpretations and emphasized class contradictions in the narrative he

Figure 11.6. Wu Han and the PRC cultural mission with Egyptian officials, 1958

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circulated a draft of the revision to fellow historians and a few party comrades for their comments. His decision was not to publish the revised biography at that time, perhaps because of the comments he received. He put it aside but came back to it again in a few years. Zhu Yuanzhang was, and still is, a politically sensitive figure in Chinese thought. In the 1950s this was partly because of the parallel situations of Zhu’s founding a new Han Chinese dynasty in 1368 (the last Han dynasty) and the founding of the modern national state begun first by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in 1928 and now robustly being consummated under Mao Zedong’s leadership. There are both positive and negative aspects to the reign of Ming Taizu (Zhu Yuanzhang). In his two earlier versions of the biography, the first in 1944 and the second in 1949, Wu had focused on the national revolution aspect of Zhu’s success in reunifying the domain and founding the Ming dynasty. As a founding ruler, particularly the last founding dynastic ruler of China of Han Chinese blood, Zhu had become a favorite of Mao’s and even a model. This insured that whatever the biographer’s interpretation of Zhu, it would be of concern to many key people, with implications extending far beyond the academic world.42 Wu, nonetheless, continued to maintain the parameters of the method and interpretation of the historian in his revision of the biography. In the winter of 1956, in the framework of the Hundred Flowers discussions, Wu gathered together eleven of his most important historical essays written before 1949, mostly on the Ming period, and published them in the collection Notes on Reading History (Dushi zhaji). This was the first of five collections of his previous and currently written works which he published as separate volumes over the next seven years, ending with the Xuexi ji (Study Collection) in 1963. The second volume was the Throwing Spears Collection (Touqiang ji) in 1959 containing essays originally published during 1945– 1946 during the December First and subsequent Democratic movements, and the 1947 anti–civil war movement. These he had intended as criticism of the Chiang Kai-shek government and its strategy of enlarging the civil war. Next he published Under the Lamp (Dengxia ji) in 1960. This collected many essays newly written and published in periodicals in 1959. Then there was Chuntian ji (The Spring Collection) in 1961, also a collection of new essays published in recent newspapers and magazines. The last of these collections was Xuexi ji, published in 1963.43 During the fall of 1956 in the ambience of the Hundred Flowers period, Jian Bozan, chairman of the Beijing University History Department, invited Wu Han to give an advanced class of lectures in Ming history to Beida graduate students and young teachers. This was just after the volume, Notes on Reading History collecting his essays on the Ming, had been published by Wu. By this time Beijing University had been relocated from the center of the city to the Yanjing University campus in Haidian far out of the city where it is today. Yanjing University, founded by Americans in the 1910s, had been

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closed, wiped out as an institution by the regime, and the faculty and facilities absorbed by Beijing and Qinghua universities. Wu’s lectures were given to the group of fifty or sixty people in the relaxed atmosphere of the Hundred Flowers period initiated by Mao the previous spring. From detailed notes taken by Xu Daling, one of the students who had read Wu’s essays on the Ming in the volume just published in February and considered himself very lucky to be in Wu’s class, the content of his lectures is evident.44 Wu took advantage of this new freer atmosphere to return to topics in the Ming that he had been studying in the 1930s and 1940s. These lectures were similar to the approach he had taken with the Ming in his classes when he was teaching at Qinghua. He probably pulled out and adapted his old lecture notes, with the exception of a short section on the sprouts of capitalism discussion currently going on among historians. After briefly discussing and agreeing with Deng Tuo’s published ideas on the “sprouts of capitalism” as he began his lectures, Wu then plunged into what for him were the real issues of Ming history. Jianzhou, the Nuzhen, and the early pre-Qing Manchu Nuzhen development in the present-day area known as Manchuria, during the Ming era was one main focus of his lectures. His ongoing research work during the 1940s and 1950s on the Ming had centered in his project compiling the passages he found in the Korean Yi Dynasty Veritable Records related to China.45 In the lectures he gave, it is clear that in the mid-1950s, once away from his official duties, Wu was thinking very seriously of key issues in his own field of Ming history, eager to be involved again with his studies of the relation of the peoples to the north of China, the Jurchen (Nuzhen) later known as Manchu, with the Ming. This was the northern area the Japanese had taken in the 1930s when they first invaded China in 1931. For him there was nothing mutually exclusive about “expert” and “Red,” two labels used in contemporary 1950s discussions within China. Wu personified the compatibility of the two within one person with his role as an official in the Communist government side by side with his ongoing scholarly interest in history. The students could see that he felt very natural, enjoying lecturing and often spending time after class with them enthusiastically discussing historical questions and chatting with them, without current politics becoming an issue.46 Unfortunately, toward the end of the term Wu was unexpectedly called away by official duties and couldn’t finish his lectures. Jian Bozan asked Zheng Tianting to finish the course for him. Later, Wu did return once again to teaching Ming history in a short course he gave for CCP cadre at the Beijing party school in November 1962.47 However, the teaching environment in the party school was very different from the relaxed academic atmosphere of the advanced class in Ming history at Beijing University. Within months after his teaching experience, in February 1957 the Hundred Flowers era was suddenly brought to a halt. The intellectuals were plunged into the Party Rectification in what they understood as their duty to critique the party, and then, in June, abruptly pushed into the period of

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bitter accusations and divisions that became known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The atmosphere and pace of Wu’s life, as everyone else’s was changed very quickly.

COMMUNIST ASPIRATIONS OF A DEMOCRATIC INTELLECTUAL Back in the days of the December First Movement in Kunming in 1945–1946, when Wu had worked closely with the poet, Wen Yiduo, in promoting demonstrations against the Chiang Kai-shek government and in founding the Democratic League Youth League, they had discovered that they agreed in their sympathy for the objectives of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, both men intended to return to their scholarly work after they had accomplished their political objectives. In the flow of events Wu Han, driven partly by Wen’s assassination, had been swept into the Democratic Movement during the years of the civil war in the late 1940s. In 1948 when Wu met Mao Zedong the first time face-to-face the pulse of revolutionary excitement radiating from the charismatic Mao had infected the idealistic Wu. The heightened sense of the future that emanated from Mao induced Wu to want to join the Communist Party because it seemed to have the solution in the modern world for China’s historic difficulties. The only other choice, which he did not even contemplate, was to retire from the public sphere and become a recluse as some scholars had in the dynastic period. Wu concluded if the intellectuals were to have influence on the course of the future it would have to be through the Communist Party or by working in coalition with the party. There were precedents for this in the Democratic League. Some league people already were kuadang, that is, straddling dual membership, although their dual membership was not generally known. Wu’s idea was that if he were a Communist Party member as well as a Democratic League member, he could be influential in both spheres and thus contribute more to his country and by so doing help to accomplish what he wanted for the country. His application directly to Mao Zedong in late 1948 to join the party had been put on hold by Mao. He had been told by Zhou Enlai that the time was not appropriate because he, and Democratic Party people like him, were needed by the country and the people outside of the Communist Party. Wu’s letter of application directly to Mao Zedong and the way it was handled by Mao and Zhou demonstrated the exceptionalist position Wu held both in the eyes of the party leadership and in his own view of his situation. In contrast, Yuan Zhen, who had lost her membership in the 1930s when she was ill with tuberculosis, openly joined the party again in the 1950s through the regular channel of the Beijing municipal party branch where she was seen at branch cell meetings by others and known to be a CCP member.48 Six years after 1948 when he had first applied to Mao for membership, in 1954, Wu Han wrote again, this time to Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and his

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immediate superior, fervently expressing his wish to join the party. He heard nothing until a year later in 1955; Mao Zedong it seems, at this point, had decided that Wu Han should be admitted to the party. Party files revealed in the Cultural Revolution accusation meetings about Wu Han and seen by Zhang Wensong, confirmed that Wu was admitted to the party at Mao’s behest. When Mao gave his permission, Liu Ren and Zhang Youyu, asked by Zhou Enlai, carried out the necessary formal role of introducers. Wu was formally admitted, in March 1957 as a member of the Communist Party, in the Beijing municipal branch. This was at a time when other democratic intellectuals were also being admitted to the party as a result of a central policy change. However, Wu Han’s membership was kept a secret, not publicly announced, known only to the branch leadership and the Central Committee of the Communist Party until revealed in the Cultural Revolution.49 In the next years, as he continued as vice mayor of Beijing, responsible for education and cultural affairs, his public identity was always that of a Democratic League member serving as a Democratic official in the government under the United Front. Although anyone who knew him well would certainly have assumed he was very close to the party, actually, despite much rhetoric later in China in the 1980s pointedly claiming him as a loyal Communist Party member, careful reading of his post-1949 writings as a body of work does not substantiate characterizing him as having adopted Communist ideology across the board. From his actions and writings, a fairer characterization of Wu’s thinking in the 1950s and 1960s is that he was selectively influenced by Marxism-Leninism and by Mao Zedong’s thought in his thinking about China, but his historical ideas of China were those that had already been firmly established on the basis of his work in the 1930s and 1940s. Wu was loyal to Communism as he chose to understand it, not because the powerful central authority decreed it. That is exactly what got him into trouble in the 1960s, for he retained his independence of mind even while supporting the party ideology. But, when ideology moved beyond what Wu could support he would not change his ideas to please the powerful. Despite his thorough familiarity with autocracy in China’s past, Wu Han’s deeply ingrained comprehension of the role and duty of the scholar, coupled with his admiration of the person, Mao Zedong, led him into ignoring the degree to which Maoist thought was autocratic at its base, and might control him personally, demanding blind, selfless discipline from its “tame tools.”

NOTES 1. Xiang Zeming in Interview 136. Wu seems not to have discussed this with his family at this time, although he may have with his wife. Surviving family members and close friends interviewed were unaware of his having had prior knowledge of his appointment before it was announced in October.

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2. Zhang Youyu in Interview 65. Zhao Gengqi (1986), 7, 24. Zhang served until 1959 when Wan Li took his place. Zhang Youyu’s comments about Peng Zhen pertain to administrative affairs, not party affairs. 3. Taiwan, of course, was not a part of the unified China after 1949, but except for 1945 to 1949 it had not been a part of China since the Japanese seized it in 1895. 4. Ying (1999). Wu Han, “Wo ai Beijing.” 5. See “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” SW, 4:411–23, originally published 30 June 1949. 6. Feng Youlan in Interview 9. 7. See chapter 10 in this volume for the monk. 8. Smith and Hutchinson (1994). 9. Mazur, “The United Front redefined” (1997). The CCP’s conception of the coalition changed by the mid-1950s. 10. Wu Han, “Lun shidaifu” [On literati-officials]. 11. Su Shuangbi (1997), 28–37. Yao Wenyuan (1965). Yao’s essay, “Ping xin bian lishi ju ‘Hai Rui ba guan,’ ” attacking Wu is considered the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. 12. One explanation of the question of “Why Wu Han?” that has been proposed is that since Wu was in Peng Zhen’s circle in the Beijing city government and Peng was one of the major targets of Mao Zedong, Wu was merely an avenue for getting at Peng and Liu Shaoqi. This explanation cannot be dismissed but it only deals with a part of the situation. The original question of “Why Wu Han?” still remains since there were a number of other very prominent people in Peng Zhen’s circle, not to speak of Liu Shaoqi and his coterie. The answer has to be sought in Wu Han’s own situation and relation to the politics of the times. 13. Seymour (1987), 9–10. 14. Wu Han, “Wode zhixue yu sixiang shi zenyang jinbude,” 19, was not actually a model but an enthusiastic description of the changes in his thinking. For his own model effort at thought reform, “Wo kefu liao ‘chao jieji’ guandian,” first published in Zhongguo qingnian 32 (11 February 1950), and republished in the collection Zhang Zhizhong, Zenyang gaizao (Hezuo shudian, 1950). 15. Su Shuangbi and Wang Hongzhi, “Wu Han xueshu huodong biannian jianpu,” 194. 16. Interview 148 with Zhang Wensong, director of the Communist Party Beijing Municipal Committee Culture and Education Department; Interview 10. 17. Xinag Zemin in Interview 136: Wu went to Xiang’s office once a week to read party documents. In Interviews 20, Li Wenyi, and 46, Wu’s first secretary Wen Lishu, said they saw documents on Wu’s desk frequently before he became a party member that only party members could see. The extent of his municipal responsibilities even in the first year is shown in Wu Han, “Guanyu Beijing zhixing yijiuwuling niandu wen jiao weisheng gongzuo jihua de baogao.” 18. Zhang Youyu Interview 65; also Zhao Gengqi (1986), 74. 19. Information on Wu’s rank provided by Wu Xuan, Wu Han’s nephew. 20. Interviews 65 and 138. Peng Zhen was a member of the Central Committee and concurrently mayor of Beijing. According to the explanation of a Beijing party committee official, “concurrent” meant that his position as mayor was a secondary responsibility and the primary responsibility would be expected to take precedence.

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21. Fraser (1965). 22. Interviews 5, 6, and 46. 23. Makarenko (1955). This is the story of the Gorky Colony of juvenile delinquents in which Makarenko explains his ideas about rehabilitating young offenders. Interview 28 with the director of the work-study school. 24. Interview 144. 25. Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu in Interview 140; Yuan Xizhi and Rong Zhaozu in Interview 146. Li Yan, Wu’s former student, also commented on this. 26. Interview 146. 27. Interviews 32, 51, 52, and 58. 28. Interview 167. Dr. Hu is now the director of the Beijing Children’s Hospital. Wu Puyue, Yuan Xizhi, Wu Xuan Interviews. 29. Mazur, “Autonomous or Not?” (1999). 30. For example: Beijing shi zhongxiaoxue jiaoshiyuan xuexi weiyuanhui (1950). 31. Example: Wu Han, “Minmeng de mengwu ruhe yu gaodeng xuexiao de yewu xiang jieho” [How to unite activities of the China Democratic League with activities of institutions of higher learning] GMRB (20 April 1953). 32. Tan Qixiang in Interview 115; Ge Jianxiong (1997), 239–40, 247, 267–85; Tan Qixiang, ed., Zhongguo lishi ditu ji. 33. Publihed by Guji chubanshe in 1956. 34. Tan Qixiang in Interview 115; Ge Jianxiong (1997), 275–76. 35. Tan Qixiang in Interview 115; Ge Jianxiong (1997), 239–40, 247, 267–85. 36. Ge Jianxiong (1997), 239–86. 37. Tan Qixiang in Interview 115; Zhao Qichang Interview 67; Hou Renzhi Interview 15; Zhang Xikong Interview 149; Zheng Tianting (1979), 455; Xia Nai (1980); Gu Chao (1993). 38. Beijing shi lishi xuehui (1964). 39. Wu Han, ed., Zhongguo lishi xiao congshu [Brief Chinese histories series]. Series launched in 1960–. 40. Ding Ling and Wu Han (1950). 41. For more detail see Mazur, “The Four Zhu Yuanzhangs” (1997). 42. Interview 56. 43. Wu Han, Dushi zhaji [Notes on reading history], Touqiang ji [Throwing spears collection], Dengxia ji [Under the lamp collection], Chuntian ji [Spring collection], and Xuexi ji [Study collection]. 44. Interview 56, and Xu’s extant and very detailed notes from the lectures, which he kindly lent to me. Xu Daling was professor of history at Beida and chairman of the history department at the time of the interview. 45. Wu Han, comp., Chaoxian Li chao shilu de Zhongguo shiliao, 12 vols. 46. Interview 56. 47. Wu Han, Ming shi jianshu. 48. Wu Han, “Wu Han zizhuan.” Interview 46. Yuan Zhen worked for some time in the Beijing government. 49. Zhang Wensong in Interview 148; Zhang Youyu in Interview 65. This change in policy to include liberal intellectuals as party members was related to the CCP Central Committee’s shift away from the idea of coalition government and to their objective to gather centrists into the fold.

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he year 1957 was a year to remember, a critical time for Mao Zedong and the Communist Party and for Wu Han, a year in which Wu’s commitment to the Communist leadership was called on. Well known as vice mayor of Beijing and also as the chairman of the Beijing branch of the Democratic League in the United Front coalition framework, yet only now secretly at Mao’s behest become a Communist Party member, Wu was in a particularly sensitive position. His particular position in the league meant that during the successive political shifts of 1956–1957, especially the Anti-Rightist Campaign that Mao began in June 1957, it was required of him to act in concert with CCP Central Committee policy as the incumbent leader of the Beijing Democratic League. This responsibility meant he was the transmitter of Communist Central Committee policy to the league at that moment. In the first years of the new Chinese state, Wu Han’s sense of responsibility and enthusiastic endorsement of the government as a league leader had involved him in many activities binding the intellectuals in various circles in and outside of the league together and in mobilizing their support for the CCP regime. After the Hundred Flowers period was inaugurated in 1956 with its surge of open discussion in spring 1957 Mao Zedong transformed the surge and shifted its direction by redirecting people to turn their attention to the Communist Party itself. In his speech 27 February 1957, “On Correctly Handling Contradictions among the People,”1 Mao asked attention inside and outside the Communist Party to turn to rectifying the CCP itself. Then little more than three months after this announcement of party rectification, beginning 8 June Mao’s thrust changed once again. The party rectification (zhengfeng), underway and participated in by many intellectuals eagerly taking the opportunity to openly criticize the CCP, itself 397

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suddenly became the focus of an about-face policy reversal that launched a campaign of criticism of those people who had been openly expressing their ideas on how to rectify the party. Now they were suddenly criticized as “Rightists.” Thus was born the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Wu Han did not hesitate; he was quick to support with great conviction the attacks on the intellectuals who had been calling for changes in the party, the now so-called Rightists.2 Mao’s February encouragement of CCP rectification by non-party intellectuals had seemed intended to enlist their help in improving policies and performance in the state formation process underway. But, when the critics’ recommendations proved to be too strong, Mao had suddenly changed his strategy.

I ACCUSE! WU NAMES THE RIGHTISTS When this abrupt change of political tide came in June, as a leader of the Democratic League responsible to the CCP state, Wu upheld the accusations of rightism, of lese majesté, against league members who had participated in the rectification critiques of the Communist Party. Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing and a key member of the Communist Party Central Committee, was a major supporter of Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign.3 Keeping in step with Peng, Wu rose to aggressively criticize some of his league colleagues publicly in the press and meetings. During the preceding months of zhengfeng, of rectification, from March through May, Wu had remained silent, not participating in the rectification efforts, although for some of this time he had been out of the country in India on a cultural/political friendship mission. Wu Han was one of the very first in the Democratic League, during this reversal of the rectification tide in June and July, to publicly denounce Rightists by turning vehemently on fellow league members and colleagues of long standing, particularly Luo Longji and Zhang Bojun.4 His vicious criticism was stimulated by the assertions of the CCP leaders that these two were leading a clique in the league that was trying to undermine the legitimacy of the CCP mandate. The vitriolic attack, “I detest! I accuse!” he made in the nationally circulated People’s Daily on 7 July 1957 was correlated with the recent reversals in policy by Mao and the Communist center.5 In a complete about-face the Central Committee led by Mao was now setting out to attack and destroy those it had a few months earlier encouraged to aid in the party’s self-rectification and strengthening. In the following months under the mandate of the Communist central authority, in special anti-Rightist criticism meetings, preset quotas were announced for identifying Rightist intellectuals. People accused of being Rightists and hence enemies of the state were viciously denounced and bestowed with symbolic “Rightist hats.”6 These people were systematically isolated and removed from their social and work relationships. Family and

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colleagues had no choice but “to draw a line” between themselves and the Rightist as an enemy. This alienation continued for the targeted individuals until the Rightist hat was removed perhaps years later, for some never. Wu Han carried into his public criticism his own past differences with Luo and Zhang. Luo Longji and Wu Han’s political differences dated from as far back as the December First Movement in 1945. This was at the time when Wu and Wen Yiduo, as liaison from the Democratic League were assisting in the creation of the Democratic Youth League sponsored by the league, while also working with the Communist underground in Kunming. Luo Longji had been critical of this sponsorship relationship and Wu, believing the Youth League to be a very important supporter of the CCP state, had never forgotten nor apparently forgiven Luo. While some people made these criticisms of Rightists to save their own necks, for Wu Han it was far more than mere self-protection. Convinced that divisive criticism among the democratic intelligentsia leadership would undermine the formation and unity of the Communist party-state and weaken the country, Wu idealistically and honestly followed the direction set by Mao and the Central Committee leadership in this period. Even within his own family circle he publicly criticized his brother, Wu Chunxi, for critical statements he had made in his work during the zhengfeng period when criticism of CCP policies was encouraged. There even were public criticisms he made of his wife’s sister, Yuan Xizhi, for statements she had made in her workplace.7 Not only did Wu Han criticize them at the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign but he maintained his criticism and refused to help either his brother or sister-in-law during the early 1960s when he well might have been able to lend a helping hand to them in the time of their very serious political difficulties. Why did Wu make the anti-Rightist speeches and write the articles? The political tides of those months must be considered to gain a sense of what was happening. Up to the time when the shift in Mao’s thinking occurred, Wu had said little or nothing during zhengfeng. Only when Mao had begun to turn attention to the criticisms of the Communist Party that came from within the ranks of the Democratic League did Wu speak out. In May and early June Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji had arranged several meetings of their democratic followers. It was said they even went so far as to call for the curtailment of CCP power and the separation of the party from government power.8 By mid-May behind the scene Mao had begun to warn that the democratic groups should look inward to inspect and rectify themselves and their own problems. On 15 May 1957, he circulated a document to upper echelon party leaders, “The Situation is Changing,” revealing broadly what was to come. In a tone bordering on hysteria at some points in the document, Mao’s statement referred to the Rightists “as nothing more than a small handful of anti-Communist, anti-people demons and ogres” who will “dig their own graves” in the near future.9

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Thus by late May and early June there were countercurrents running swiftly in opposite directions in the political environment, although the new dimensions of Mao’s thinking were known only by those at the center of the party. Working in the spirit of rectification, Luo and Zhang were raising the intensity of their ideas on how the CCP regime could be modified to provide more democratic expression. Fearing the ideas the intellectuals were airing and moving in the contrary direction himself because he saw the stability and strength of the party threatened, Mao chose to close the gate on the rectification current in the party and kill it with a reverse tide of anti-Right accusations that would stall the rectification mania he had himself ignited. As a member of Peng Zhen’s municipal government Wu Han certainly knew about Mao’s internal party document, “The Situation is Changing” and was well aware that Peng himself was deeply involved in promoting the AntiRightist Campaign. Seeing Mao’s anxiety about the meetings high level members of the Democratic League were holding, Wu certainly knew he was in a sensitive and vulnerable position. On 8 June, Mao wrote more explicitly of the danger to the CCP leadership in an intra-party directive to the Central Committee, pointedly asking people to “please pay attention to the reckless attacks by the reactionaries within the various democratic parties.”10 On the same day the People’s Daily published the editorial, “What Is This For?” widely assumed to be by Mao: Under the pretext of “helping the Communist Party in its rectification,” this small minority of Rightists is challenging the leadership of the Communist Party and the working class, even blatantly clamoring for the Communist Party to “step down.”11

If he were to survive the storm, Wu Han had to separate himself from the so-called Rightists by taking a strong public stand opposing the ideas and actions of the Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji group, both for his own good and for the very survival of the league. He had to actively oppose them as Mao was loudly calling for the members of the democratic parties, especially the league, to denounce their reactionary members and rectify themselves. Without hesitating Wu Han threw himself wholeheartedly into the arena on the side of the CCP, making speeches, writing articles, picking up the cudgel against the Rightists in the Democratic League.12 Wu’s own position in the Anti-Rightist Campaign was made more certain by his secret admission in March 1957 as a member in the Communist Party by Mao’s arrangement, just months before the storm broke. With this he became a person with membership in two parties, in Chinese called kuadang, “straddling parties.” This meant his loyalty was owed to both parties. He was now responsible to the CCP and also responsible for and to

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the Democratic League. Furthermore, his CCP membership was not known beyond a very few people in the Beijing Communist Party Committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Beyond that narrow circle, he was never publicly known as a party member until he became a target of the Cultural Revolution. Of course Yuan Zhen knew, but his secretary and colleagues did not. They could only guess (which they did). Consequently, until 1966 when the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution publicly exposed his CCP membership, beyond his Beijing Municipal Committee comrades, he was known only as a member of the Democratic League. The most basic condition complicating his situation was his position as a major official in the Beijing municipal government headed by Peng Zhen, the Beijing mayor and party secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee, the Beijing shiwei. Wu Han was on close personal terms with Peng. Peng had been one of the CCP Central Committee members who promoted the Anti-Rightist Campaign most strongly. Whether Wu could have resisted the swirling and reversing currents in the CCP in the spring of 1957 had he wanted to is doubtful, but it was not really a relevant question, for at that point he was a ready and willing supporter of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Wu was convinced by Mao’s rhetoric that these people represented a threat to the well-being of the Chinese Party-state. After demonstrating his trustworthiness in this emergency against the Rightists, in December 1958 he was elected vice chairman of the Democratic League Central Committee. In the existence of the league, the Anti-Rightist Campaign proved to be a watershed. After the campaign the Democratic League and its members were tightly controlled by the CCP center. Any notions of autonomy that might have lingered in league thought were snuffed out although the separate identity of the Democratic League and of its members as league people remained, if only as a hollow symbol.13

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD Soon after Wu’s secret admission to the party, in 1958 Chairman Mao proclaimed the Great Leap Forward. During the early and mid-1950s, until the era of the Great Leap, the PRC regime had followed Soviet influenced development strategy in its political economic policy, balanced between industrial development and agriculture. But by the close of 1957 as the Anti-Rightist Campaign swung along, the Central Committee leadership was confronted with the very serious implications of the reports coming in on the weakness of agricultural production that was inadequate to provide for the growing population and industrial expansion goals. There was rising disappointment with the Soviet Stalinist model that was predicated on heavy industry expansion funded by agricultural production. Also at about this time, the

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successful launch of Sputnik impressed and amazed people, goading them into realizing anxiously the deficiencies in their own capabilities compared to the advanced level of Soviet technology. Mao, who had been concluding in these months that it was necessary to make major changes in strategy, gave a key speech on the need for change in November 1957. 14 In the near future Mao named the changed direction he had begun to talk about the “Great Leap Forward.” The goal of advanced industrial and agricultural development didn’t change but the strategy for reaching it was radically transformed. Over the next year, the path the Central Committee led by Mao chose for the Great Leap was aimed at expanding agricultural production by emphasizing traditional labor intensive methods, especially water conservancy. The basis of the effort was mass mobilization of peasant labor in the fields along with the development of small scale village industry to provide for national needs such as the food supply for the people and iron to supply heavy industry. By November 1958, 99.1 percent of all rural households in China had been gathered into these People’s Communes. Along with the mass mobilization of agricultural labor, an important component of Mao’s thinking was his denigration of expertise and experts. In the spring of 1958 he had ranted critically about “the professors” in a speech that previewed some of the policies employed in the leap.15 The great goal of this leap, launched in May 1958, was to be major increases in agricultural production within the near future of one or two years. In Mao’s words they were “going to lift the lid to let the initiative and ingenuity of the people explode.”16 Amazingly, in the same speech Mao advocated depending on individual judgment and discrimination. The naive assumption was that if everyone would pull together the unrealistically high production quotas that had been set could be met. In Dali Yang’s words, the Great Leap turned out to be “fantasy incarnate.”17 The actual on-the-ground result of the leap was very different. Both human and natural factors shaped the result. Across the country the 1959 harvest was very poor. This was followed by the drought of 1960 throughout the whole country. In the spring and summer the worst conditions were in the north of China, aggravated by typhoons which caused flooding and plant disease. By the autumn China was in the midst of a major agricultural disaster aggravated by the drought, resulting in famine conditions in the countryside. With the advent of famine in 1960 the Great Leap was declared over in the fall, acknowledged as a disaster. Although the actual production figures for this period only became known in the early 1980s in Deng Xiaoping’s regime, at the time of the disaster the dire conditions of famine and the death toll were well known and widely discussed. An effort was made to mitigate conditions by allowing people to cultivate private plots in collectives and once again to sell in rural markets. But production conditions and agricultural harvests at the level of the early 1950s were not restored until 1965.18

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WU HAN’S LEAP: THE COUNTRY’S YESTERDAYS— NO “PRESENT WITHOUT PRECEDENT” Although Wu Han wasn’t involved in the leap in the countryside himself, after the Great Leap Forward was announced by Mao in 1958 one day in his Beijing municipal office Wu told his secretary, Guo Xinghua, that he was going to make his own “Great Leap.” Fed up with wasting time in endless bureaucratic meetings, he told her he was going to set aside time each day for writing.19 He said there was a special contribution he could make as a scholar to socialist society while the farmers made iron in the “Great Leap” backyard furnaces in the villages. In the context of those times the historical questions he addressed were also attracting many other historians in discussions that centered around the issue of the relationship of the past to the present. Some commentators have pointed to reactions to Mao Zedong’s Great Leap policies as the initial stimulus of the broad discourse at this time.20 While these people were all reacting to the national situation in the People’s Republic as it was developing in the late 1950s around them, the academic debate was far more complex. The relationship of the past to the present had been a central theme in Chinese thought through the whole twentieth century from even long before the 1919 May Fourth Movement that had influenced the early lives of the actors in this 1950s scene. Mao, as he made efforts to pull ideas from the past to weave them into his political thought, was only one more participant in the stream of this discourse. As we have seen in earlier chapters, in the 1930s Wu himself, had written several essays on this question and had been a leader in the New History Research Association that took as its purpose the writing of history for the present. In the founding manifesto of the Research Association’s Shixue newspaper supplement in 1935 in the Tianjin Yishi bao and the next year in the Nanjing Zhongyang ribao, Wu Han had drawn on the ideas of the Qing scholar, Yan Yuan, on the relation of historical truth to the present and the past. At the beginning of the 1900s, Liang Qichao had sought to stimulate the writing of history for the needs of the present; Zhang Taiyan had addressed the question of education for the future; even John Dewey, the pragmatic American philosopher, much admired by Hu Shi, in his lectures in China had discussed the relationship of past and present. Mao, himself, had been deeply influenced by Liang Qichao’s ideas during this stream of discussion. In fact, there were few Chinese historians and thinkers of importance in the twentieth century who had not dealt with this question of the relation of China’s past to its present. In this vein, Wu’s ideas in the discussions of the late 1950s and early 1960s dealt with two aspects of the relation of past to present that went together: “the present should be stressed more than the past” (Hou jin bo gu) and “the past must be made to serve the present” (Gu wei jin yong).21 This couplet

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was widely used in the debate. In Wu’s opinion there were fallacies on both sides: the traditionalists dealt with the past separately from the present and the ultra radical modernists had no use at all for the historical past. Using Marxist historical concepts, Wu wrote that objective historical study must certainly explain scientifically the history of the common people, of popular uprisings and of production relationships, but it must also study with care what he called the “unprogressive dark parts of history,” that is, the feudal social inequities and economic exploitation. The premodern societies must be studied to learn from them, not pushed out of view as some wished. As a matter of fact, Wu was also motivated by a problem in his own particular present much more immediate than the historian’s interest in the relation of the past to the present. As the educator who held the responsibility for supervising Beijing schools he saw an immediate problem, both in secondary schools and at the university level. This was a problem that had been produced by current party policies. Since the Great Leap Forward the call to lay more stress on the present than the past had resulted in many achievements, especially in encouraging study of the situation and narrative of the proletariat. Nevertheless, in the implementation of the policy of “stressing the present more than the past” some serious problems for China were showing up in Wu Han’s judgment. Schools had canceled all or kept only a few ancient history classes, “ancient” in the vocabulary current in the 1950s meaning before 1840 when modern history was deemed to have begun. For Wu the omission of the study of the premodern past was an alarming situation which would only harm the people’s present and future understanding of what China was, of the nature of China. Using the logic of the dialectical materialist argument, he wrote bluntly about the necessity of studying the past: It is obviously wrong to slight those parts of the past that shouldn’t be slighted. It will result in the coming generation now receiving its education being unable to know our country’s yesterday and the day before yesterday correctly. Some teaching material gives more coverage to the history of the broad masses of people and peasant uprisings. That is correct. On the other hand, to give the least possible or no coverage to the internal contradictions, brutality and exploitation of the feudal ruling classes will lead to only the side of revolutionary struggle of the broad masses of people remaining in the class struggle. The antithesis of the feudal ruling classes which actually existed in history is being stripped away and devitalized. The goal of the people’s revolutionary struggle then becomes unclear or disappears.—Obviously these viewpoints are nonmaterialistic and are wrong.22

By arguing that without knowledge about the feudal ruling classes, revolution could not be explained or understood because there would seem to have been nothing to revolt against, Wu was arguing for the importance for the present of the historical context of past events. He further expanded his

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criticism of the current trend, pointing out, consistent with his scholarship in the 1930s, that the viewpoint was wrong which condemned the past for: —not coming up to the standards of Marxism-Leninism. They don’t understand that works of the past are products of the reflection in human thought of the life of a given society. By the historical materialist point of view we should measure things from the social conditions of their time and place and not judge the ancients by today’s criteria.23

When reading materials for class curricula were only selected from a very narrow range of modern style writings he pointed out “the result will make it very difficult for our coming generation to understand our country’s history and fine heritage of literature and arts.”24 In a powerful summary he reasoned: While it is no good to praise the past and condemn the present, it is unreasonable and does not conform to objective reality to praise the present and condemn the past one-sidedly, to cut off history and make the present “without precedent.” We must teach the positive side and also the negative side of history, the bright aspects and also the dark aspects, the progressive and the backward or counterrevolutionary phenomenon, the struggle of the broad masses of people and also certain deeds of the heroes who propelled history forward. We should teach the experience of success and also the lessons of failure. We should teach contradictions in things, teach spears and also shields. You cannot talk only about spears without talking about shields.25

In a lecture at Nankai University in October 1959 Wu talked about how to describe and judge the great men of the past. But featuring, as he was doing, the “great men” had dangerously elitist implications in the complicated framework of emergent leftist thinking that was being stimulated by the Great Leap psychology. Many of Wu’s ideas dealt with the changing social milieu over time and its effect on people. Once again he emphasized that people could not be judged in previous times by principles of later times; for example, to ascribe “democratic” behavior to someone who lived in a feudal or slave owning period was impossible. His four chosen representative heroes from the past were: Cao Cao, Empress Wu of the Tang, the Ming official Hai Rui and the late Ming historian Tan Qian, author of the Guoque—and, furthermore, also an important source for Jianzhou in Manchuria, an area of continuing interest to him.26

POPULAR HISTORY FOR THE PRESENT Wu’s conviction that the present age must learn from the past continued to be the engine that drove his historical activities in the late 1950s and the 1960s as it had in the early years of his work. It certainly was the prime motivation

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for his launching the nationally read popular historical series Brief Chinese Histories or Zhongguo lishi xiao congshu in 1960. This series was a focal point in his effort to counteract the removal of the past from the school curriculum and from popular readership. Wu not only was alarmed at the trend himself, he also knew very well that many ordinary people missed the old stories about historical figures. This inspired him to set about organizing publication of the series to make history available as popular reading, according to the man who was his editorial assistant at the time, Zhang Xikong. Wu was inspired by the memory of the unfulfilled plans for a general history and the accompanying series of simplified popular readings about historical figures which he and the historian Zhang Yinlin had begun discussing years before in 1938. Zhang had completed and published the first volume in the general history in 1940, but no further volumes had been published because of the wartime crisis and Zhang’s death.27 As early as the fall of 1958, at a meeting of middle school history teachers Wu had called, he talked about plans to publish a series of popular Chinese history books with the teachers. Recognizing the need for suitable textbook materials of popular appeal his plan received an enthusiastic response from the people at the meeting.28 To accomplish the goal Wu organized a committee of history teachers to write at the popular level and served as the chief editor of the series himself with a distinguished board of editors that reads like a Who’s Who of PRC historians. In an exciting, groundbreaking project, over a period of three years 150 small booklets of historical narratives in simple Chinese were published in the series and distributed all over China to students and adults hungry for interesting stories from Chinese history. The series emphasized historical figures of all social classes and events that were connected with the ordinary people of society. As he saw the enthusiasm of the public’s response he expanded the plans for the project beyond the popular history series to include a parallel series on historical geography and asked the Beijing University historical geographer Hou Renzhi to be the editor for that series. Continuing, he added a series on foreign history and another on Chinese literature edited by the literary authority, Wu Xiaoling.29 Wu Han’s interest in the popularization of history had begun in the 1930s, inspired by Liang Qichao’s promotion of the use of history to create a national spirit and Liang’s emphasis on the popularization of history. Of course, Wu had also been stimulated by his teacher, Hu Shi and Hu’s promotion of the written vernacular (baihua wen) for a modern literature as the means of making communication and education of all classes of people possible. Wu had never forgotten or given up the plans Zhang Yinlin, Liang’s student, and he had laid years before for a popular history series to accompany their projected general history.30 Now, as an influential educator in a central position, Wu Han was able to bring to fruition a part of their dream for history education with this series aimed at strengthening the curriculum of the schools and the knowledge of the public, a popular series

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that provided a greater understanding of China’s past to ordinary people for the purposes of the present. In light of the growing trend on the left that insisted the past be downplayed, forgotten, and considered wholly evil, this was a farsighted and courageous project that Wu launched in his own Great Leap mentalité.

CONTRADICTIONS OF SPEARS AND SHIELDS By 1959 information circulating about the terrible conditions in the countryside was making it very apparent to upper echelons of the party that something was going terribly wrong with the Great Leap that Mao had launched the year before. A year after the launch a major problem emerged due to the great stress in the leap on achieving positive results. It became glaringly apparent that local officials, in their eagerness to appear successful, were greatly exaggerating harvest results and evaluations of local conditions in their reports to the higher authorities. There were no rewards for spreading bad news, but, in fact, the actual situation was really bad. Higher officials were beginning to try to find out what was actually happening in the countryside. At a meeting in Beijing on local affairs in the provinces Wu searched out a local leader from Kuzhutang, his home village in Yiwu County, Zhejiang. He talked to the cadre for a long time about the actual conditions in the village, wanting to know if the villagers had enough to eat and how they were managing.31 Beginning in late spring of 1959, in his roles as essayist and historian and as a government official with responsibility for education and culture, Wu Han published a series of essays and later a play about the Ming official Hai Rui, that were all related to this situation of dishonest officials in the countryside. Mao Zedong had asked Wu to write about Hai Rui as a model of an honest, upright, and fearless official in a special message to Wu, according to Wu Han’s secretary. In April while he was in Shanghai Mao had seen a play, Sheng ci pai, about Hai Rui and had been impressed with Hai as a model of how officials should act for the welfare of society. The chairman, by then quite aware of the false reporting in the countryside, began to talk about encouraging people to write about this honest forthright Ming official to set an example for cadre behavior in the present of the Great Leap. He asked his assistant, Hu Qiaomu, to carry a message to Wu Han, whom he respected as a writer and Ming historian, to ask him to write about Hai Rui, according to Wu’s secretary, Guo Xinghua.32 Long before, in his early work in 1934, Wu had held up Hai as an incorruptible official standing far above the other Ming officials who abused their power and ignored the people’s sufferings. A figure often used by writers as a historical model, an example of fearless, moral behavior in an official, Hai was a man who had cared enough for the people that he sacrificed his own personal safety and fortune to protect their well-being.33

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After the message reached him from Mao, Wu began to think about Hai Rui again and on 16 June 1959 his first in a number of articles, “Hai Rui Rebukes the Emperor” (Hai Rui ma huangdi) introducing Hai’s honest and courageous spirit, was published in the People’s Daily under the penname Liu Mianzhi. Once Mao’s word had been carried to him, although Wu had little choice but to write about Hai, he launched into the assignment willingly with his characteristic enthusiasm. It is intriguing that he chose to publish his first piece on Hai Rui under a penname with special significance. “Liu Mianzhi” was a penname he had used before in the late 1940s and which he would use repeatedly in the near future. In the real world of the past, Liu had been a Song dynasty literatus and a supporter of the Zhejiang culture hero, Yue Fei, whom Wu had admired intensely ever since he had gone to school in Hangzhou where the temple to Yue Fei stands. Liu Mianzhi’s role in the struggle of his home province, Zhejiang, against the northern invaders made him an especially important hero in Wu’s eyes. Also, it was from Liu Mianzhi that the neoConfucian philosopher, Zhu Xi, had learned the Dao, the Way.34 Thus Liu was a Keeper of the Dao (dao tong), one who had the moral responsibility of overseeing the government (zheng tong). This name, Liu Mianzhi, which Wu had chosen for his own penname signified both the moral integrity of the scholar and the power of the Dao, the moral way, to guide the government. Should the significance of Liu’s identity have been lost on any less erudite readers, the given name “Mianzhi” standing alone means simply “lets put more effort into achieving the task at hand,” obviously sending a message that the officials must be honest in their accounting and not overreport the harvests and conceal the extent of the grain shortages. It was subtle but hard to miss—the identity of the author as “Liu Mianzhi” chosen by Wu for the essays, conveyed to readers the idea of the moral scholar/official overseeing irresponsible officials, and reinforced the image of the upright official Hai Rui in these essays he was writing.

CREATION OF THE FATEFUL PLAY Over the next months, Wu Han warmed to the task Mao had asked of him—to educate the people about Hai Rui and his role in the Ming period to provide a model to guide the current local and regional officials toward more responsible action. He wrote several more essays on Hai Rui and then capped his effort to help by writing a play, an opera, about the exemplary Ming official.35 Wu began writing, urged on by the great opera singer, Ma Lianliang, who knew Wu was writing about Hai with Chairman Mao’s encouragement and thought an opera about Hai would be specially suitable. In fact, Ma was eager to sing the role. Wu began to work on the script in October 1959, the same month he lectured at Nankai University on great heroes

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and the contexts of their lives, and only a few months after Hu Qiaomu had come to him with Mao’s request that he write about Hai Rui and Hai’s honesty. Hu had told him how enthused Mao had been when he watched the opera Sheng ci pai in Shanghai. Wu had already long been interested in the reform of Chinese drama and opera, a subject debated in intellectual circles for some years, even before 1949. As we’ve seen Wu was deeply interested in popularization. As a historian who had grown up in a rural area, he naturally thought of the traditional operas with their historical themes that were often performed on outdoor village stages, and assumed a play about Hai Rui would be played on village stages in the countryside. What better way to reach the village public? And of course, as the Beijing municipal government official who oversaw cultural and educational affairs, Vice Mayor Wu Han was in regular contact with the opera troupes in the city. Ma Lianliang, at that time the director of the Beijing Opera Troupe, actively encouraged Wu to write a play about Hai Rui for the Beijing troupe to perform. Other plays about Hai were being performed on opera circuits and Ma wanted to produce one himself, according to Wang Yan, later director of the opera troupe. There was, however, one real difficulty that emerged. Unfortunately, beyond his knowledge of the Ming and his enthusiasm for historical topics as dramatic themes for plays, Wu had absolutely no familiarity with the structure of opera or with how they were written. As Ma Lianliang and the troupe soon became painfully aware, he knew absolutely nothing about the classical forms of Chinese operas.36 Despite Wu’s active conviction and his enthusiasm for the project, the director, Wang Yan, later recalled that his first draft was flat and very difficult to perform. Ma Lianliang and his actors were dismayed, fearing that they wouldn’t be able to carry the production off well. Wu’s lack of experience at writing lines appropriate for the spoken and sung sounds and phrasing of the opera voices proved to be a real handicap. Ordinarily the plays were written by professional writers experienced in the distinctive characteristics of the opera genre. According to Ma Chongren, Ma Lianliang’s son, this was the first time a historian, unschooled in opera, had worked with their troupe to create a Beijing opera (jingju). In his words, Wu was, in fact, an amateur trying to work among professionals when it came to writing operas. After seven versions and long months of painful work with the script and the troupe leaders, finally Wu was able to satisfy Ma Lianliang and the director, Wang Yan, and the rest of the troupe that the opera could be staged and sung. The script was first published in November 1960 in Beijing wenyi under the name Hai Rui ba guan (Hai Rui Dismissed) about a year after he had begun to write it. After yet another revision, it was finally published as a playbook in August 1961. Despite the enthusiastic reception of the first performances of Hai Rui Dismissed by the Beijing Opera Troupe with Ma Lianliang in the starring role in 1961, the opera was not considered a great tour de force among opera enthusiasts. Performances continued sporadically until the summer of 1962

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when suddenly they were summarily called off by a telephone call from someone in Jiang Qing’s coterie. The troupe was only told that she thought the play had problems; nothing more was said. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and an actress herself, had been leading opera reform for some time. Although later during the Cultural Revolution the claim would be made that the play was closely linked to Peng Dehuai’s dismissal as an allegory intended by Wu to criticize Mao’s dismissal of Peng, in fact in real time Wu did not intend Hai to represent Peng. Peng Dehuai was not linked to the play until the end of 1965 when Mao Zedong himself retrospectively made the accusation three years after Jiang Qing had stopped the performances, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing’s interest in the reform of traditional opera had led to her effort in the early 1960s to promote revolutionary drama. In her campaign she had gathered a group of radical literary critics around her.37 The leaders in Ma Lianliang’s opera troupe guessed among themselves at the time the play was stopped that the reason for stopping the performances was related to rising demands coming from peasants in the countryside that the land converted to communes during the Great Leap be returned. A major issue in the historic Hai Rui’s life had been his advocacy that the tyrannous official Xu Jie return the land that had been taken from them to the peasants. Wu Han, the historian aiming to be true to the facts of the past, not acknowledging or considering that Mao expected him to skew history and tailor Hai Rui’s life story, had not shied from this issue of the people’s welfare in writing the play. This lack in Wu Han’s straightforward nature of any tendency to avoid negative criticism, a kind of naiveté, had led him to the innocent choice of the play’s title. Before the play was published in 1960, at the suggestion of his good friend the botanist Cai Xitao, Wu impulsively, and fatefully as it turned out, had changed the title from simply “Hai Rui” to “Hai Rui ba guan”— “Hai Rui Dismissed”—without giving the slightest thought to possible political implications. After Cai had first read the play bearing Wu’s own original title “Hai Rui,” he told his friend it needed a more catchy title—how about “Hai Rui ba guan?” Without further ado Wu renamed the opera.38 A title that had seemed innocent and reasonable to the two men in 1960, overtime took on another layer of meaning as the extent of the economic and human disaster resulting from the Great Leap became known. Years later in 1965 it would be interpreted by a paranoid Mao as inflammatory, as intended to signal criticism of the emperor who had dismissed Hai Rui and by analogy of the chairman himself having dismissed Peng Dehuai. When Wu came to writing his play about Hai, it had been an exhilarating, demanding experience for him and, at the same time, a painful, frustrating experience for Ma’s opera troupe. At the time when the opera was called off in 1962 little thought was given in the troupe to either the reason for calling it off or to the play itself because everyone in the troupe, and Wu as

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well, was busy with other projects, according to the play’s director and to Wu Xiaoling, Ma Lianliang’s close friend.39 Among the troupe’s activities at the time the play’s cancellation did not seem critically significant, especially since the troupe itself had struggled with the production and had never considered the play an artistic triumph. No one connected with the play or the troupe could have dreamt that in a few years this play would become a principle factor in the deaths under dire circumstances of both Ma Lianliang, the chief actor, and Wu Han, the playwright. In the meantime after Wu finished his play, as an amateur playwright who had tried his wings he became intensely interested in encouraging the writing of historical dramas by new authors among the people. All along he had thought of play writing as a way to promote popular knowledge of history, one of his own major goals and one he assumed to be in keeping with Mao Zedong’s ideas on promoting artistic expression among the “people.” In order to encourage new plays that would make historical events and values from the past live vividly for people, in 1961 he launched an intriguing new project to collect plot sketches for historical plays and arranged for the collection of sketches to be edited and published by the Beijing Historical Association.40

DEBATING THE MORALITY OF THE “GREAT PREDECESSORS” In the fall of 1961 Deng Tuo, Liao Mosha and Wu Han, colleagues and fellow cadre in the Beijing municipal party government and all well-known zawen essay writers, at Deng Tuo’s suggestion had joined together to write a newspaper column in Frontline (Qian xian), the widely read journal of the Beijing party committee edited by Deng. The column was called Notes from the Three Family Village (Sanjia cun zhaji). A scholar, prominent journalist and member of the Communist Party since 1930, Deng had been the founding editor of the nationally circulated People’s Daily until Mao removed him in 1957. After that he became a member of the Beijing municipal government led by Peng Zhen in 1958.41 Working side by side in the Beijing city government, Wu and Deng had become good friends who shared their interest in history and in writing. The three essayists joined in writing the column under the joint penname, Wu Nanxing, created from Deng’s and Liao’s pen names and Wu’s surname. Deng’s column, Evening Chats at Yanshan published in the Beijing Evening News, had been enjoyed for some time by enthusiastic readers starved for interesting reading about Chinese culture and history. According to Liao Mosha, each of the three men felt that there was too little being published for the popular readers’ interest. They were all convinced that the reading audience longed for more interesting, relevant writing about Chinese cultural subjects. Beyond that informal agreement, Liao told this biographer, they had no grand design or even any small plan, but simply took turns

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writing essays for the column according to the publishing schedule they had agreed on but with no assigned topics. Each writer chose his own topic and turned his article in to the editor of the column, Li Jun, who coordinated the publication in Frontline. Sometimes Li even had to run around at the last minute and find the current essayist to remind him to hand in his essay. The others often didn’t know what the current writer’s topic would be until the Frontline issue was published and they read the essay in the paper.42 Wu Han’s contributions to the Three Family Village often drew on historical examples, sometimes used analogically, intended to enlighten the readers and encourage constructive behavior among the cadres and the people in general. Inveterate historian and teacher that he was, Wu wrote to teach responsible behavior and values to the popular audience as well as to party cadres. One of his Village essays was on modesty, another promoted the controversial new government policy on cremation, another criticized endless time-wasting in meetings. There was one on spare time study for selfimprovement, another on the Confucian Three Character Classic primer and the values it taught. There were essays on opera reform, on writing village histories, on academic research and two on selectively inheriting morality which soon took on special significance. Some of Deng Tuo’s articles were more sharply pointed political commentary aiming to bring attention to current political matters that needed perfecting. Far from intending opposition to the regime or the ideology the three essayists were aiming at strengthening the polity.43 Political attention began to focus more frequently on Wu Han in 1962 and 1963 after he wrote these essays and a third on the critical inheritance of traditional morality to express his profound concern that the values and wisdom of the past not be lost to the future of China. These morality essays were soon challenged by left-wing people speaking day by day with stronger voices in the party. By late 1963 the three short essays had become the center of an extended critical public debate with a large number of leftist writers on one side and Wu Han on the other.44 Although a lively discussion of traditional morality and its role in socialist life had been going on for some time in academic circles, now because Wu spoke with official identity and political rank in the Beijing municipal government as well as with standing as a respected member of the intelligentsia, his essays in the already charged atmosphere of 1962–1963 put the subject in a different league. While the publication of the first two essays in the Beijing party theoretical journal, Frontline, gave a political legitimacy to his thrust, at the same time the context of the political culture Wu was writing in was changing around him. Mao’s stress on class struggle and mass mobilization at the 10th Plenum of the party in the autumn of 1962 and his announcement in May 1963 of the Socialist Education Movement moved the political climate in a direction quite opposite to one in which values from the past could easily be positively discussed. In the changed atmosphere Wu’s essays aroused a

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strong radical-left response. By 1963 a rush of essays was being published in the newspapers contending with Wu’s ideas on morality.45 This debate was to become particularly significant in Mao’s attack on Wu in late 1965 and on Wu’s subsequent fate, although at the time of initial publication in Frontline no one would have expected the extreme outcome. In his 1962–1963 essays in Three Family Village and in other publications, once again Wu was speaking out for the relevance of the past to the present. This time he wrote of the importance selected values from traditional Chinese culture had for the nature and functioning of the socialist present and future of society in China and for Communist rule and the Chinese state itself. The first two of his morality articles were published in Three Family Village in May and August 1962 in the Beijing party theoretical journal Qian xian (Frontline).46 The third was published August 1963 in the influential newspaper Guangming ribao. Wu Han’s intention in his essays was similar to the Ming Donglin Academy literati’s efforts hundreds of years before in their Ming dynastic era to perfect the rule of their present. Indeed, it could be said Wu was writing precisely because he knew the dao tong, the underlying moral values, because he was so loyal and so firm in his concern for the present and future consolidation of the governing power, the zheng tong. This duty to perfect the rule is, after all, the highest moral duty of the qingguan, the pure, upright official. Wu’s motivation to write these essays was deeply rooted in his regard for his country’s culture, the political culture of his twentieth-century era in this case. Concern for the country, interwoven with his historical view, induced him to utilize public space to take a stand contrary to the radical leftist insistence that the Communist present and Communist state needed nothing from the past and contrary to its conviction that the heritage from the past (except Marxism, of course) must be abandoned. In fact, Wu was commenting on China’s state nationalism from his own nationalist position of loyalty to the historic-cultural nation, actually a very reasonable form of nationalism, as has been observed by John Breuilly.47 Wu’s first two essays on morality, originally published under the joint pen name of Wu Nanxing, were quickly identified by readers as soon as late summer 1963 as written by Wu Han, according to Li Jun. Public debate made them the focus of a widespread controversy on socialist morality and its relation to traditional morality. Although the initiation of this controversy had no particular connection with the Three Family Village column, over time the continuing contention in the debate began to have a serious effect on the column. According to Li Jun, Frontline deputy editor, the column finally was stopped by Deng Tuo in July 1964, mainly because of the negative attention created by the ultra-leftist criticism swirling in the debate over Wu’s morality essays.48 Wu’s message in the essays had been that after critical evaluation, morality can and should be selectively passed down and inherited from the

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past by the present society. “Critical evaluation” meant that the best things from the past can be selectively inherited but not the exploitative basis and values of the landlord class. More than a year after the publication of the first two essays Wu responded, under his own name, to his critics with “A Third Essay on Morality” (San shuo daode) in the newspaper Guangming ribao, 19 August 1963. After finishing the third essay he told Su Shuangbi, his assistant in the Beijing Historical Association, that he would write no more on the subject. He had said what he wanted to say. The line of thought in the essay was quintessential Wu Han: “history cannot be severed, the study of history is for looking forward instead of looking backward.” What was good from the recent revolutionary past must be combined with moral qualities from the “great predecessors” of the more distant past to educate for today and the future. In Wu’s words in the “Third Essay on Morality”: To say that today’s patriotism has no relationship to the loyalty (of Yue Fei, Wen Tianxiang, and Shi Kefa) that is historically inherited and to say that these are two different things is also not necessarily correct. History cannot be severed, the study of history is for looking forward instead of looking backward. It is to educate people today. On the one hand, education in the revolutionary tradition should be emphasized, on the other hand it is also necessary that the essential part of some of the moral qualities of some of the great predecessors be critically absorbed, inherited and developed.49

Not surprisingly, this essay in August 1963 not only did not silence his ultra-left critics, it incensed them like a red flag waved before a bull. Although Wu wrote no more on the issue his opponents had only just begun. In December 1965, a four-hundred-page book, On the Discussion of the Morality Question (Guanyu daode wenti de taolun) collecting twenty-six of the essays in the morality debate published over the previous three years opposing Wu Han’s viewpoint particularly as expressed in his three morality essays that were included in the book, was released by the Sanlian Shudian Press in Beijing.50 The release of the volume was only a few days after the essay “Criticism of the New Historical Play, ‘Hai Rui Dismissed’” by Yao Wenyuan attacking Wu Han, that had already been published in the Shanghai wenhui bao on 11 November, was republished in the Beijing ribao on 29 November.51 At the same time, the Sanlian Shudian Press also published a shorter volume, Discussion of the Issue of Wu Han’s “Hai Rui Dismissed” (Guanyu Wu Han “Hai Rui ba guan” wenti de taolun) that collected all of Wu Han’s writings on Hai Rui and on historical drama, as well as fourteen essays criticizing his writings on the Ming official. That these 2 volumes, altogether 650 pages, were ready for distribution immediately following Yao’s attack, demonstrates very clearly that it was not Yao but powerful people above him who had carefully planned the erupting campaign to destroy Wu Han.52 During these years the growth of this substantial criticism of Wu’s morality essays was watched with great interest by people on the sidelines, not

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merely because of the immediate political noise it created but also because there were basic values concerned with the making of modern Chinese society at stake here—values in the deeply rooted indigenous Chinese culture, in the character of the nation and in the education of the young in the present and for the future. Many saw that far more than Communist ideology was at stake. A strong argument can be made that this debate generated from the ultra-left was part of the century-long conflict over the nature and identity of Chinese culture and state in the modern era. Earlier in 1957, in the academic space of philosophical and historical circles debate had raged over philosophical values and morality in China’s past.53 But now in these three essays Wu Han was speaking in a public political space to popular readers at the same time the party was coming to dominate the public sphere even more. In 1963, already constrained by the ultra-left tide running, there were many who agreed with Wu but dared not join him in public agreement. Being an official in the Beijing municipal government where the mayor, Peng Zhen, encouraged a relatively open environment appeared to afford Wu a special public political space to air his ideas on values and morality. Unfortunately for Wu Han, his position of loyalty to the country could not protect him from the exercise of autocratic state power by Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao’s increasing emphasis on the singular importance of the ideology of class struggle led him to see Wu as a direct threat to his new thrust. The central moral principles that Wu wanted retained centered on loyalty or filiality: to the family, to the society, and to the ruler. For Wu this meant complete loyalty to Mao Zedong, but Mao did not see it that way. Such loyalty, fundamentally incompatible with the revolutionary idea of class struggle as the driving force in society, Mao took as a challenge springing from the ancient hierarchical moral values of filiality interwoven in the fabric of Chinese life. Although Wu apparently did not comprehend this at the time, this debate on his three essays was a bellwether, a marker in the major leftward ideological sea change that was underway. Formerly left-leaning in the Democratic parties, Wu, although he hadn’t changed his own ideas, was now standing on the right faced by the ultra-left led by his revered leader, Mao Zedong.

ZHU YUANZHANG REVISITED By 1964 the economic situation was improving, conditions were easing and people were beginning to feel optimistic, to once again have a sense of wellbeing. The “three years of disaster” following the Great Leap when there had been widespread suffering and starvation from bad planning and poor harvests seemed to be a thing of the past. Mao Zedong’s emphasis had been on initiating the Socialist Education Movement54 as the economic situation began to improve with the aim of reorienting the people to the aims of Communism

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through socialist education emphasizing the ideology of class struggle. But this was not a time of complete unanimity at the top, for at the same time other leaders in the party such as Liu Shaoqi were occupied with practical economic and work-related issues dealing with the operation of the country and management of the economy. Peng Zhen, likewise, tended to take a moderate role to smooth over contentious tendencies in the situation. In February 1964 Wu Han, sharing in this sense of optimism and lessened pressure, turned to the revision of his Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang once again. Wanting to continue his efforts to enrich the store of historical works that were available for readers, he was able to find the time to rework the biography. As before Wu was convinced that the Ming era was a key to understanding China’s twentieth-century situation. With the biography long out of print and the revision he had circulated privately in the mid-1950s never published, he wanted very much to publish it again. Knowing from his long conversation with Mao in 1949 on the eve of the Communist victory over the Guomindang, that Mao Zedong was intensely interested in the Ming founder, Wu wanted the revision to be both compatible with current thinking and true to historical fact. When it was finally published in February 1965 this fourth edition was immediately well received by historians. Even now, despite the appearance of several other biographies of the Ming founding emperor, it is still generally considered a fine biography of the Ming founding emperor by Chinese scholars.55 Unfortunately however, in 1965 a dispassionate evaluation of the biography as a book of history was not possible at the top official level. An alarming sign that the biography was receiving a negative rating from Zhongnanhai, Mao’s residence, was Jiang Qing’s fury when she saw it as an effort to criticize Mao and the Communist Party’s rule. Over the years it appears Wu had not paid attention, perhaps had not wanted to consider, warning signs that suggested how sensitive a topic Zhu Yuanzhang was to Mao Zedong and to some of the ultra-leftist people at the party center. Jiang Qing’s attitude toward the book was certainly not softened by an intense personal dislike that had developed between her and Wu Han. It was reported by his wife in conversation with his sister, Wu Puyue in this period, that Wu had shown his annoyance and lack of respect to Jiang Qing at a dinner in Zhongnanhai in 1964 or 1965. He and Mao were talking about Zhu Yuanzhang and Jiang Qing had interrupted their conversation. Wu’s blunt response had been to tell her that she didn’t understand history and didn’t know what she was talking about.56 There was much more afoot, moreover, than just Mao’s wife’s displeasure and it dated back some time. During the Hundred Flowers period in 1956 an incident involving a young Beijing University teacher and his students at the Ming tombs far out in the country indicates that Wu’s Zhu Yuanzhang in the third privately circulated unpublished version of 1955 had already been the subject of talk at the highest level of the center. The instructor,

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Xu Daling, out in the countryside with some of his students to explore the Ming tombs, unexpectedly ran into one of the most important people in the country, Liu Shaoqi, Wang Guangmei (his wife), and their children, also out on an expedition in the grassy hills to explore the tombs.57 At that time the tombs were the focus of a heated controversy over whether one should be opened for viewing and Wu Han was at the center of the debate. Liu, president of the People’s Republic and one of the handful of top CCP leaders at the very center, invited the students and their teacher to sit down and talk. Awestricken, the students and young teacher quickly arranged themselves in a circle sitting on the grass around Liu and his family. There was an excited buzz as they whispered to each other how lucky they were to have the chance to talk face to face with the president of the country. As they talked about the Ming emperor’s tombs scattered all around them Liu brought up Wu Han because Wu, as a Ming historian and also vice mayor of Beijing supervising cultural institutions in the Beijing area, was one of the prime advocates of opening the Ming tombs for archeological study. Liu asked the youthful Xu Daling if he were Wu’s student; Xu replied that he was a student of Wu’s. Liu went on to talk about Wu’s biography of the Ming founder, out of print at the time, voicing his opinion that Wu had overemphasized how Zhu Yuanzhang had commanded so many people be killed. He thought that this indicated Wu’s negative evaluation of the emperor. Then he asked Xu Daling what his own opinion of the Ming founder’s ordering of the executions was. Xu replied, straightforwardly, that he thought the emperor’s killing of the Ming officials was bad. Liu Shaoqi commented that in the biography, which he obviously had recently read, he thought the killing was emphasized too much and added that it depends on who the people are who are killed. He went on to tell the students that they need not agree with Wu Han and said “You can think for yourselves.” Although this took place in June 1956 during the Hundred Flowers period when there was a relaxed atmosphere that encouraged discussion, nonetheless, the incident reveals the sensitive nature of a totalitarian ruler ordering subjects killed, however admired the ruler was for unifying the country. Obviously, Liu Shaoqi was among the select few who had read the 1955 manuscript of Wu’s third revision of Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan. Wu Han was aware of this incident through Xu Daling who took his special course in Ming history the next fall. Furthermore he also knew that Mao Zedong had not been satisfied with the 1955 draft revision of the biography that he had circulated privately, for Mao had pointed out, either to Wu directly or had sent the message to Wu, that “Zhu was the leader of a peasant rebellion. He should be (presented as) a positive figure. He should be written better, not described in such a negative way.”58 Yet, knowing Mao’s opinion had not deterred the historian.59 Wu Han had been delving into the Ming documents since the early 1930s and had written extensively in the 1930s on the decisive Hu Weiyong affair during Zhu’s reign. Zhu, the

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emperor, had ordered the execution of tens of thousands of people involved. It could not be hidden since it was there in the Ming texts. For Wu to have changed his analysis would have meant turning away from all of his research and his conclusions, repudiating the facts in the documents and his own scholarly career. This would have been behavior totally out of character for him and beyond his historical comprehension. It would have represented his capitulation to ideology. The Ming founder, known as Emperor Taizu or the Hongwu Emperor, born to the personal name Zhu Yuanzhang in everyday life before he defeated the Yuan dynasty and ascended the throne, had decisive influence on the rest of the Ming dynasty—as it happened the last Han Chinese dynasty, on the subsequent Qing era, and, in mid-twentieth century, on Mao Zedong’s ideas of governing. In Wu’s biography of the Ming founder he characterized Zhu as a revolutionary leader who unified the Chinese nation, an interpretation with which Mao identified closely. But Wu’s interpretation in all versions of the biography, beginning with the first in 1944, also gave the reader a concrete description of Zhu’s transformation from a revolutionary leader of peasant uprisings to an autocratic emperor.60 In order to overcome the opposing landlord military forces and to control the strength of the military officers and Confucian scholars, Zhu had gradually changed from a leader of the peasant war and allied with the landlord class to consolidate his rule and establish the dynasty. In the 1965 and final published version of the biography, in analyzing Zhu’s merits and demerits Wu Han concluded that among the emperors Zhu Yuanzhang was a positive figure. Occupied as he was with historical analysis of the Ming dynasty founding emperor, using the facts he found in the documents, Wu chose to ignore, or misjudged, the power of the current ultra-left swing toward class conflict and struggle in the rapidly changing political culture when he wrote in a restrained scholarly tone about the “development of social production and social progress.” The evaluation of Zhu Yuanzhang in Wu’s biography was clear for all to read. Wu wrote: Comparing his achievements and shortcomings, his achievements outweigh his shortcomings. He was a moving force in the development of social production and social progress, a historical figure deserving of positive recognition. Of the feudal emperors through the ages, he was certainly a relatively outstanding figure.61

When the Cultural Revolution began there were highly serious charges made in the criticisms of Wu: he had intended the biography to be “an assault on proletarian dictatorship” by negatively evaluating the Ming founder, rather than giving him a wholehearted positive evaluation as the leader of the peasant rebellion that had restored the unity of the country.62 Actually the attack on Wu Han had been prefigured in Liu Shaoqi’s comments to the students at the Ming tombs years before. Wu was accused

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of the crime of treacherously attacking Mao Zedong thought intentionally when he criticized certain of Zhu Yuanzhang’s writings, namely the Huang Ming zuxun, the imperial instructions on the basic policies to be followed by the dynasty. By early 1966, only a year after the new edition of the Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang was published, its author was being publicly cast as the number one enemy of the Communist Party, the party-state, and especially of Mao Zedong and the ultra-left people around him.63 The publication of the fourth edition of the biography in 1965 insured that Wu, heretofore a trusted intellectual close to the center of power, was seen as a dire threat by Mao Zedong in the tense atmosphere of the ultra-left tide.

TARGET OF THE LEFT: “A PRESENT WITHOUT PRECEDENT” Wu Han’s public representation and articulation of values that still ran deep in Chinese hearts, values that appeared to challenge both proletarian equality and authoritarian Leninist Party discipline, resulted in the ultra-left identifying him as an opponent, a threat. The heritage of morality he wrote of in the morality essays meant filial loyalty to family and ruler, and personal, individual responsibility to self and society. In the historical cultural construct of China responsibility for intellectuals did not simply entail obedience, it meant obligation for moral action. The mandate for moral perfection of the self was the first step toward loyalty to the ruler. Reciprocally, the moral responsibility of the ruler to the people was related to the ruler’s own need to seek self-perfection. A ruler with this responsibility to his people must start from the assumption that he was imperfect but could perfect himself. This was the Dao that must be practiced by both people and ruler. In the first half of the 1960s Wu had rubbed powerful people the wrong way, particularly Mao Zedong with his forthright, independent attitude. Although this was not his intention he had virtually become a living embodiment of the very real possibility that traditional morality and the motivation of loyalty to the nation could become a launching pad in the public sphere for criticism of the regime’s leadership of the one-party nation-state. This happened despite Wu’s not having challenged that leadership, indeed actually intending to support and help guide it toward perfection. Because Wu was expressing ideas that carried enduring relevance for China’s identity and cultural continuity—ideas on values which had been at the center of the ongoing twentieth-century discourse on China’s future and because he was a scholar whom Mao had fully trusted and who had been taken into their midst, Wu’s views on morality could not be so easily brushed aside by the central leaders as those of the isolatable so-called Rightists in 1957. Since he had repeatedly proven his own loyalty to the Maoist Communist cause he had strong supporters within inner party circles: Zhou Enlai, Chen Yu, Dong Biwu, Peng Zhen, among others. Wu Han’s challenge

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was not to party hegemony, but to the relationship of exogenous (foreign), Marxist ideology to fundamental, indigenous Chinese values. His “morality” views were not put forth as challenges to party hegemony as had been the criticisms raised by would-be-critics in the aborted Party Rectification in spring 1957. He did not wish to be outside of the party or speak from outside the party. Far from it—from Wu’s point of view he was speaking from within the fold, but a fold that he must help to perfect, that he had the duty to help perfect. Nevertheless, he was speaking for the inclusion of values that in the Maoists’ view, would alter the basic tenets of Maoism. The position he was pushing on the critical inheritance of moral values expressed cultural values that directly challenged ultra-leftist Maoist Communist ideology. The issue Wu Han was posing confronted Chinese Communist ideology with Chinese national culture: true loyalty to the national culture meant that other versions of nationalism could be questioned. For Mao Wu’s ideas about the critical inheritance of morality were a fundamental threat that went to the core of the basic, unresolved contradiction within Mao’s own goals for the party and for China—the compatibility of Chinese national identity and unity with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist class struggle–based ideology. Immersed in the affairs of the moment and lulled by his seemingly secure position in the municipal regime, Wu Han made the mistake of assuming that devoted loyalty to the party, a powerful guanxi wang (relationship network) and secret membership in the Communist Party would immunize him from serious political attack. In his fidelity to historical truth (as he understood it) he made the mistake of forgetting Mao’s warning to him that it was necessary to create a positive narrative of the Ming founding emperor. This despite his knowing full well the likelihood and difficulties of being the target of such attacks since he had watched and avidly participated in the attacks on Luo Longji and Zhang Bojun himself and even privately criticized and silently stood on the sidelines as his own brother and sister-in-law suffered the brunt of such attacks during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. And of course he well knew from his studies of the early Ming period and Zhu Yuanzhang that the founding emperor had tens of thousands of officials and their families and associates executed merely on suspicion of treason against him. Because of his loyalty to Mao and the Communist Party Wu had overlooked, or preferred not to see, that many of the political campaigns against individuals in the People’s Republic had been arbitrary applications of totalitarian authority. His own conviction that members of his family deserved their Rightist hats, despite evidence to the contrary, ironically had already demonstrated his unwillingness to question the validity of the policy makers’ verdicts.64 Wu’s boldness in historical viewpoint and in the courage of his own convictions coupled with his unbounded capacity for loyalty to the principles he chose to uphold and his own naive trust, ironically, left him totally exposed to the criticisms of Mao and the leftists.

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END OF IRONY: THE FOCAL POINT OF POLITICAL ATTACK The details of the attacks on Wu Han filled hundreds of pages of the newspapers and magazines and political posters in 1966 and the years following. The attacks began as he stood alone in November and December 1965 after the article criticizing his Hai Rui opera by the hitherto little known radical literary critic, Yao Wenyuan, had been published 11 November in Shanghai.65 Its reprinting less than three weeks later in the Beijing papers, immediately precipitated a major discussion on Wu’s intentions in the play. The publication of this essay by Yao Wenyuan was a strategic move that used the press to recast Wu Han as Mao’s enemy in public opinion across China. In the past many commentators have assumed the accusations made by Yao Wenyuan against Wu in the first public attacks on him in November 1965 originated with Jiang Qing and the group around her including Zhang Chunqiao since Yao was a part of this group. But with the emergence of a firsthand account found in archives in China, a chronology of events written on the spot by Kang Sheng from September 1965 to May 1966, it has become clear on the contrary, that from the late summer of 1965, it was Mao Zedong who was personally engineering the attack on Wu Han. This daily chronicle by Kang Sheng, recording the events of the struggle at the top in the Communist Party Central Committee involving Mao and his opponents in 1965 and 1966 starkly reveals Mao’s opinion of Wu Han, an opinion much changed from the early years of the country’s founding. Kang was one of Mao Zedong’s closest trustees faithfully at his side in this period. In September 1965 he wrote that he had heard Mao asking Peng Zhen, “Can Wu Han be criticized?” He wrote that “Chairman Mao has come to think that Wu Han’s problem is the problem of a person representing the capitalist class furiously launching an attack on the Party and Socialism.” These notes of Kang’s reveal that in the late summer 1965 Mao already considered Wu a problem. It was only a question of what should be done about him.66 Mao had concluded that Wu Han must be criticized and isolated. He must be re-created, identified as an enemy who opposed the party and Socialism, made powerless to write about ideas that might disrupt or conflict with the ideological sea change Mao was engineering.67 Among the signs of the gathering storm Deng Tuo, fellow official in the Beijing government and well-known party intellectual who had sparked the birth of the Three Family Village column in Frontline, the column Wu and Liao Mosha had joined him in writing, had been working with Peng Zhen who was on a Five Man Party Cultural Revolution Committee since the middle of the summer of 1965. They were addressing issues the radical group around Jiang Qing was raising. In November after the Yao Wenyuan article criticizing Wu’s Hai Rui play was published in Shanghai Zhou Enlai called a meeting, attended by Deng Tuo, aimed at having Yao’s article published in the

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Beijing Daily and other papers. The article was accompanied by an editorial by Peng Zhen that attempted to limit criticism to academic rather than political issues. As criticism mounted in December Deng was asked to organize several public meetings to discuss Wu Han’s play—with the objective of defending Wu from the critics who wanted to silence him.68 The 1966 Cultural Revolution attacks on Wu Han stressed accusations supposedly made by Yao Wenyuan in his November 1965 essay, indicting Wu for criticizing Mao and the Communist Party in the play he had written about the Ming official Hai Rui. This view accepted as fact the indictment that Wu had intended in the play to criticize Mao allegorically for dismissing Peng Dehuai. But the facts do not bear this out. To begin, the accusation regarding Wu’s intention to link Peng and the play had not been a part of Yao’s criticism in his article, but was introduced afterward in December by Mao Zedong himself, after the Yao article had already circulated widely. It was Mao who first accused Wu Han of intending to criticize him by using Hai Rui to stand for Peng Dehuai, the forthright minister of defense whom Mao had fired in 1959 after Peng revealed the extent of the Great Leap disaster to the Lushan Conference. Indeed, the reason for Wu’s becoming the first target of the Cultural Revolution must be looked for with Mao Zedong. On 21 December 1965, in Hangzhou Mao raised the point when he said to Chen Boda, referring to Wu’s play, Hai Rui ba guan: “The crucial point is ‘dismissal’ (ba guan). The Jiajing Emperor dismissed Hai Rui. In 1959 I dismissed Peng Dehuai; Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui as well.”69 Mao’s lieutenants in the Cultural Revolution quickly picked up the leader’s comment and perpetuated it as fact, as evidence of Wu’s intention in writing the play. From this genesis, years after he wrote the play, the factoid was created that Wu Han had intended the play to be an allegory accusing Mao.

FAMILY AND BEYOND: CULTURAL REVOLUTION TARGETS At that time in late 1965 Wu Han’s family began to feel the stress as the Yao Wenyuan article was reprinted and widely talked about in Beijing.70 One cold day in early December, a young woman hurried along a dusty Changan Street on the west side of the Imperial Palace, past the low gray brick walls broken only by the closed doors of the red painted gates. As Song Dian walked she had shivered, thinking with foreboding of her uncle Wu Han and her aunt Yuan Zhen and wondering what she would find in the courtyard house behind the gate. She had stood a long time on the crowded, rattling bus all the way from Qinghua University outside the city, where she was in her last year of study for her degree in chemistry. Exams were in a few weeks but now she stole a few hours from her studies to make the journey into the city. She had come often to her uncle’s home on weekends during her years at school so it seemed almost like her usual

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trip. Although her parents were in Beijing once again, she still came to her uncle’s whenever she could. It seemed like home because it had actually been her home for many years.71 That day she was on a special mission. From the Beijing newspapers and talk at the university she realized that her uncle was having very serious problems. Political pressure like this was an unfamiliar situation for him, although in the past years there had been times when her own father, Song Ruji, and her younger uncle, Wu Chunxi, were under great pressure from criticism. This uncle who she was hurrying to see was someone very special in her life. As she walked under the skeleton branches of the leafless plane trees arching over Beichang Road, she may have thought of happy times in the past, fishing with him and his bringing fruit to her while she studied at the big desk in his book-lined study. In the last few days she had been shocked when she read the paper with the article by Yao Wenyuan criticizing “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,” the play Wu Han had written. Although at first Yao’s essay seemed to be opening an academic debate, she sensed this was no ordinary debate. Later, she would recall that at that point she had still thought it was possible to have free academic discussion within Marxism. Her uncle had been in academic debates before but this had quite a different ring to it. She worried that it might become a serious political crisis for him. That an official of her uncle’s high rank and connections would suddenly become the subject of such a critical article, written by a young author of relatively lower rank, and republished within days from the Shanghai Wenhui bao in the three major Beijing papers, the People’s Daily, the Beijing Daily, and the Liberation Army Daily, signaled to readers that there was something very serious going on under the surface.72 With deep anxiety she had read Yao’s concluding words criticizing the play about the Ming dynasty high official Hai Rui which Wu Han had written in 1961: “‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ is not a fragrant flower, but a poisonous weed.”73 The whole thing made her very uneasy. She felt the urgent need to go into the city to talk with them about it. At the gate she knocked and was let in by the gateman after he saw that it was the vice mayor’s niece. She quickly crossed the four-sided courtyard and found Wu Han sitting in his study. Her aunt, Yuan Zhen, joined them as she asked him about the article in the newspapers. They told her Yao Wenyuan was “young and inexperienced. This was an academic discussion. Perhaps Wu had some Confucian influence remaining.”74 They had Chairman Mao’s article, “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” in his Selected Works lying on the desk.75 Wu took the book in his hands and showed it to her while her aunt said, “He still has feudal ideas which must be washed out.” Yuan Zhen spoke a great deal, but Wu Han was very quiet. Then he softly tried to reassure his niece, telling her not to be frightened. He recalled Chairman Mao personally sending him the fourth volume of his Selected Works with his inscription to Wu on the title page in August 1961.

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They turned the pages of the book to find Mao’s inscription to Wu Han. There was also a letter in grass characters Mao had written to him in 1948, on 24 November, before the Communist army had occupied Beijing that Wu had long treasured.76 Expressing her trust of Mao, Yuan Zhen said, “your uncle cannot be an enemy since Mao would not send books and letters if he considered him an enemy.” Pausing a moment she continued with an old expression, “The result is the opposite of what was intended . . . against your will,”77 Wu’s ideas were being taken differently than he had intended. Yuan Zhen told her that his traditional ideas must be corrected by Marxism. After they talked for some time, she stayed for a meal of good home cooked food, then bundled up and made the long journey back to her room at the university. In late December, Wu Han’s niece went again to see how they were getting along. In the last few days her life on the Qinghua campus had become very difficult. Now she herself was being criticized. Friends suddenly were reluctant to talk to her. Tense and anxious, she was puzzled by the situation in which she found herself. This time she had slipped away from the campus without telling anyone because she knew she would be in danger if it became known that she had gone to see him. By then it was bitterly cold. They had been forced to move to a small room in their house. Most of the servants were gone now. His usual happy, warm greeting for her was gone and his face drawn and sad. He was very quiet and subdued. Years later she recalled, “I cried a lot as I talked to him. People had begun to say that he was an enemy, that he had a special purpose to attack Chairman Mao. I didn’t want to believe this but I was under heavy pressure myself. I asked them what the difference was between ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional.’ The newspapers were filled with arguments. At school people kept asking me questions about Wu Han’s intentions.78 In my heart I thought he had not intended to go against the party. Now he only sat and was quiet. I had strange feelings. I felt a disaster was coming. Yuan Zhen did not speak straightforwardly.”79 He was writing his self-criticism and showed her a draft, then asked for her suggestions. The key idea was the reason for his making this mistake. He said that although he followed the Communist Party, still his ideas had not changed. She suggested that he add words like “because I grew up in old China my ideas are not suitable for New China. I do not know if it was intentional or unintentional.” By this time there were two sides in the debates, the academic side and the political viewpoint that he was an enemy of the party system. Her view had begun to waver; now she felt that perhaps this was true, but she was under intense pressure.80 He looked at her silently. He didn’t want to influence her but from the way he looked at her she could tell that he thought the future was not good. After that she made only one more visit to them. This third visit in January was very short. They were still living in their house, but restricted

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separately in two small rooms. They carried their own water and wore very poor, torn old clothes. Their things had been taken away from them. Hostile young students controlled the house.81 The servants were gone except for the old nurse. Their two adopted children were with them, the little boy slept with Wu and the girl with Yuan Zhen in her small room.82 She saw they had food to eat, but he was very depressed. When she asked him questions, he didn’t answer but talked only to the children. She asked about their health. The weather was cold, but they had only a very little stove to boil water and cook. That day was the last time she ever saw either of them. She was under severe criticism herself. It was no longer possible for her to contact them because they had become “enemies of the people.” Within a short time, she lost her own freedom and was confined under close supervision. Qinghua became virtually her prison. During 1966 all students had to read the newspapers and participate in discussions of the articles. This really meant criticism—students had to imitate the criticism they read in the newspaper in the discussions. At the center of every campus discussion the pressure was on her as Wu Han’s niece. Students surrounded her constantly as they loudly criticized the people targeted in the discussion, chief among them her uncle. With no way for her to control her own actions she was forced to openly criticize him. No one dared to have any friendly contact with her. She was completely isolated. The student leaders demanded she expose Wu. They wanted her to say the newspapers were right, although everyone already knew what the papers said. They all knew she was his niece and had lived in his home. They wanted to know what he had said before this had been revealed, what had he done? She knew she was expected to tell something, more than what was already in the newspaper. She was constantly followed everywhere and unceasingly told, “Think, think.” “Write it down. Write something new! You must ‘draw the line’!” The way you did that was by saying something about him to show how he was bad. In that way you separated yourself from him. This went on all day, day after day without end. Different people would take turns following her and accompanying her everywhere. She was never left alone.83 In the months and years that followed the winter of 1966, Wu Han’s entire family, including his wife, Yuan Zhen, and their two children, Wu Xiaoyan amd her brother Wu Zhang, his brother and sisters and their spouses and children, Yuan Zhen’s family, distant relatives in his native village in Zhejiang, friends and acquaintances of a lifetime and many others in ever widening circles across China, were drawn into the Cultural Revolution meat grinder for the sole reason of association with him. The destructive process and its effect on his family and associates outlasted his life and took on a reality and driving force of its own.84

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HISTORIAN DESTROYED IN THE STORM OF THE TIMES The attacks continued in the winter months as Peng Zhen struggled first to save Wu and then to save himself and others in the Beijing municipal government. In December as the strength of criticism grew, Deng Tuo had organized a group of seven to work together to defend Wu. He had written an article containing his ideas “criticizing” Wu published under the penname of Xiang Yangsheng in the 12 December Beijing Daily. The thrust of these people in their articles attacking Wu was that his mistakes were academic, not political. This is likely what Yuan Zhen was referring to when she told Wu’s niece when she visited them that he had faults due to influence from the past. Su Shuangbi, Wu’s secretary in the historical association and a prominent intellectual and party journalist/editor later in the 1980s and 1990s recalled that Deng Tuo was “deeply disturbed that Wu’s play was being unfairly criticized.” Su, himself, published an article defending Wu’s writing on landlords in late December. But they couldn’t turn the tide of criticism, by February they themselves were being targeted.85 The onslaught broadened in the spring as Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha, along with Wu Han, were attacked and demonized as the “Black Gang” of the “Three Family Village.” Then it was not long before the proclamation declaring the Great Cultural Revolution came in May of 1966. Events rapidly surged beyond Wu and expanded to consume all of Chinese society in a phenomenon that had become far larger than any one person. What we are speaking of here is the man and those whose lives touched his and how those events were interwoven with the current of the times. In February Wu was sent by the Municipal Party Committee, by Peng Zhen, to the village of Chang Ping north of Beijing, to participate in the Four Cleanups Campaign. One day students and cadre, who had also been sent there to be reeducated and to work with the peasants in the fields, saw in their midst an older man dressed in worker’s clothes who was obviously neither a worker nor a student but a refined looking gentleman. The man, who went by the name Li Mingguang, mingled at the long tables with them at mealtime in a friendly manner, speaking quietly but not saying much. The students whispered among themselves that this was Wu Han, the vice mayor of Beijing. One of the people recognized him. Now a noted professor at Beijing University, he had actually been Wu’s student several years before. It was known Wu Han was being seriously criticized. Someone said he had been sent out with them to protect him.86 But it didn’t work. He had already written two self-criticisms.87 He had discussed the situation with his family. Wu’s anxiety was great because he well understood from his knowledge of the Ming dynasty and Chinese political custom that criticism and a negative verdict could mean destruction,

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not only for him, but for everyone in the family according to the ancient and, ironically, inherited and very feudal Chinese custom of mie zu (destruction of the clan) which held the whole family responsible for one person’s crime. Mie zu was one reason the number of deaths in the Ming was so great in the years of Zhu Yuanzhang’s campaign to destroy his enemies. On 16 May 1966 the Chinese Communist Central Committee proclaimed the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution. Wu Han was declared a counterrevolutionary, as were Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha, the other members of the Three Family Village who had written the by then infamous column in the Beijing Communist Party journal, Frontline. The attacks quickly escalated and unleashed every kind of abuse and indignity, both mental and physical. Children from the neighborhood school climbed the back wall of Wu’s home and surrounded him in his own study, taunting and spitting on him as though he were the lowest of the vermin of the earth. They scattered and destroyed his books and papers in front of him as they danced around him shrieking slogans.88 Wu became the object and victim of countless public struggle meetings, dragged through the streets with crowds throwing things and taunting him. The three writers in Three Family Village were named the “Black Gang” of traitors. Deng Tuo, a man who had given his life to Communism and to Mao

Figure 12.1. Cultural Revolution, 1966, former vice mayor of Beijing, “Counterrevolutionary Revisionist Element Wu Han”

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Zedong, was now totally destroyed by the accusations. The day after the proclamation of the Great Cultural Revolution he committed suicide.89 With Liao Mosha beside him, Wu Han was dragged daily in open trucks through the streets so the masses could see the dangerous and despised men. He was pulled into struggle meetings in outdoor amphitheaters, mobbed with thousands of Red Guards and workers who beat him, taunted him, spit on him, forcing him up onto the platform to stand bent over with his hands behind him in the “airplane” position in front of the howling mob hurling charges at him.90 Wu Han was held in detention in the Beijing party school along with all of the other people who were being attacked from the Beijing municipal government. Yuan Zhen was there also. Their fellow comrades from the shiwei (municipal committee) held together with them at the party school watched them silently and knew that the two were not allowed to be together. They could not speak to each other but followed each other with their eyes from across the open courtyards as they both labored at sweeping and cleaning the grounds. When they weren’t sweeping they were in long thought reform sessions to cleanse their minds. Still today in the grounds of the Beijing party school where Wu Han and Yuan Zhen swept and cleaned, criticized by Mao Zedong who was following his version of Marxism-Leninism from the West, stand the tombstones marking the graves of the Jesuits who came to China in the late Ming and Qing period and brought with them some of China’s first experiences of Western culture. Every day was difficult. While she was at the school in detention Yuan Zhen’s physical condition deteriorated because she did not have the medication her illness required and she did not have Wu to care for her and provide the things she needed as he always had. Xiang Zemin, who had come with Liu Ren in 1949 to Wu Han to ask him if he would serve as the vice mayor now was held in detention with them in the multistoried compound of buildings. Xiang saw from a distance that her skin turned dark, almost black. Years later Liao Mosha spoke of how he had seen, when he and Wu silently met at mealtime and sat together at the table, that Wu was often badly beaten. Sometimes blood ran from under his shirt.91 At first Wu and Yuan Zhen had been allowed to keep a room in their home on Beichang Street near the Imperial Palace and return occasionally to be with their two children who lived there alone with only an old amah to care for them. But in the spring of 1967 the whole family was forcibly removed from their home, loaded in a truck, and moved to very small quarters in a building in a worker’s neighborhood in the southern part of the city along with Wan Li, another vice mayor. There they were even more vulnerable to persecution by the neighborhood Red Guard who climbed up onto their balcony to beat and taunt Wu when he was allowed to return to his home.92

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In the end: March 1968, Wu Han was put in prison. In April Yuan Zhen was sent to a labor correction team. On 18 March 1969, Yuan Zhen, released from the correction team was sent home. Ill, she died of abuse, alone and untended in a hospital. On 10 October 1969, at sixty years, Wu Han died in prison of abuse and medical neglect. Their daughter, Wu Xiaoyan, sometime after being raped and after being imprisoned in 1976, committed suicide 23 September, a few days before the Gang of Four was arrested.93 Their son, Wu Zhang, was left to survive and make his way alone.

LIAO MOSHA’S EPILOGUE FOR WU HAN Liao Mosha, the sole surviving member of the Three Family Village after the Ten Years of Cultural Revolution, on finding once again among his papers a 1964 photograph of his dead comrade looking out at him with a disarming smile, wrote a poem. The photo, taken only a year before the fateful attack on Wu, reminded Liao of his friend’s bravery and also of Wu’s admiration for the pure and upright official, Bao Gong, known in Chinese as a qingguan. Bao was the famed Northern Song dynasty governor of Kaifeng who had safeguarded his people against evil officials. The poet Liao captures the poignancy of Wu Han’s death and leaves us with the thought of Wu as the pure and upright qingguan: Ghosts caused disasters and the disastrous results had already been seen, With the naiveté of a child smiling sweetly, What a pity you had a dream of Kaifeng Your reputation left behind will always remain the same.94

Figure 12.2. Memorial service commemorating Wu Han’s rehabilitation and honoring Wu Han and Yuan Zhen, 1979

Figure 12.3. 1979

Up close photographs of Wu Han and Yuan Zhen at the memorial service,

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Figure 12.4. Li Xiannian shaking hands with Wu Zhang, Wu Han’s son, in condolence and commemoration of his father’s rehabilitation, 1979

NOTES 1. Leung and Kau, eds., The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, 2, 308–51. 2. An editorial June 8 in the People’s Daily, “What Is This For?” said to be by Mao Zedong, refers to “Rightists—challenging the leadership of the Communist Party and the working class—blatantly clamoring for the Communist Party to ‘stepdown.’” This marked the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Quoted in Leung and Kau (1992), 566. MacFarquhar (1974–1997), vol. 1 for background. 3. For Peng Zhen’s role leading the Anti-Rightist Campaign, MacFarquhar (1974–1977), vol. 2, The Great Leap Forward, 1, 4. Wu’s first public comments manifesting his criticism of Luo were at a meeting at People’s University (Renmin daxue), 9 June 1957, reported the following day in RMRB, and in a special interview of him by RMRB (Renmin ribao, People’s Daily), 11 June. He intensified his attack on Luo’s ideas of an independent role beyond the Party for critics in RMRB, 19 June. 5. Wu Han, “Wo fenhen, wo kongsu!” [I detest, I accuse!], 4. 6. Wu Han, “Wo fenhen, wo kongsu!” [I detest, I accuse!], 4; Interview 54 with Xiao Qian furnished a vivid description of what it was like to wear a Rightist hat and be isolated from work and family relationships. 7. Interview 58 with Wu Chunxi’s wife, Ye Meiying. Teiwes (1979); Yue and Wakeman (1985). 8. Source note for Mao’s “Organize Our Forces to Counter the Reckless Attacks for the Rightists,” Leung and Kau (1992), 561. 9. Collected in Leung and Kau (1992), 546–55, quote from 551. 10. Leung and Kau (1992), 562.

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11. Leung and Kau (1992), 566. 12. Wu’s published works pertaining to the first months of the Anti-Rightist Campaign were: “Women jianjue zou shehui zhuyi de daolu” [We resolutely follow the road of socialism], 6; “Wo fenhen, wo kongsu!” [I detest, I accuse!], 4; “Qianze yi Zhang-Luo weishou de yipi Minmeng youpai fenzi de zui’e huodong” [Accusing the evil activities of a group of Democratic League Rightists headed by Zhang and Luo], 3; “Jujue Zhang-Luo lianmeng de lingdao jianchi zou shehui zhuyi daolu Minmeng Beijing shi zuzhi jianjue jieshou dang de lingdao” [Rejecting the leadership of the Zhang-Luo alliance, adhering to the Socialist road, the Beijing municipal organization of the Democratic League is determined to accept the leadership of the Communist Party], 2. These were published in the Renmin ribao, Guangming ribao, Beijing ribaa, that is in the widely circulated Beijing and national newspapers. In the 1998 revision of their biography of Wu Han, Su Shuangbi, and Wang Hongzhi (280–90) deal with the problem of explaining Wu’s stand in the Anti-Rightist Campaign by pointing out the political context of the reversal of policy by Mao Zedong and Wu’s vulnerable position as a league leader. 13. Seymour (1987). 14. Dali Yang (1996), 34–37. 15. Dali Yang (1996), 36. 16. MacFarquhar (1974–1997), 54–55. 17. Dali Yang (1996), 34. 18. MacFarquhar (1974–1997), 325–29. Smaller collectives rather than the huge communes became the means of organizing the countryside. 19. Interview 10. 20. Goldman (1981), 50. 21. Wu Han, “Hou jin bo gu, gu wei jin yong,” DXJ, 61–66. This was published in an essay in late 1959 and again in the collection of essays, Deng xia ji [Under the lamp] in June 1960. 22. Wu Han, “Hou jin bo gu, gu wei jin yong,” DXJ, 64. 23. Wu Han, “Hou jin bo gu, gu wei jin yong,” DXJ, 65. 24. Wu Han, “Hou jin bo gu, gu wei jin yong,” DXJ, 65. 25. Wu Han, “Hou jin bo gu, gu wei jin yong,” DXJ, 66. 26. Wu Han, “Guanyu pingjia lishi renwu de yixie chubu yijian.” 27. See chapters 6 and 7 in this volume for Zhang Yinlin and Wu’s friendship at Qinghua and their plans for a general history of China. 28. Zhang Xikong Interview 149. 29. Wu Xiaoling Interview 129; Hou Renzhi Interview 104. 30. For Liang and Hu and their influence on Wu Han see chapter 4 in this volume. For Wu’s work with Zhang Yinlin see chapters 6 and 7 in this volume. 31. Interview 60. 32. Guo Xinghua in Interview 10. Guo Xinghua (1984), 112–14. 33. Wu Han, “Wan Ming liu kou.” 34. For Liu Mianzhi see Song shi, juan 459, 13462–63. 35. The essays, published in the Beijing press with national circulation, were “Hai Rui Curses the Emperor” [Hai Rui ma huangdi] published under the penname Liu Mianzhi, RMRB, 16 June 1959; Wu Han, “Hai Rui’s Story” [Hai Rui de gushi] Xin guancha, 1 July 1959 for popular readers and students; Zhao Yan [Wu Han] “Hai Rui, the Honest Official” [Qingguan Hai Rui], BJRB, 22 July 1959; Wu Han, “On Hai Rui”

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[Lun Hai Rui] RMRB, 17 September 1959; “Hai Rui,” Xin jianshe, 7 November 1960: and the play by Wu Han, “Hai Rui Dismissed” [Hai Rui ba guan], Beijing wenyi, 4 January 1961. 36. Interview 121 with Ma Chongren, Ma Lianliang’s son, who had been the stage director, and with Wang Yan, the director; Interview 129 with Wu Xiaoling who was a very close personal friend of Ma Lianliang. 37. Teiwes (1979), 504–5. 38. Interview 121. 39. Interviews 121 and 129. 40. Wu Han, ed., Lishi ju nimu. 41. For Deng Tuo see Cheek (1997), 182–87. 42. Liao Mosha in Interview 25. Sixty of the columns were published from October 1961 to July 1964. Interview 162, with Li Jun, the deputy editor of Frontline [Qian xian] who coordinated the column, was very helpful. 43. Cheek (1997), 319–29. 44. The essays were: Wu Nanxing, “Shuo daode” [On morality], Qian xian 10, 25 May 1962; Wu Nanxing, “Zai shuo daode” [Again on morality], Qian Xian 16, 25 August 1962; Wu Han, “San shuo daode—jing da Xu Qixian tongzhi” [A third essay on morality—A respectful answer to Comrade Xu Qixian], GMRB, 19 August 1963. For other essays in the debate see Guanyu daode wenti de taolun, Zhexue yanjiu bianjibu, eds. (1965). 45. Teiwes (1979), 512. 46. For Deng Tuo see Timothy Cheek (1997). According to Frontline deputy editor Li Jun, a result of Deng Tuo’s editorship of Frontline and also Wu’s reputation of trustworthiness was that articles did not undergo rigorous censorship before publication. 47. Breuilly (1994). 48. Interview 162. For an excellent discussion of the column see Cheek (1997), 235–77. Also Fisher (1986), 166–71. Of the total sixty essays published in the column October 1961 to July 1964, twenty-one were written by Wu Han. 49. Wu Han, “San shuo daode.” 50. Zhexue yanjiu bianjibu (1965). 51. Yao Wenyuan. “Ping xinbian lishiju ‘Hai Rui ba guan’” [Criticism of the new historical play, “Hai Rui Dismissed”]. Shanghai wenhui bao, 11 November 1965. Published in Beijing in Beijing ribao, 29 November 1965; Jiefang jun bao, 29 November 1965; and Renmin ribao, 30 November 1965. 52. Zhexue yanjiu bianjibu, Guanyu daode wenti de taolun (1965); Sanlian shudian, Guanyu Wu Han ‘Hai rui ba guan’ wenti de taolun (1965). 53. Zhexue yanjiu bianjibu, Zhongguo zhexueshi wenti taolun zhuanji [A symposium on the problems of the history of Chinese philosophy] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957). Feng Youlan and Zhou Fucheng participated in this debate in 1957, as did Guan Feng. 54. Teiwes (1979), 493–600; Cheek (1997), 215–77. 55. Mazur “The Four Zhu Yuanzhangs” (1997). New material is found in Chen Wutong (1993). 56. The description of this incident was repeated by Yuan Zhen to Wu’s sister, Wu Puyue, soon afterward and is known in the Wu family as the “dog meat dinner” as the menu featured dog meat. Communication from Wu Puyue.

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57. This incident was recalled to me by Xu Daling in Beijing, December 1985, Interview 55. 58. Quoted in Yuan Fuzhi (1981). 59. This is much the same conclusion of Su Shuangbi and Wang Hongzhi (1998), 296–327. 60. For the first three versions see chapters 7, 9, 10, and 11 in this volume. 61. Wu Han, Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (1965), 301. 62. Su Shuangbi (1997), 28–37. 63. Chen Wutong (1978). 64. Interviews 51, 58, and 146. Wu Chunxi was criticized as a Rightist in 1957–1958 and given a Rightist hat, which was never removed. Wu Han would not help him, leaving a deep scar within the family. Attacked once again in 1966, this time because of his brother, Chunxi, died in the countryside, harnessed to a plow as a draft animal. 65. Yao Wenyuan (1965). 66. Kang Sheng, 1965.9 to 1966.5—The Great Events of the Struggle of the Two Lines on the Cultural Battle Line as quoted in Su Shuangbi (1997), 28–37. Su is the recently retired deputy editor in chief of the CCP theoretical journal, Qiushi. 67. Mazur, “Public Space for Memory” (1999), 1019–35. 68. Cheek (1997), 282–83. Timothy Cheek’s work included interviews in China of participants in these events. 69. Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi (1986), 10–11. 70. This following section incorporates the vivid memories recounted to the author by Song Dian, Wu Han’s niece, of her own experiences with Wu and Yuan Zhen and at Qinghua, her university, during these difficult times, from Interviews 32 and 33 with Song Dian. 71. Interviews 32, 47, 48, 49, 50, and 58. The niece’s parents were sent to Xining in the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. 72. For events behind the scenes of late 1965 and early 1966 Kang Sheng, 1965.9 to 1966.5—The Great Events of the Struggle of the Two Lines on the Cultural Battle Line, which may be accessed in Su Shuangbi (1997), 28–37. See also Mazur, “Public Space for Memory” (1999), 1019–35. 73. Yao Wenyuan (1965), Beijing Ribao, 29 November 1965. 74. Song Dian Interview 32. 75. “Talks at the Yan’an conference on Literature and Art,” in Mao (1960), juan 4. 76. Mao Zedong had inscribed and sent vol. 4 of his Selected Works to Wu Han. For a photograph of the title page with this inscription see WHXS. For a photograph of the letter see WHZ. 77. Song Dian Interview 32. 78. For the radicalization of the Beijing University campuses in mid-December 1965 see two articles in Beijing Zhongguo qingnian bao, 14 May 1966, which reported on a meeting at which Deng Tuo spoke to college students, translated in SCMP 3709. 79. Song Dian Interview 32. Ding Wang (1969). 80. Interview 32 with Song Dian. His first self-criticism: Wu Han, “Guanyu ‘Hai Rui ba guan’ de ziwo piping”; the second self-criticism: Wu Han, “Shi geming, haishi jicheng?—guanyu daode taolun de ziwo piping.” Both of these were published immediately in the Beijing ribao (Beijing Daily). 81. For an example of a firsthand account of the student hostility see Zhang Yidong (1996).

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82. Without natural children of their own, in the late 1950s with the help of Kang Keqing, they had adopted two children, first a girl and then a boy. In 1966 the girl, Wu Xiaoyan, was twelve and the boy, Wu Zhang, was seven or eight. The students patrolling were the precursors of the Red Guards, formed later in May 1966. 83. Interview 160 with Song Dian. 84. His daughter, Wu Xiaoyan, was imprisoned in 1976, seven years after his death and committed suicide soon after on September 23. Interviews 132 and 146. 85. Cheek (1997), 282–83. 86. Interview 27. Also Su Shuangbi (1997). 87. See note 80 for Wu Han’s self-criticisms; Interview 128. 88. Zhang Yidong (1996), 329–31. 89. Ding Yilan Interviews 5, 6, 7; Mazur, “A Private Ceremony to Mourn Deng Tuo, Wu Han, Liao Mosha and Liu Ren” (1997), 164–68. 90. Video film taken at these meetings including struggle meetings of Wu Han, viewed by this author, taken by cameramen for the purpose of giving the officials in Zhongnanhai a visual report shows starkly the inhumanity toward the victims of the Red Guards conducting the struggle sessions on behalf of “the masses.” 91. Xiang Zeming Interview 136 and Liao Mosha Interviews 25 and 26. 92. Interview 146. Yuan Fuzhi and Rong Zhaozu. 93. Interviews 146 and 133 with Wu Xuan. 94. Liao, journalist and poet, was the only survivor of the Cultural Revolution from the Three Family Village, the Frontline column by Deng Tuo, Liao Mosha, and Wu Han written under the collective pseudonym Wu Nanxing. Liao Mosha was rehabilitated in the mid-1970s. Liao’s note accompanying his poem, written in 1972, reads: “In the Northern Song dynasty the capital was Kaifeng, the ancient capital of Bianliang. . . . The governor of Kaifeng, Baozheng (Bao Gong), unafraid of powerful officials got rid of evil for the people. Here I have used Bao Gong to represent Wu Han who once was the Vice Mayor of Beijing.” Wu often used Bao Gong metaphorically for a “pure official,” qingguan, in his widely published popular essays. The poem can be found in Liao Mosha (1985), 64. Liao Mosha in Interviews 25 and 26.

Appendix: List of Interviews

All interviews were conducted by Mary G. Mazur. Numbers are not assigned according to time order; dates are arranged in Chinese style: year, month, day. There is an arbitrary gap in the interview numbers, there are no missing interviews. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Chuan Hansheng Deng Yun Deng Yun Deng Zhuang Ding Yilan Ding Yilan Ding Yilan Fei Xiaotong Feng Youlan Guo Xinghua Hangzhou University Jiang Zhaocheng Xu Mingde He Mu Ho Ping-ti Ho Ping-ti Hou Renzhi Jinhua No. 1 Middle School Group Interview

1986:06:30, Hong Kong 1985:09:00, Chicago 1983:01:06, Chicago 1985:09:01, Beijing 1986:01:21, Beijing 1986:06:25, Beijing 1985:05:04, Chicago 1986:03:20, Beijing 1986:02:25, Beijing 1986:03:12, Beijing 1986:04:01, Hangzhou

1986:06:03, Beijing 1983:01:11, Chicago 1986:07:16, Chicago 1984:05:24, Cornell University 1986:03:28, Jinhua

437

438

17. Jinhua Normal School Group Interview 18. Li Hua 19. Li Hua 20. Li Wenyi 21. Li Yan 22. Li Yan 23. Li Yan 24. Li Yan 25. Liao Mosha 26. Liao Mosha 27. Liu Guisheng 28. Liu Jinchun 29. Qi Zhifen 30. Qian Jiaju 31. David T. Roy 32. Song Dian 33. Song Dian 34. Song Ruji 35. Song Ruji 36. Su Shuangbi 37. Su Shuangbi 38. Su Shuangbi 39. Tang Xianglong 40. Teng Ssu-yu 41. Teng Ssu-yu 42. Wang Tianyou 43. Wang Xuancheng 44. Wei Ying 45. Wen Jiasi 46. Wen Lishu 47. Wu Puyue 48. Wu Puyue 49. Wu Puyue 50. Wu Puyue 51. Wu Xuan 52. Wu Xuan 53. Wu Zhang 54. Xiao Qian 55. Xu Daling 56. Xu Daling 57. Xu Daling 58. Ye Meiying 59. Ying Ruocheng

Appendix

1986:03:30, Jinhua 1986:03:10, Beijing 1986:06:23, Beijing 1986:06:10, Beijing 1986:01:29, Kunming 1986:01:30, Kunming 1986:02:02, Kunming 1986:02:12, Kunming 1986:03:15, Beijing 1986:04:27, Beijing 1985:12:00, Beijing 1986:05:00, Beijing 1986:06:04, Beijing 1985:11:24, Beijing 1985:08:00, Chicago 1985:11:12, Beijing 1985:11:29, Beijing 1986:03:08, Beijing 1986:06:27, Beijing 1986:04:17, Beijing 1985:12:06, Beijing 1986:06:22, Beijing 1986:05:19, Chengdu 1983:12:09, Indianapolis 1985:08:06, Indianapolis 1985:12:03, Beijing 1986:03:29, Jinhua 1986:04:24, Beijing 1986:06:21, Beijing 1986:06:18, Beijing 1985:10:18, Beijing 1985:10:21, Beijing 1985:10:28, Beijing 1985:11:12, Beijing 1986:01:17, Guangzhou 1986:07:02, Beijing 1986:06:24, Beijing 1986:04:21, Beijing 1985:12:12, Beijing 1986:06:07, Beijing 1986:06:26, Beijing 1986:06:14, Beijing 1984:10:08, Chicago

Appendix

60. Yiwu xian Kuzhutang Group Interview 61. Yuan Fuzhi 62. Yuan Fuzhi 63. Yuan Fuzhi 64. Zhang Youren 65. Zhang Youyu 66. Zhang Zhiliang 67. Zhao Qichang 68. Zhou Fucheng 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

Hou Renzhi Hou Renzhi Hou Renzhi, Zhang Weiying Jinhua Shiwhangfu Director Melville Kennedy Li Hua Liu Weiqing and Huang (Jinhua No. 1 Middle School) Qinghua Library Qinghua History people (Xi Xintan) Allyn and Adele Rickett Shen Shaomei Song Ruji Su Shuangbi Tan Qixiang Frederick Teiwes Wang Kang Wang Kang Wang Kang Wang Xuancheng Wang Yan, Ma Chongren Wang Zengqi Wu Dean Wu Huaimei Wu Kun Wu Liangyong Wu Linzhou Wu Puxing Wu Xiaoling Wu Xuan Wu Xuan Wu Xuan Wu Xuan

439

1986:03:29, Yiwu 1986:01:16, Guangzhou 1986:01:17, Guangzhou 1986:07:02, Guangzhou 1986:06:08, Beijing 1986:06:18, Beijing 1986:06:5, Beijing 1986:03:06, Beijing 1986:06:11, Beijing 1987:04:30, Beijing 1987:10:13, Beijing 1987:06:22, Beijing 1987:05:13, Beijing 1987:12:01, Beijing 1987:06:20, Beijing 1987:05:11, Jinhua 1987:06:17, Beijing 1987:04:28, Beijing 1987:11:30, Philadelphia 1987:05:16, Kuzhutang 1987:06:07, Beijing 1987:06:21, Beijing 1987:04:18, Anyang 1987:04:21, Beijing 1987:04:27, Beijing 1987:05:04, Beijing 1987:06:10, Beijing 1987:05:13, Jinhua 1987:06:22, Beijing 1987:10:23, Chicago 1987:02, Chicago 1987:05:15, Jinhua 1987:04:08, Beijing 1987:06:17, Beijing 1987:05:16, Kuzhutang 1987:06:07, Beijing 1987:06:14, Beijing 1987:03:09, Guangzhou 1987:05:11, Jinhua 1987:05:30, Beijing 1987:05:30, Beijing

440

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

Appendix

Wu Yuecai and Wu Bide Wu Zuguang Xiang Zeming Xiang Zeming Xiang Zeming Xu Daling, Wang Tianyou Yang Jiang, Qian Zhongshu Yiwu Xiaoshangpin Shichang Market Manager Yuan Fang Yuan Fuzhi Yuan Xizhi Yuan Xizhi and Rong Zhaozu Zhang Qiqian Zhang Wensong Zhang Xikong John Service Wu Liangyong Su Shuangbi Li Funing Chen Zhikuan Wang Yongxing Wang Huan Zhao Zhaoxiong Su Tianzhun Yuan Fuzhi Song Dian Hou Renzhi Li Jun

1987:05:15, Kuzhutang 1987:10:23, Chicago 1987:04:30, Beijing 1987:06:02, Beijing 1987:06:02, Beijing 1987:06:20, Beijing 1987:04:04, Beijing 1987:05:17, Yiwu 1987:06:12, Beijing 1987:03:08, Beijing 1987:03:31, Beijing 1987:06:30, Beijing 1987:06:24, Beijing 1987:06:06, Beijing 1987:06:09, Beijing 1988:03:28, Oakland 1988:06:15, Beijing 1990:02:25, Beijing 1990:02:27, Beijing 1990:02:27, Beijing 1990:02:27, Beijing 1990:03:01, Beijing 1990:03:01, Beijing 1990:03:03 and 06, Beijing 1990:03:08, Guangzhou 1991:05:12, Chicago 1992:08:14, Hanover, New Hampshire 1996, Beijing

Bibliography

WORKS BY WU HAN This selected bibliography includes Wu Han’s works referred to in this biography. The general order follows the date of publication, beginning with the earliest work. Entries are under the name the author originally chose for the work: penname, style name, or formal name (Wu Chunhan or later, Wu Han). Republication of a work is usually entered under the name Wu Han, even when first published under another name. A separate list of Wu’s collected works published posthumously is included. Abbreviations of periodical and collection titles are found in the abbreviations list. The complete bibliography of Wu’s works can be found in Mary G. Mazur, “A Man of His Times: Wu Han, the Historian,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1993. The compilation of this selected bibliography of Wu’s works draws on, emends, and adds to the bibliography of Wu Han’s works published by Zhang Shouchang in 1982.1 Wu Han [Chunhan]. 1930. Xi Han de jingji zhuangkuang [Economic conditions of the Western Han]. Shanghai: Dadong shuju, 1941. Also WHSLJ. Written 1930, originally published in 1930. Wu Chunhan. 1930. “Kunlun nü kao” [A study of the Kunlun slaves]. Xiandai xuesheng 1, no. 1 (October). Also WHSLJ. “Wu Chunhan zhi Hu Shi xin shiyi jian” [Eleven letters from Wu Han to Hu Shi]. March 1930 to May 1932. Hu Shi Archives, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. Published in “Pingzhu Wu Han Hu Shi tongxin,” in Lishi yanjiu 3 (15 May 1966): 49–65. Also contained in Wu Han wenji, Hong Kong, 1967; and WHZZSX. “Wu Chunhan zhi Yang Zhibing xin” [Wu Chunhan to Yang Zhibing letters]. 1931–1932. Fragments of five letters and one complete letter. Published in Qi Li and Meng Jin, “Jielu Wu Han de fan geming zhen mianmu: Wu Han jiaxiang Yiwu

441

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———. 1939. “Tou xia kao” [A study of “captive” households]. Yishi bao shixue 20. Also DSZJ. WHSX2. Originally written 23 September 1939. Yan Su. 1940. “Mingdai hanzu zhi fazhan” [The development of the Han nation during the Ming dynasty]. Kunming zhongyang ribao shixue 33. Also WHSX2, WHWJ1, WHSLJ. Wu Han. 1940. “Mingjiao yu Da Ming diguo” [Manichaeism and the Ming empire]. Qinghua xuebao 13, no. 1 (19 April 1941). Also DSZJ, WHSX2, WHXJ. Originally written 25 December 1940. ———. 1940. “Ji Ming shilu” [Notes on The Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty]. Lishi yuyan yanjiu suo jikan 18 (September 1948). Also DSZJ, WHSX2. Originally written 26 September 1940. ———. 1942. “Letter from Wu Han to Fu Sinian, 1942?” In Fu Sinian Wenwu Ziliao Xuanze. Edited by Wang Xunsen and Du Zhengsheng, 226–27. Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan, lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1995. ———. 1942. “Jiben she sheyou Zhang Yinlin xiansheng” [My colleague, Mr. Zhang Yinlin]. Renwen kexue xuebao 1, no. 2 (December 1942): 181–83. Also WHSX2. Originally written November 1942. ———. 1943. “Lishi shang junquan de xianzhi (xingqi lunwen)” [Historical limitations on the power of the ruler]. Yunnan ribao. Also LSJZ, WHSX2, WHWJ3. ———. 1943. “Shuo shi” [On scholars]. Also LSJZ, TQJ, WHSX2, WHWJ3. ———. 1943. “Lun tanwu” [On official corruption]. Yunnan ribao (14 November). Also LSJZ, TQJ, WHWJ3. ———. 1944. You “sengbo” dao “huangquan” [From monk’s begging bowl to imperial power]. Zaizhuang chubanshe. Written in 1943, text is the same as Ming Taizu. ———. 1944. Ming Taizu [The Ming founder]. Chongqing shengli chuban she. Text same as You “sengbo” dao “huangquan.” Also WHSX4. Chen Bo. 1944. “Qian Muzhai zhi shixue” [The historiography of Qian Muzhai]. Wenshi zazhi 4, no. 28. Also WHSLJ. Qian Muzhai is Qian Qianyi. He collaborated with the Manchus before the fall of the Ming. Wu Han. 1944. “Zhiren yu zhifa” [Rule by men and rule by law]. Ziyou luntan (1 March): 19. Also LSJZ, WHWJ3. ———. 1944. “Gei shibing yi shidang daiyu” [Suitable wages and living conditions for the soldiers]. Kunming zhengyi zhibao (6 September). Also TQJ, WHWJ3, WHZW. ———. 1945. “Lun Wan Ming liukou” [On the roving bandits of the late Ming]. Chongqing xinhua ribao (12 February). Also LSJZ, TQJ, WHSX2, WHSLJ, WHZW. Originally written under a different title in 1934. Revised March 1944, Kunming. ———. 1945. “Baozhi yu yulun” [Newspapers and public opinion]. LSJZ. Also TQJ, WHZW. ———. 1945. “Shibing men fang xia qianggan lai” [Soldiers, put down your guns]. Kunming minzhu zhoukan. Also TQJ, WHWJ3. ———. 1945. “Xin shidai he xin funü” [The new times and the new woman]. Kunming zhenbao 35. Also TQJ, WHWJ3. ———. 1945. “Lun Wusi” [On May Fourth]. Also LSJZ, TQJ, WHZW. Written May 1945. ———. 1945. “Wuren bing fei wei zhizao yipi baiwan fuhao er zhan” [The purpose of our fighting is not to make millionaires]. Kunming minzhu zhoukan 2, no. 6 (3 August). Also TQJ, WHWJ3.

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Wu Han. 1962. “Weida de lishi xuejia Sima Qian” [The great historian Sima Qian]. Renmin wenxue 2 (12 February). Also XXJ, WHSX3, WHWJ4, WHXJ, WHZW. ———. 1962. “Lun lishi renwu pingjia” [On evaluation of historical figures]. RMRB, 23 March. Also XXJ, Beijing shi lishi xuehui diyi dier jie nianhui lunwen xuanji (1964); WHSX3; WHXJ. ———. 1962. “Shuo zhenglun” [On debate]. GMRB, 27 March. Also XXJ, WHWJ4. ———. 1962. “Lun lishi zhishi de puji” [On popularization of historical knowledge]. Wenhui bao (27 March). Also XXJ, WHSX3, WHWJ4, WHXJ, WHSLJ, WHZZSX. ———. 1962. “Lun xuexi” [On study]. Zhongguo funü 4 (1 April). Also XXJ, WHWJ4, WHZZSX. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1962. “Lun kai hui” [On holding meetings]. Qian xian 7 (10 April). Also WHWJ4; SJCZJ, 41–43. Wu Han. 1962. “Duzhe, zuozhe, bianzhe—guanyu ‘Lun lishi zhishi de puyi’ yiwen Wu Han yu duzhe Zhu Baibing, Yang Chunhe de laiwang xin” [Readers, authors, editors—letters exchanged between Wu Han and readers, Zhu Baibing and Yang Chunhe on the essay “The Popularity of Historical Knowledge”]. Wenhui bao (9 May). Zhang Bai. 1962. “Zhengming de fengdu” [The style of argument]. RMRB, 9 May. Also CDL, WHWJ4. ———. 1962. “Tan xie wenzhang” [On writing essays]. RMRB, 15 May. Also CDL, WHWJ4. ———. 1962. “Lun bu tong xueke de xiezuo” [On coordination of different branches of learning]. RMRB, 22 May. Also CDL, WHWJ4. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1962. “Shuo daode” [On morality]. Qian xian 10 (25 May). Also XXJ; WHSX3; WHWJ4; WHXJ; SJCZJ, 49–51. Zhang Bai. 1962. “Qi Jiguang lian bing” [Qi Jiguang trains soldiers]. RMRB, 29 May. Also CDL. Wu Han. 1962. “Tan lishi gushi” [On history stories]. GMRB, 29–30 May. Also WHSX3. ———. 1962. “Guanyu yanjiu lishi de ji ge wenti—1962.5.9 dui Zhongguo renmin daxue lishi xi he lishi dang’an xi tongxue de jianghua” [A few questions in historical research—9 May 1962, a lecture to students in Peoples’ University History Department and the Department of Historical Archives]. Jiaoxue yu yanjiu 3 (4 June). Also XXJ, WHSX3, WHSLJ. ———. 1962. “Lishi ju shi yishu, ye shi lishi” [Historical plays are art and history]. Xiju bao 6 (18 June). Also XXJ under a different name, WHSX3. Han Wu. 1962. “Duo xie yidian zawen” [Write more zawen]. Wenhui bao (30 June). Also XXJ, WHWJ4, WHZW. Wu Han. 1962. “Xuexi lishi zhishi de jige wenti—zai zhonghua quanguo xinwen gongzuo zhe xiehui juban de baogao hui shang de jianghua” [A few issues in learning from historical scholarship—a lecture at the seminar sponsored by the Chinese National Journalist Workers Association]. Xinwen yewu 7 (3 July). Also WHSX3, WHWJ1, WHZZSX. Han Wu. 1962. “Wang Huizu lun zuo zhou xian guan” [Wang Huizu talks on Zhou and Xian officials]. Wenhui bao (6 July). Also WHWJ4. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1962. “Shuo qianxu” [On modesty]. Qian xian 13 (10 July). Also WHWJ4; SJCZJ, 57–59.

Bibliography

459

Wu Han. 1962. “Shi Kefa dansheng sanbai liushi zhounian jinian (qi jue er shou)” [Three hundred and sixtieth anniversary of Shi Kefa’s birth]. GMRB, 19 July. ———. 1962. “Guren de zuo, gui, bai” [The sitting, kneeling, and bowing of ancient men]. RMRB, 5 August. Also XXJ, WHWJ4. ———. 1962. “Wu Han tan Wu Zetian (xueshu jianbao—jieshao Wu Han zai Beijing lishi xuehui deng danwei juban de ‘Lishi zhishi jiangzuo’ de jiangyan)” [Wu Han discusses Wu Zetian (Study Newsletter—introduction to Wu Han’s lecture at the “Seminar on Historical Knowledge” held at the Beijing Historical Society and other units)]. GMRB, 7 August. ———. 1962. “Wu Han tan dui Wu Zetian de pingjia” [Wu Han discusses the evaluation of Wu Zetian]. BJRB, 7 August. ———. 1962. “Tamen zoudao le tade fanmian—Zhu Ziqing song” [They turned against it—eulogizing Zhu Ziqing]. GMRB, 12 August 1962. Also WHWJ4, WHZW, WHZZSX. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1962. “Zai shuo daode” [On morality again]. Qian xian 16 (25 August). Also XXJ, SJCZJ, WHSX3, WHWJ4, WHXJ. Wu Han. 1962. “Wen Tianxiang de guqi” [The moral integrity of Wen Tianxiang]. Zhongguo qingnian bao (4 September). Also XXJ, WHWJ4, WHZW. ———. 1962. “‘Chile ge’ ge chang zhe jiazu de mingyun” [The fate of the families who sang “Chile ge”]. Renmin wenxue 9 (12 September). Also XXJ, WHSX3, WHWJ4. ———. 1962. “Lun minzu yingxiong” [On national heroes]. Jiefang junbao (30 September). Also XXJ, WHSX3, WHWJ1, WHXJ. ———. 1962. “Zenyang xue guwen” [How to study ancient Chinese]. Xinwen yewu 10 (3 October). Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1962. “Tan huozang” [Discussing cremation]. Qian xian 19 (10 October). Also WHWJ4; SJCZJ, 72–74. Wu Han. 1962. Ming shi jianshu [A brief Ming history]. Zhonghua shuju, 1980. Also WHSX4. Lectures given November 1962 at the Senior Party School (Beijing). ———. 1962. “Wu Han tan yanjiu lishi” [Wu Han discusses historical research]. WHXXSZ. ———. 1963. “‘Hai Rui de gushi’ zai ban tiji” [Notes on “The story of Hai Rui” reprinted]. In Hai Rui de gushi. Zhonghua shuju. ———. 1963. “Lishi gushi’ xu” [Preface to “Historical Stories”]. In Lishi de gushi, vol. 1. Beijing: Beijing chubansh. ———. 1963. “‘Xuexi ji’ zi xu” [Preface to Study Collection]. In Xuexi ji. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe. ———. 1963. “Wo guo gudai gui, bai lijie de youlai shi zenyang de?” [What was the source of kneeling and bowing in our country?]. In Zhongguo lishi changshi, vol. 5, ed. Wu Han, 99–102. Beijing chubanshe. ———, ed. 1963. Zhongguo lishi changshi [Common knowledge of Chinese history]. Vol. 1. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe. ———. 1963. “Zhongguo lishi changshi xuyan” [Preface to Common knowledge of Chinese history]. In Zhongguo lishi changshi, vol. 1. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1963. “Lun xiu Qingshi” [On writing Qing history]. Qian xian 3 (10 February). Also SJCZJ, 95–97; WHXJ; WHSX3; WHWJ4. ———. 1963. “Tan Beijing cheng” [Talking of the city of Beijing]. Qian xian 6 (25 March). Also SJCZJ, 104–6; WHWJ4; WHSX3.

460

Bibliography

Wu Han. 1963. “Puji lishi zhishi de yi tao hao shu—‘Lishi gushi’ xu” [A preface to “Historical Stories”—a set of good books popularizing historical knowledge]. Wenhui bao (30 March). Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1963. “Lun xuefeng” [On academic atmosphere]. Qian xian 9 (10 May). SJCZJ, 114–16. ———. 1963. “Lun xiju gaige” [On opera reform]. Qian xian 12 (25 June). Also SJCZJ, 123–25; WHSJ4. Wu Han. 1963. “Lun Yiling zhi zhan” [On the battle of Yiling]. BJRB, 27 June. Also WHWJ4. ———. 1963. “Lun Jiawu haizhan” [On the Sino-Japanese War]. Beijing wanbao (19 July). Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1963. “Tan xueshu yanjiu” [On academic research]. Qian xian 15 (10 August). Also SJCZJ, 132–37; WHXJ. Wu Han. 1963. “San shuo daode—jing da Xu Qixian tongzhi” [A third essay on morality—a respectful answer to Comrade Xu Qixian]. GMRB, 19 August. Also WHWJ3, WHSX3. Wu Han. 1963. “Guanyu daode de jieji xing he jicheng xing wenti de taolun” [A discussion of the issue of the class nature and inheritability of morality]. Xin jianshe 9 (20 September). Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1963. “Tan xingqu” [On interest]. Qian xian 18 (25 September). Also SJCZJ, 141–43; WHWJ4. ———. 1963. “Tan xie cun shi” [On writing village history]. Qian xian 22 (25 November). Also SJCZJ, 154–56. Wu Han. 1963. “Yijiuliusan nian ruogan xueshu wenti taolun zongshu (jieshao le Wu Han zai daode jicheng, lishi ju deng wenti shang de lundian)” [A summary of discussion of several academic issues of 1963 (introducing Wu Han’s viewpoints on inheritance of morality, historical plays, and other issues)]. Xueshu yuekan 12 (10 December). ———. 1964. “Lun lishi renwu pingjia” [On the evaluation of historical figures]. In Beijing shi lishi xuehui diyi dier jie nianhui lunwen xuanji (1961–1962), ed. Beijing lishe xuehui, 36–53. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe. ———, ed. 1964. “Zhongguo lishi changshi xuyan” [Preface to Common knowledge of Chinese history]. In Zhongguo lishi changshi, vol. 6–7. Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1964. “Zai tan bianxie cun shi” [Once again on compiling village history]. Qian xian 2 (25 January). Also SJCZJ, 166–70. ———. 1964. “Tan xiezuo” [On writing]. Qian xian 5 (10 March). Also SJCZJ, 177–79. ———. 1964. “Tan yanxi” [On performing plays]. Qian xian 8 (25 April). Also SJCZJ, 183–85. Wu Han. 1964. “Zhu Yuanzhang de duiwu he zhengquan de xingzhi” [Zhu Yuanzhang’s troops and the nature of his reign]. RMRB, 26 April. Also WHSX3, WHWJ1. ———. 1964. “Mingchu tongzhi jieji neibu de douzheng” [The struggle within the ruling class of the early Ming dynasty]. RMRB, 29 April. Also WHSX3, WHWJ1. Wu Nanxing [Wu Han]. 1964. “Tan xueshu yanjiu” [On academic research]. Qian xian 11 (10 June). Also SJCZJ, 192–94; WHWJ4. Wu Han. 1965. Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan [Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian chubanshe. Also Sanlian shudian chubanshe, 1979.

Bibliography

461

———. 1965. “Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan zixu” [Author’s preface to “Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan”]. In Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan. Beijing: Sanlian shudian chubanshe. Also WHSJ. ———. 1965. “Guanyu ‘Hai Rui baguan’ de ziwo piping” [A self-criticism on “Hai Rui dismissed from office”]. BJRB, 27 December, and RMRB, 30 December, 5–6. Ding Wang, vol. 4. Translated in CB: 783 (21 March 1966); Chinese History and Philosophy (fall 1968): 68–107. ———. 1966. “Shi geming, haishi jicheng?—guanyu daode taolun de ziwo piping” [Revolution or inheritance?—a self-criticism on the discussion of morality]. BJRB, 12 January, 3. Also Qianxian 1 (January 1966). ———, comp. 1980. Chaoxian Li chao shilu de Zhongguo shiliao [Chinese historical materials in the veritable records of the Yi dynasty of Korea]. 12 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Preface by Weng Dujian (1979). Begun in 1934.

Works by or Containing Works by Wu Han Published after 19653 Changduan lu [The record of the long and short]. 1966. Hong Kong: Cunzhen yinshu guan. Also published by Renmin chubanshe, 1980. Containing Wu Han’s and other writers’ essays. Wu Han’s zawen published under name of Zhang Bai. Wu Han. 1966. “Hai Rui baguan” ji qita. [“Hai Rui dismissed from office” and other works]. Hong Kong: Ming bao. ———. 1967. Jin Ping Mei yu Wang Shizhen. Hong Kong: Nantian shuye gongsi. ———. 1967. Wu Han wenji [Collected works by Wu Han]. Hong Kong. ———. 1979. Hai rui baguan [Hai Rui dismissed from office]. Wu Han he “Hai Rui baguan” [Wu Han and “Hai Rui dismissed from office”], edited by Renmin chubanshe. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Includes the play, “Hai Rui baguan.” Wu Nanxing. 1979. Sanjiacun zhaji [Notes from Three Family Village]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Wu Han. 1979. Wu Han zawen xuan [Selected zawen by Wu Han]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. ———. 1981. Jiangzhe cangshujia shilue [Outline history of Jiangsu and Zhejiang bibliophiles]. Beijing: Wenhua shuju. ———. 1984. Wu Han shixue lunzhu xuanji [Selected historical works by Wu Han]. 4 vols. Edited by Beijing shi lishi xuehui. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. ———. 1987. Wu Han shilun ji [Collected works on history by Wu Han]. Edited by Li Hua and Su Shuangbi. Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe. ———. 1988. Wu Han wenji [Collected works by Wu Han]. 4 vols. Edited by Li Hua, Yang Zhao and Zhang Xikong. Beijing chubanshe. ———. 1988. Wu Han xuanji [Selected works by Wu Han]. Edited by Su Shuangbi and Wang Hongzhi. Tianjin: Renmin chubanshe. ———. 1993. Wu Han de zizhuan shuxin wenji [Wu Han’s collected autobiography and letters]. Edited by Su Shuangbi. Beijing: Zhongguo renshi chubanshe.

CHINESE SOURCES Ban Gu (Pan Ku). 1955. Qian han shu [The history of the former Han dynasty]. Translated by Homer H. Dubs. Baltimore: Waverly Press.

462

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NOTES 1. Zhang Shouchang, “Wu Han zuozhe mulu biannian” [Chronological Bibliography of the Works of Wu Han] in Zhongguo dangdai shehui kexuejia, ed. Beijing tushuguan wenxian congkan bianjibu (Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1982), 147–87. 2. Wu Nanxing is the collective penname of Wu Han represented by “Wu,” Deng Tuo represented by “Nan” and Liao Mosha represented by “xing,” the three authors who wrote the San jia cun [Three Family Village] column in Qianxian [Frontline]. This entry and the others here under Wu Nanxing are the essays by Wu Han. 3. Wu Han was detained in 1966 and died in prison in 1969.

Index

ABC’s of Communism (Bukharin), 164 Ai Qing, poet: penname of Jiang Haicheng (Wu Han’s cousin), 22 anti-Americanism, 322, 332 Anti-Hunger and Anti-Civil War Movement, 323 Anti-Rightist Campaign, June 1957, 344, 392, 397–401; Peng Zhen supported campaign, 398; as watershed in Democratic League existence, 401; Wu Han publicly denounced Luo Longji and Zhang Bojun, 398, 398–401; Wu Han supported Mao’s campaign, 398–401 arranged marriage, 35, 126–27; for Wu Chunhan (father arranged), 35; for Wu Chunxi, Wu Han’s brother (father arranged), 128; for Wu Puyue, Wu Han’s sister (father arranged), 126, 128 assassinations ordered by Chiang Kaishek, 287; Chu Tunan, Wen Yiduo, and Wu Han on 1946 list, 287; Li Gongpu killed in Kunming, 311; Wen Yiduo killed in Kunming, 311; Wu Han blacklisted and hunted in Beiping and Shanghai, 342

baihua (vernacular), 29, 50–51; May Fourth Literary Renaissance, 28–29 Bao Gong (Song dynasty Kaifeng official): and Fei Xiaotong’s idea, democracy for the people, 341; Liao Mosha memorial poem to Wu Han, representing Wu as Bao Gong, 429, 435n94; as a qing guan, pure official, 341 Beijing: capital of imperial China, 74; municipality and six-county area administered by city government, 370; restored as national capital (1949), 369–70; sights and sounds of, 74–75. See also Beiping Beijing city walls: controversy over removal of, 387 Beijing Historical Association: Wu Han organized, aided by Deng Tuo, 387 Beijing University, 74, 390; and Jian Bozan (chair of history department), 390; moved to Yanjing University, outside of city walls, 390 Beiping, 45–46, 68n3, 73; battle fought west of Qinghua, 222; educational and cultural capital of China in 1930s, 74; historic “museum city”

491

492

Index

occupied by Japanese (1937), 222; occupied by People’s Liberation Army, 355. See also Beijing biographer’s task, 8–9, 11–12; biographer’s lens, 375; interviews, sites, and interviewees, 9–11 Bitter Bamboo Pond village, 2, 128–29; Wu clan in village, 16–18; Wu Han’s 1946 visit, 306–9; and Zhejiang Province, 2. See also Kuzhutang Bi Xue Lu: book about Donglin Party at end of Ming, 131–32; Wu Han admired commitment of Donglin people, 132 “Black Gang of Three Family Village”: Deng Tuo, Wu Han, and Liao Mosha attacked spring 1966, 426 blacklist, 342; Wu Han hunted in Beiping, 342; Wu Han unable to leave country, blacklisted, 343 Breuilly, John: on nationalism, 413 Cai Yuanpei: minister of higher education, 46 Cao Cao: in the History of Three Kingdoms, 49–50; representative national hero for Wu Han, 405; subject of Wu Han’s zawen essays, 316; Wu Chunhan discusses Cao Cao and Liu Bei, 49–50 censorship, 136; in twenty-first century, 2 Changsha Temporary University: Beijing, Qinghua, and Nankai universities combined in Changsha, 235; moved to Kunming, 239; Nanjing attack by Japanese aroused fear, 238 Chen Bo (Wu Han’s style name), 343 Chen Tanqiu: English teacher at Dong Biwu’s middle school, 163 Chen Yinke, 129, 189, 320; withdrawal from active involvement after New China established, 373 Chen Yu: CCP Central Committee member, 380; governor of Guangzhou, 380; Yuan Fuzhi’s husband, 380

Chiang Kai-shek, 45, 67, 287; free expression in press, tried to suppress, 131; Marco Polo Bridge Incident strengthened his opposition to Japan, 220 China College (Zhongguo gongxue), 40, 45–51, 57–58, 61, 62–68; destroyed by Japanese attack on Shanghai, 1932, 101–2; first China-founded private university in China, 46; Hu Shi as president of Zhonggong, 47; Hu Shi as student at Zhonggong, 47; Wu Chunhan entered, 40 civil war: CCP counter-offensive, 337; Democratic League worked to stop, 309; GMD and CCP fighting in the north, coalition gone, 299; GMD government proclaimed Communists in rebellion, 326; GMD surrendered Beiping, PLA entered, 354; Mao ordered PLA to cross Yangtze and march south, 359; Nanjing, surrender of, 359; Nationalist Army took Yan’an, 326; peace negotiations collapsed, 323–26; Shanghai, fall of, 361; undeclared war, 313; Wu Han opposed GMD pro-war policy, 312 coalition government, 344. See also United Front Cohen, Paul, 8 Communist Party: transformed from revolutionary party to ruling power, 349; Wu Han joined (1957), 393 Communist Youth Corps: evolved from Socialist Youth Corps, 169; Leninist activist group, 170; Women’s Normal School student tide, pioneer members of CY, 169; Yuan Fuzhi joined, 169; Yuan Zhen chose not to join, 170 contextualizing: and Gu Jiegang, 79; Robinson’s use of, 79; Wu Han’s use of, 79 cultural history, 51–55, 190; and Chen Dengyuan, 191; Cultural History of China (Takakuwa Komakichi), 190; Hu Shi’s cultural history, 55–57, 191;

Index Liang Qichao lectured on cultural history at Qinghua, 190; and Liu Yizheng, 190; Wu Han’s critical review of Cultural History, 190–93 Cultural Revolution: Deng Tuo committed suicide (17 May), 427; named “Black Gang of Traitors,” 427; proclamation declared Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Liao Mosha counterrevolutionaries, 427; Proclamation of Cultural Revolution (16 May 1966), 427; rehabilitation and recovery (1979), 10, 429–31; Wu Han and Liao Mosha dragged through the streets, attacked by Red Guards, 427, 428. See also Wu Han and Cultural Revolution culture: meaning of, 51–55 December First martyrs memorial meeting, 299 December First Movement, 292; antiwar meeting at Lianda, fired on by soldiers, 291; crisis in Kunming universities, 293–94; as nationwide student movement, 294; response to terror and killing, 291–92; upsurge by Democratic Youth League, 292; Wu Han and Wen Yiduo represented Democratic League in Movement, 292 December Ninth National Salvation Movement, 209–10; Japanese creation of puppet council precipitated, 209; National Liberation Vanguard (Minxian), part of, 210; students demonstrated, 209 Democratic League: banned by Nationalist government, 326; CCP call for New Political Consultative Conference, 328; Central Committee met in Hong Kong, 327; connections with liaison office, 318; Huang Yanpei negotiated no arrests by GMD for Shanghai League, 326, 352; league Central Committee office in Nanjing, 319; league people

493

came to talk to Wu Han daily, 318; in Shanghai mediated between GMD and CCP, 309; “single line” communications, 318; sponsored film of Wu Han, 7; terror acts against, 318; Wu Han opposed new Consultative Conference, 329; Zhang Lan (national chairman), 324, 352 Democratic League (post-1948): after Anti-Rightist Campaign CCPcenter controlled league, 401; CCP invited key people to Political Consultative Conference, 349; first Democratic League group formed in North China Liberated Zone, 350; Harbin Common Agreement, 349–51; Hundred Flowers and league members’ criticism of CCP, 344; independence of democratic parties stamped out, 344; independence of league as key issue, 344; left-wing group, 349, 352; in Party Rectification campaign (1957), 344; Shanghai people’s letter, 344; Temporary Working Committee reported plans to league Central Committee, 359; under United Front department, 351 Democratic League, Beiping branch: banned but Wu Han opposed disbanding, 327; chaired by Wu Han, 324; final step to civil war, 325; liaison group withdrawn by CCP, 325–26; refused to participate in GMD National Assembly, 324; secret radio communication with CCP, 327 Democratic League, Kunming, 277–301; became a “third force” political party, 279–80; Chinese Democratic League formally announced (10 Oct. 1944), 279; controversy over Communist members of the Youth League, 294; division over control of Kunming Democratic League, 294–95; formation of (1943), 277; fostered organization of Democratic Youth League, 290; interest in constitutionalism and civil rights,

494

Index

279; Luo Longji and Zhou Xinmin established branch, 278; organized nationally (1941), 278; Wu Han joined, 278 Democratic League, North China branch, 319; disagreement among members, 319; opposed civil war, 320; split over disbanding in civil war, 327; Wu Han as editor of Democratic Weekly, 319; Zhang Dongsun (leader), 319 Democratic Movement, 288; aimed for radical change of governing regime, 289; demonstrations in 1989, 7; student “December First Movement” a part of, 294 Democratic Weekly: Beiping league newspaper, 319; Kunming Democratic League newspaper, 281; Wu Han, editor of, 281, 319 Democratic Youth League, 288, 292; created within the United Front, under auspices of Democratic League (March 1945), 289; and crisis over rape by American soldiers, 322–23; Hua Gang link to Dong Biwu, 290; New Democratic Youth League organized, Wu Han honorary secretary-general, 363; Wu Han and Wen Yiduo organizers, 289; Wu Han broke with Kunming leaders, 292–94; Wu Han resumed relationship in Beiping, 322 Deng Tuo (journalist and scholar): Beijing Historical Association, founder of, 387; committed suicide (May 1965), 427–28; editor of Frontline (Qianxian), Beijing Party Committee journal, 411; Evening Chats at Yan shan (Deng’s column), 411; founding editor of People’s Daily newspaper, 411; joined Wu Han and Liao Mosha to write Three Family Village column, 411; Mao accused him as counterrevolutionary “Black Gang” traitor, 427; transferred to Beijing Municipal Committee, 387;

tried to defend Wu Han (1965–1966), 421–22, 426 Deng Xiaoping: inscription for Wu Han in Han Ting pavilion, 5 Deng Yingchao: Yuan Fuzhi’s friend, 331; Zhou Enlai’s wife, 331 Dewey, John, 403 Ding Ling, Ming tomb, 386; Wu Han encouraged excavation of, 386–87 Dirlik, Arif: and the Debate on China’s Social History, 61 documents removed from China, objection to, 123–24; Guang yun (Song dictionary), 123 Dong Biwu: in Beijing after 1949, 380; chairman of higher education commission, 362; friend of Wu Han, 331; head of transitional North China government, 369–70; Hubei Women’s Normal School, taught at, 164; Southern bureau head of Communist Party, Chongqing, 260–61; wanted Wu Han in Consultative Conference, 330; Wuhan Middle School, established, 162 “doubting antiquity” school of thought, 78 evidential research methodology (kaozheng), 50, 80–81, 85, 88, 91, 93, 94, 96 Fang Chao-ying, 201 Fang Hao (Jinhua Middle School director): historian of Taipings in Jinhua, 25 Fa Xian: Buddhist monk studied by Wu Chunhan, 65 Fei Qing: Fei Xiaotong’s brother, 342; helped Wu Han escape GMD, 342 Fei Xiaotong, 274; democratic rally, participated in, 285; drafted “Letter to George Marshall,” 297–98; friend of Yuan Zhen’s, 273; and idea of Good Emperor (Bao gong), 341, 346; participated actively after PRC established, 373; and Qinghua seminar with Wu Han

Index on “Structure of Power,” 338–41; in Qinghua sociology department, 338; worked with Wu Han, 297; Yunnan University chair of sociology department, 271 Feng Xuefeng: leftist writer from Yiwu, 310; Wu Han met in Shanghai, 310 Feng Youlan, 363, 371; academic dean when Qinghua became a people’s university, 355–56; Qinghua University academic dean, 83; Wu Chunhan, arranged work-study for, 83 foreign cultural missions representing PRC, 388, 389 Franke, Wolfgang, 201 Fu Sinian, 203 Gao Shenfu: friend of Wu Chunhan’s from Yiwu, 46 Ge Jianxiong: student of Tan Qixiang, 386 General History (tongshi), 51; interest in by Lei Haizong, Zhang Yinlin, Wu Han, and Tao Xisheng, 188; Jiang Tingfu encouraged modern general history, 188 “Great Leap”: “Three Years of Disaster,” 316 “Great Leap Forward” (1958), 381, 401– 3; agricultural disaster across China, 402, 407; false reporting of harvests by officials, 407; Mao proclaimed (1958), 401–3; provoked discourse among historians about relation of past to present, 403–4 Great Learning (Daxue): Confucian classic, 376; loyalty a basis of political culture, 376; thought reform and morality related, 376 guerilla fighting: Eighth Brigade headquarters in Wu family home, 307; against the Japanese, 16; Kuzhutang village base against Japanese, 306–9 Gu Jiegang, 55, 118; on culture, nature of, 55, 200; helped Wu Han, 76, 78, 83; and historical geography,

495

218; Hu Shi, influenced by, 80; Hu Yinglin, interested in, 78; and Owen Lattimore on Mongols and Manchuria, 218; as refugee in Kunming lived in Wu Han’s house, 238; and scientific methodology, 78; space and time relationship in past and present, 219; Sven Hedin and Central Asia, 218; Yanjing University, teaching at, 74, 76; Yugong Society, founded by, 218–19 Guomindang: collapse of party rule and defeat of government (1948), 349. See also Nationalist Party Guo Xinghua (Wu Han’s secretary in municipal office), 403, 407 Haiphong to Kunming rail journey, 232–33 Hai Rui (Ming dynasty official), 196; Mao asked Wu Han to write about Hai Rui, 407–8; Wu Han admired as good official, 196, 405 “Hai Rui Dismissed” (Hai Rui baguan), 1, 5, 421–22; Mao accused Wu Han of criticizing his dismissal of Peng Dehuai with the play, 422 Hangzhou Christian College (Zhijiang University): and Northern Expedition, 38; operated by American Board of Foreign Missions, 37 Han Ting pavilion at Qinghua, 5 Harbin Common Agreement, 349; first step in United Front Common Program to new party-state, 350–51 He Bingsong, 131; student of James Harvey Robinson’s, 208; “Ten Professors,” one of, 208 historical geography: and Gu Jiegang, 218–19; Yugong Journal, 218; Yugong Society, focal point for historical geography, 219 historical materialism, 60–61; Outline History of Taipings (Luo Ergang) and, 214 Historical Research Association (Shixue yanjiu hui), 146–49, 203, 207, 387;

496

Index

annual 1939 meeting in Kunming, 247; constructing China’s New History, 143, 145; as a forum for discussion of members historical studies, 143; published Historical Studies Supplement Shixue in two national newspapers, 144–47; published Supplement in two national newspapers in Kunming, 247; “relation of past to present” discussion continued in 1950s PRC, 403; revived in Kunming, 247; Zhang Yinlin joined, 188. See also Shixue Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber): Wu Chunhan’s interest in authorship of, 66 Hong Weilian (William Hung): gave Wu Chunhan assistantship, 76; Yanjing library director, 76; Yanjing University director of Graduate Institute, 76 Ho Pingti (He Bingdi): Qinghua history student, 88 Hou Renzhi (historical geographer): editor of historical geography series of chinese popular history series, 406 Hua Gang: CCP emissary to Long Yun, 271; discussion forum in Kunming, encouraged, 273; link for Southern Bureau with Wu Han and Youth League, 290; Marxist historian and sociologist of modern China, 271; in Shanghai contact with Wu Han, 310 Huai-Hai, battle of, 345 Huang Shang: editor of Wenhui bao, 316–17; invitation to Wu Han to publish, 317 Huang Yanpei, 326, 352, 358 Hubei Women’s Normal School: Chen Tanqiu taught English at, 163; demonstrations by Wuhan Student Union over expulsions, 166; Dong Biwu taught Chinese literature at, 161, 163, 164; entrance exams, Wu sisters took, 161; expulsion of five students by principal, 166; Liu Zitong taught Chinese language and literature (guowen) at, 163–64;

public government supported school, founded 1913, 161; Women’s Reading Society, Dong Biwu helped girls organize, 164; in Wuchang, provincial capital and one of Wuhan tri-cities, 161; Yuan Zhen and Yuan Fuzhi expelled for year, 166–67. See also Women’s Reading Society Hundred Flowers (1956), 390; ended suddenly (February 1957), 390; Wu Han published essays on Ming history, 390; Wu Han taught Ming history at Beijing University, 390 Hu Qiaomu (Mao Zedong’s assistant), 407 Hu Shi: Beijing University dean of College of Arts and Letters, 68; China’s ambassador to United States, 1941 to end of war, 258–59, 320; cited Wu Han and Qian Jiaju as examples at Nankai in 1934, 180; and conception of cultural history, 51–57; and concern for students’ future, 57; criticized Guomindang, 67–68; criticized Taiping Outline History (Luo Ergang), 214; and “democracy vs. autocracy,” debate with Jiang Tingfu on, 142, 201–2; and evidential research, 80; father of May Fourth Literary Renaissance, 51; Guomindang, difficulty in relationship with, 67; Guomindang attacks Hu, 51, 66–68; helped Wu Han enter Qinghua, 83; history linked to contemporary political change, criticized, 215; influenced by James Harvey Robinson, 56; influence on Wu Chunhan, 51–58, 64–68; left country after New China established, 373; Luo Ergang lived at his house, 79; mentors Wu Han and Luo Ergang, 85; opposed “Ten Professors” idea of China centered culture, 208; president of Beijing University, 320; president of China College, 47, 51; resigned from China College, 68; and scientific method, 78, 80; snubed Wu Han, 320; student

Index at China College, 47; student at Columbia University, 56; taught cultural history at China College, 51, 55–57; on textual criticism, 78; Wu Chunhan’s teacher at China College, 50–51, 55–68; Wu Han’s letters to Hu Shi, 64–67, 77, 101–2, 125–26; Wu Han visited Hu’s house in city, 133 Hu Weiyong, 124–26; execution ordered by emperor, 125; Hu Weiyong Affair, 140–42, 255; prime minister of first Ming emperor, 124 Hu Yaomei (pediatrician), 383 Hu Yinglin, 78, 119; as bibliophile, 91; and biography by Wu Han, 78, 83, 120; on forgeries, 78; Gu Jiegang’s interest in, 78; and Wang Shizhen, 119–20; Wu Han native place ties, 78; from Zhejiang, Lanxi county, 78 intellectuals’ role in China, 2; crucial nature of intellectual elite in midtwentieth century, 296; duty and role of intelligentsia in nation, 277, 284; importance confirmed as targeted in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, 374; intellectuals and politics, 269; intellectuals’ place in Chinese political world, 339–41; intellectuals politically more important in civil war for Wu Han, 374; party-state legitimated by intellectuals in Democratic League, 361; “spirit of the nation,” Wu Han’s opinion, 346; Tiananmen Incident, 2; in twentieth century, 2–4; in twenty-first century, 2; Wu Han’s idea was responsibility to criticize, 341 Japanese aggressive activity: China College destroyed in Shanghai, 100; invasion at Shanghai, 100; Japanese armies entered north China, 222; Japanese pressure on Beiping area (1935), 206–7; Manchurian crisis, 1931 invasion, 95–96; Marco Polo Bridge Incident (1937), 221–22; Nanjing student demonstrations,

497

99; Nationalist Army resists in Shanghai, 100; Northeast China, people afraid because of, 197; puppet council created by Japanese on Beiping doorstep, 209; in Shandong, 99; student patriotic response, 98; students fled Beiping (1933) as Japanese expanded south of Manchuria, 131–33; Tanggu Truce, 133 Japanese surrender, 290; struggle between GMD and CCP began after, 291 Jian Bozan: historian and chair of Beijing University History Department, 390; invited Wu Han to give lectures in Ming history at Beida, 390 Jiang Entian: Yuan Zhen’s friend and roommate, 175 Jiang Qing: Mao Zedong’s wife and actress, leading opera reform, 410; message called off performance of Wu Han’s Hai Rui baguan opera, 410; saw Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography as Wu Han’s criticism of Mao, 416; and Wu Han at Zhongnanhai dinner with Mao, 416 Jiang Sanying (Wu Chunhan’s mother), 17, 37; after Binyu’s death stayed in Kuzhutang to manage farm, 181–82; died in Kuzhutang family home (1949), 381; as hard-working peasant, 19–20; in Kunming, conflict over Wu Han’s relationship with Yuan Zhen, 240–42; in Kunming, Wu Han took care of her, 240; last time Wu Han saw his mother, 309; managed family land after Binyu contracted tuberculosis (1931), 126; opposed Wu Han’s marriage to Yuan Zhen, 211; as refugee with family in Kunming, 239; returned to Kuzhutang, Zhejiang (1939), 243; went to Beiping to care for Wu Han stricken with tuberculosis, 211; Wu Han gave family land to Yiwu County, 381; Wu Han visits in 1946, 306

498

Index

Jiang Shan (Wu Chunhan’s friend): assisted Wu Han collecting Zhejiang bibliophiles, 91; became leftist poet and follower of Lu Xun, 106; fled Guomindang to Wu Han in Beiping, 105–6; joined Communist Party in Yiwu (1928), 34–35 Jiang Tingfu (Qinghua History Department chairman), 83; advised Wu Chunhan to specialize in Ming period, 84; Columbia University student, 86; diplomatic historian, 86; influenced by James Harvey Robinson and Columbia new history group, 129; promised Wu Han department position after graduation, 89; reform Qinghua History Department, appointed chairman to, 86–88, 187–90; secures Qing archives for Qinghua, 90 Jinhua: Jinhua Provincial Middle School in, 24–26; prefectural seat for Yiwu, 17; as Taiping capital, 17, 25 Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), 117; and authorship question, 119–21; dating of, 119; dating of established by Wu Han, 135; newly discovered text, 134–36; Wang Shizhen as author of, 119; and Wu Han, 118–21, 134–36, 138 Kang Sheng, 421 kuadang (dual party member): Qian Jiaju as, 97; Wu Han as, 392, 400 Kunming, Yunnan, 232–33; air raids increased, 241; expansion due to refugee institutions, 234; first air raid drill, 236; housing shortage, 234; overland from Changsha, 233; route by rail from Haiphong, 233; Wu Han lived in city center, 238; Wu Han lived in Luosipo village when married, 242–43; Wu Han moved to country village Luosipo, 241 Kuzhutang, 16–17; author’s visits to, 10; Wu family home, a village museum, 381; Wu Han had family tombstone placed in, 381–82; Wu Han talked

to villager in Beijing about “Great Disaster” conditions in, 407. See also Bitter Bamboo Pond village Lamprecht, Karl, 53 League of Democratic Groups, 270, 271; Democratic League forerunner, 270, 271 Lei Haizong: historical method, taught at Qinghua, 129, 133; taught general history, 187 “Letter to George C. Marshall” (Pan Guangdan, Fei Xiaotong, Wen Yiduo, and Wu Han), 297–98; drafted by Fei Xiaotong, 297–98 Lianda: Beijing, Qinghua, and Nankai universities combined, 246; branch of Lianda in Xuyong, Sichuan (1940– 1941), 257–60; established university and started classes in Kunming, 246; Lei Haizong asked Wu Han to return to Qinghua faculty, 247; university closed Xuyong branch (1941), 260; Wu Han became assistant professor at, 247. See also National Southwest Associated University Liang Fangzhong, 142, 175, 177, 241 Liang Qichao, 53–54; on “New History,” 59, 130–31, 145–47 Liang Shuming on Democratic Movement, 289 Liao Mosha (only surviving member of Three Family Village): Communist Party official in Beijing government, 377–78; fellow comrade with Deng Tuo and Wu Han in Beijing municipal government, 411; held in detention with Wu Han in Beijing Party School in Cultural Revolution, 428; poem as epilogue for Wu Han written in 1972, 429, 435n94; wellknown zawen essayist, joined Deng Tuo and Wu Han to write Three Family Village column in Frontline, 411 Liberated Area, Hebei, Shijiazhuang; Democratic party people gathered, 345; Mao and Zhou Enlai talked with

Index Wu Han, 345–48; Wu and Yuan Zhen entered, 345 Liberated Area, North China, 337, 344–45 Li Hanjun, 162; executed by Guomindang, 173; and labor organizing in Wuhan, 169; taught at Dong Biwu’s Middle School, 163 Li Jun (editor of Three Family Village column), 412 Li Qingzhao (poet): in Jinhua, 25 Li Shixian (Taiping king in Jinhua), 25 Liuli chang: booksellers’ street in Beiping, 131 Liu Mianzhi (penname of Wu Han), 408 Liu Ren, 345, 369, 378 Liu Shaoqi: opinion of Wu’s unpublished third revision of Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography, 417 Liu Xiancai: China College student from Yiwu, 48; Wu Chunhan’s roommate at China College, 48–50 Liu Zitong, 163; labor organizing by, 168; October Revolution in Russia, talked to students about, 164; targeted by principal and fired, 165–66; taught Chinese language and literature, 164; warlord drove him away, 166–68; and women’s liberation issues, 164 Li Wenyi, 166, 170; came to Kunming, 269; CCP member and organizer, 270; Yuan sisters’ friend and student in Normal School, 166 Li Xiucheng (Taiping leader), 25 Li Yan: refugee and Qinghua student of Wu Han, 231–33; taught at Yunnan University, 274; teacher-student relationship, 236–37, 256; Wu Han’s Ming history student at Yunda, 236 Long Yun (Yunnan governor), 233– 35, 271; encouraged free public atmosphere, 234; established Yunnan University, 235; forced from Yunnan by Chiang Kai-shek (1945), 287; promoted education and industrialization, 235

499

Lukacs, Georg: on relation of history and fiction, 138 Luo Ergang, 129; chose Taipings as main research topic, 81; Hu Shi criticized Outline History of Taipings, 214; Hu Shi influenced, 81; and job situation difficulties, 215; joined Historical Research Association, 144; in Kunming, lived with Wu, 247; lived in Hu Shi’s home, 79; opposed Wu’s marriage to Yuan Zhen, 211– 12; social history and scholar class, interested in, 195; student of Hu Shi at Shanghai Zhonggong, 50; suffered neurasthenia during evacuation from Beiping, 224; Taiping documents, discovered in Guangxi, 144; Taiping Outline History widely praised, 213– 14; visits Wu Han in tuberculosis hospital, 211–12; went to Changsha refugee university, 224; worried about Wu Han, living in Luosipo village, 257; Wu Han evacuated Luo and family from Beiping, 224 Luo Longji, 273, 287, 344, 350, 352, 358, 360–61; attacked by Wu Han in AntiRightist Campaign, 398–401, 420; chairman of Kunming Democratic League, 280; official appointment in PRC, 374; Western educated political scientist, member of Socialist Party, 278 Makarenko, Anton: worked with juvenile delinquents in USSR, 379 Ma Lianliang (director of Beijing Opera Troupe), 409–11; chief actor in Hai Rui baguan opera, 408; encouraged Wu to write opera about Hai Rui, 409; and Wang Yan (Hai Rui baguan opera director), 409, 411 Mao Zedong: announced Socialist Education Movement, 412; asked Wu Han to write about Hai Rui as model, 407; attacked Wu Han, 15; and centrist United Front, 272; influence on Wu Han, 392; meeting with Chiang Kai-shek (Sept. 1945),

500

Index

291; moved to left, stressing class struggle and mass mobilization in 1962, 412–15; rulers in history interested him, 346; saw play about Hai Rui in Shanghai, 407; talked of New Democracy in early 1940s, 272; wrote about coalition and united front, 282; Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography of Wu Han’s interested him, 345–46 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 221–22 Marshall, George C.: American aid led to civil war, 309; blamed for supporting GMD against CCP, 309; recalled when negotiations collapsed, 313; sent by President Truman to unify GMD and CCP, 295–96 Marxism, study of brought interest in Communism, 162, 163, 165, 169 Maurois, Andre: model for Wu’s biography, 254 May Fourth Movement (1919): in Jinhua Middle School, 28–29; meant equal rights for women to Yuan sisters in northwest Hubei, 159–60 May Thirtieth Incident, 1925; demonstration in Jinhua, 29; Qian Jiaju as leader of Socialist Youth League, 29 McMahon, Keith, 27 Mei Yiqi (Qinghua president), 329 Meng Sen: Ming-Qing period specialist, 88, 197–99 Miao Jiaming: Yunnan industrial and financial leader, 234 mie zu: destruction of the clan, 426–27 Military Control Commission: surrender of Beiping, 355 Military Liaison Office, Beiping: Communist liaison group withdrawn, 324; final step to civil war, 324–25; for Guomindang, Communist, American relationship, 318; Xu Bing CCP representative, 318, 324 Ming emperors’ tombs, 416–18 Ming shi Lu (Ming Veritable Records), 133 “mirror of history,” 142

Nanjing, Guomindang capital, 46, 48, 68n3 Nankai University: bombed by Japanese, 231 National Beijing Library, 74–75 national consciousness and education, 38–39; and Zhijiang University (Hangzhou Christian College), 39 National Day, 283 nationalism: demonstrations in 1931– 1932, 98–99; Great Han nationalism, 200, 204; Manchurian crisis and Japanese aggression arouse, 98 Nationalist government: arrested faculty and students for political crimes, 130; collapse and withdrawal from Nanjing, 353; convened National Assembly, 326; defeats of army, 351–52; Democratic League banned by, 326; GMD Army took Yan’an, 325; GMD Beiping army commander surrendered, 353–55; Japanese invasion of Manchuria, weak response to, 98; negotiations for withdrawal, 352; proclaimed Communists in rebellion, 326; repelled Japanese attack on Shanghai, 100; White Terror, to get rid of Communist influence, 130 Nationalist Party, 46. See also Guomindang National People’s Congress, 385 National Southwest Associated University: created from Changsha Temporary University, 238–39. See also Lianda National Studies (Guoxue), 51 native place ties, 78, 96–98 New China United Front: Democratic League essential in Front, 352–53; group meeting on plans for transformation of Democratic League, 357; Harbin Common Agreement key to, 349–51; intelligentsia, key roles for, 347; main center of early activity in Hebei Shijiazhuang Liberated Zone, 350; New Political Consultative

Index Conference basis of formation of government, 354; New United Front begins to function, 362; Unified Declaration of democratic people on eve of fall of Beiping, 353; United Front Department supervised Democratic League reorganization in Liberated Zone, 351; Zhou Enlai had key democratic people brought into Beiping, 354; Zhou Enlai oversaw planning for, 348. See also Democratic League (post-1948) New Fourth Army Incident, 258–59; Democratic League organized nationally afterward, 278; Eighth Brigade Kuzhutang guerilla base, 307–9; outrage, public response, 259; possibility of United Front ended by, 259; students angry, talked to Wu Han, 259–60 New History, 58, 129–31; broad view of society written for the people, 146; interrelationship of social and economic with political history, 143; Jiang Tingfu and China centered New History, 187–88; materialist view of past, 146; popular histories, 146; Tang Xianglong on, 143. See also social history New Political Consultative Conference: founded the new People’s Republic state, 363 New Thought Tide, 157, 162 New Youth magazine, 162; Hu Shi’s article on vernacular, 51 Northern Expedition: Jinhua in Zhejiang campaign, 34; and nationalistic talk, 33; organized under United Front (1926), 170; and Wu Chunhan’s friends, 34–35 Notes from Three Family Village (Sanjiacun zhaji), 2, 411; authors thought readers wanted cultural subjects, 411; published in Frontline journal of Beijing Communist Party Committee, 411; Wu Han essays on inheritance of morality attracted controversy, 411–15

501

novels: fiction in Ming shi, dynastic history, Wu Han’s work on, 137–38; influence on students, 26, 119; A Rustic’s Idle Talk, influence on Wu Chunhan, 26–27; Yu Pingbo taught history of fiction, 129. See also Wu Han’s historical interests Parker pen, 343, 345 Party Rectification Zhengfeng (spring 1957), 391; Mao “On Correctly Handling Contradictions,” 397; participants labeled Rightists, 398 party-state: founded by Political Consultative Conference, 363; New China, 364 Peng Dehuai (“Great Leap Forward” critic), 410, 422 Peng Yingyu, 372; Mao saw symbolic importance, 346; monk in Wu Han’s Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography, 346 Peng Zhen: attempted to defend Wu Han, 421–22; effort to oppose 1965– 1966 extreme leftism, 426; mayor of Beijing (1951), 370, 377; member of Standing Committee of CCP Central Committee, 378; Municipal Party secretary, 370; planning for United Front, 357; seldom in municipal office, 378; sent Wu Han to Four Clean-ups Campaign at Chang Ping, 426; Wu Han’s relationship to, 401 People’s Liberation Army civil war victories: crucial battles, HuaiHai, Liaoning-Shenyang, BeipingTientsin, 329 People’s Republic of China: established October 1949, 370 Political Consultative Conference (1949): unitary nature of coalition under unitary leadership of CCP, 344 Political Consultative Conference, 295; CCP call for new conference, 328; coalition government provided for, 296; coalition nullified by GMD oneparty government, 296; convened by Chiang Kai-shek Jan. 1946, 295–96; May First Declaration, 328; seen as

502 spur to liberation, 329; Wu Han’s opinion on, 329 popular history series: Brief Chinese Histories Series (Zhongguo lishi xiao Congshu), 387, 406–7; inspired by Zhang Yinlin and Wu Han’s 1930s plans for popular histories, 248; Wu Han, editor in chief of Brief Chinese Histories Series, launched (1960), 406; Zhang Xikong as series editorial assistant to Wu Han, 406 Qian Jiaju, 61, 96–98, 179, 244; antiJapanese demonstrations (1931), leader of, 99; appointed to official position in PRC, 374; arrested by Guomindang in Nanjing, 99; compared Wu Han to Wen Suchun in novel, 212; disagreed with Wu Han about anti-Japanese political activity, 100, 105; leader of Jinhua May Thirtieth demonstration, 29; and fear of Guomindang, 97; as Wu Chunhan’s middle school friend, 25–27. See also Wu Han and Qian Jiaju Qianmen Gate, 74 Qian Mu: adjunct lecturer at Qinghua, 188–89 Qinghua History Department: department members when Wu joined, 188–90; Lei Haizong, postwar chairman of, 314; postwar department, 314; reform of, by Chairman Jiang Tingfu, 86–88, 187–90; Wu Han, Ming specialist in, 88; Wu Han, postwar full professor in, 314; Wu Han becomes chairman (1949), 356; and Zhang Yinlin, 193 Qinghua University: celebrated peaceful end of siege of Beiping, 354; evacuation to temporary university in Changsha, 223; GMD ordered Qinghua to move south at surrender, university refused, 355; GMD used as hospital postwar, 313; in Haidian, northwest of Beiping city, 90; Japanese occupation of,

Index 313; library destroyed, 313; Mei Yiqi (university president), 223; Military Control Commission representative Wu Han, 356; President Mei Yiqi fled GMD surrender, Dean Feng Youlan responsible for, 355; returned to Beiping campus (1946), 313; student and faculty refugees (Aug. 1937), 222–25; Wu Han, dean of College of Liberal Arts, 356 Qinghua Weekly (Qinghua zhoukan), 117; editorial board, Wu Han and Xia Nai on, 121–23; Wu Han, literary and history section editor, 121 Queen Mother of the West, 66, 118–19; geographical location of interests Wu Han, 119; and Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), 118 railroad line, Jiangsu to Hangzhou, 17, 127 “Red” and “expert” labels, 391 rehabilitation of Wu Han after Cultural Revolution, 430, 431; Liao Mosha poem in memory of Wu, 1972, 429, 435n94 relationship networks, guanxi wang, 384 Republican China: police magistrates in reforms, 18–19; transition from Qing dynastic government, 18 Robinson, James Harvey, 145–46; at Columbia University, 56; and nonMarxist materialism, 129 Rong Zhaozu (Yuan Xizhi’s husband), 380 Roy, David Todd: and Jin Ping Mei, 136 rural gentry, 18–19 A Rustic’s Idle Talk (Yesou puyan): favorite novel of Wu Chunhan, 26–27; hero Wen Suchun, Wu Han resembled, 212, 246 Sailer, Randolph: American professor at Yanjing University, 322 Shanghai, 45 Shen Chong Incident: Democratic Youth League anti-American demonstrations, 322–23; rape of

Index female student by American soldiers, 322 Shen Junru, 344, 358, 362, 382; appointed to official position in PRC, 374; leader of National Salvation Association group and United Front, 273 Shi Liang, 352, 358 Shixue (Historical Studies Supplement), 145–47; Manifesto, by editor Wu Han, 145–46; published by Historical Research Association, 143–47; published members’ works, 144; in Tianjin yishi bao and Nanjing Zhongyang bao, 144 Shi Zhecun refugee: taught at Yunnan University, 231–33 Sima Guang: Comprehensive Mirror for Aid to Government Zizhi tongjian, 385; Gu Jiegang, chief proofreader, 385; Wu Han supervised modern punctuated edition project, 385 Sino-Japanese relations: Ming SinoJapanese policy, 125; in Zhu Yuanzhang reign, Wu Han analyzed, 125 Snow, Edgar: broke news of New Fourth Army Incident, 259 social history: Arif Dirlik on, 61; and Fei-Wu Qinghua seminar on “Structure of Power,” 339–41; Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang, 189; interest grows in, 61; and Liang Qichao, 189; at Qinghua, 189; and Tao Xisheng, 61–63; and Wu Chunhan, 64, 135, 148 Social History Debate, 143. See also Dirlik, Arif Socialist Education Movement, 412; aimed to reorient people to Communist aims after “Three Years of Disaster” of Great Leap, 415; Mao announced (May 1963), 412 Song Dian (Wu Han’s niece), 422–25; criticized and attacked by students at university, 425; visited Wu Han and Yuan Zhen under criticism, 422–25 Song Ruji (Wu Puyue’s husband), 423

503

sources for biography, 9–10; interviewees, 11, 437–40 Southern Bureau of Communist Party: Dong Biwu led, in Chongqing, 261; reached out to people in Guomindang areas, 261 Southwest Culture Research Society: academic-political meetings, 271; discussion forum in Tang Family Garden, 274; office for publishing in Tang Garden, 277, 281 Southwest Document Research Office, 277; Democratic League publications, 281; Democratic Weekly, published, 281; Democratic Youth League student workers in office, 288; printed Mao’s United Front policies, 288; printing office in Tang Family Garden, 277; Wu Han, editor, 277 storytellers: on local heroes in Yiwu, 22; Wu Han invited to Kuzhutang family home, 306 Strachey, Lytton: Queen Victoria as model biography for Wu, 254 Su Shuangbi (journalist): article defending Wu Han, 426 Taiping: Luo Ergang on, 81 Taiping palace in Jinhua, 25; middle school classes in, 25 Taiping Rebellion, 17 Tang Xianglong: at Kunming, lived at Luosipo, 241; Qing economic history, 142; on Yuan Zhen’s influence on Wu, 244–45 Tan Qixiang: editor of Historical Atlas of China, 385–86; Wu Han supervised and encouraged atlas project, 385–86 Tao Menghe: hired Qian Jiaju, 105; established Journal of Chinese Social and Economic Research, 143; Social Research Institute organized by, 105; and Tang Xianglong, 142, 241 Tao Xisheng, 59; influenced Wu Han, 61; on Western Han economic conditions, 62–62; teaching social history at Qinghua, 189 television series “Wu Han,” 7–8

504

Index

Teng Ssu-yu, 75, 77; first look at Beijing recalled, 75; Hong Weilian’s assistant in Yanjing library, 77 “Ten Professors”: “Declaration on Construction of China’s Mainstream Culture” (1935), 207–8 textual criticism: Gu Jiegang practiced, 78; Hu Shi practiced, 78 Third Force, 324; Wu Han critical of “Third Force” people, 341 thought reform: centrist intellectuals early models, 376; and national unity, early years of New China, 376; reeducation of intellectuals, Wu Han active in, 376 Three Character Classic, 15, 21 Three Family Village. See Notes from Three Family Village Tiantai Buddhist monastery, 37 United Front: destroyed, 170; of Guomindang and Communist Party members (1926–1927), 170; Guomindang purge of Communist Party, 45; Nationalist government started under, 170; Northern Expedition launched under, 170 United Front, redefining: Dong Biwu, linking, 330–31; New Political Consultative Conference, part of, 329; Wu Han’s importance to, 330; Zhou Enlai planned changes, 348. See also New China United Front United Front after New Fourth Army disaster, 272–73; as a forum for intellectuals to tell government criticisms, 271; cooperative action to preserve the nation, 277; project to enlarge the Front, 272 United Front Department in Shijiazhuang, 344, 350–51, 354 United Front in 1940s: Mao supports coalition, 282; National Salvation group, 273; patriotic groups became leaders of Front, 273; revived as centrist group in early 1940s, 271–73; Wu Han supported, 282; Yuan Zhen interested in, 273

Veyne, Paul, 8 Wang Kang: editor of Kunming Freedom Discussion (Ziyou luntan), 339; participant in Fei-Wu seminar, 339 Wang Mang, 63 Wang Shizhen: and Hu Yinglin, 119 Wan Li, 428 warlords, 50 Wen Suchen: hero of A Rustic’s Idle Talk, 26–27; Wu Han’s life, similarity to, 212, 246 Wenxue jikan (Literary Quarterly): Wu Han on editorial board and published in, 136–37; Zheng Zhenduo, editor of, 136 Wen Yiduo, 208, 238–39, 274, 283, 284; assassinated in Kunming, 311; became radical at end of war, 295; criticized United States for supporting GMD, 300; last speech of, 312; martyrdom of, 312; and “Open letter to Marshall,” 297–98; political activist, 286–88; professor of Chinese literature and poet, 238; publication of his collected works, 318; as Wu Han’s friend and comrade-in-arms, 283; Wu Han speaking at memorial meeting for, 317 Winter, Robert: Qinghua professor and friend of Wu Han, 327, 338, 345 Women’s Reading Society: girls cut hair as act of rebellion, 166; members and husbands married later, 165; opposed principal’s paternalism, 165; overthrow society’s restrictions on women, aim to, 165; photo of members, 168; photo of Yuan Zhen celebrating cutting hair, 167; in Wuchang, 165 Wu Binyu (Wu Han’s father), 15–17, 18–19; Confucian scholar and village mediator, 19; contracted tuberculosis, Wu Chunhan returned home to visit, 126; country scholar and teacher, 17; died in spring 1934, 128; financial difficulties, 31; and general store in Wudian, 31; influence on

Index Wu Chunhan to become scholar, 31; police academy graduate, 18; police magistrate, 18–19; and Qing examination system, 18; son of peasant and firecracker maker, 17; as Wu Chunhan’s teacher, 21–24; Yiwu county gentry, 18–19 Wu Chunhan (Wu Han), boyhood and youth: attended Jinhua Provincial Middle School, 24–26; attended primary school at Nourishing Virtue School, 21–24; attended Zhijiang University in Hangzhou, 37; became head of family, 128–29, 180–81; and bosom companion (zhiji) relationship with Yuan Zhen, 27; chose China College (Zhongguo gongxue) in Shanghai, 40; entered China College, 46; father, relationship with, 23–24, 35–37, 40; father contracts tuberculosis, 126; father’s death (1934), 128; as historian, 15–16; as Hu Shi’s student at China College, 50–51; opposed sister’s arranged marriage, 126–29; and Qian Jiaju, his special friend in middle school, 25f–27; Qinghua University graduate, 16; refused marriage arranged by father, 35; returned home in 1932 after five years, 126; ran away from family and home to school, 36–37; student in the China College Department of History and Sociology, 50; and village boyhood, 16–22; as village teacher, 32; and Yang Zhibing, his special teacher, 21–24; and Yuan Zhen, relationship with as student, 16. See also Wu Han Wu Chunhan, student in Beiping: accepted at Qinghua, 83; antiJapanese student activism, uninterested in, 99–100; asked Hu Shi for help, 81–82; Beijing University, considered applying, 77; cataloguer in Yanjing library, 76; Hu Shi and Gu Jiegang help him get work-study, 83; and Hu Yinglin research project, 78, 83; and Jiang Tingfu, teacher

505

who influenced him the most, 129; and Luo Ergang, friendship with, 81; Qinghua entrance exams, took, 82–83; Qinghua Weekly, on editorial board, 121; Qinghua work-study in library, 83; Yanjing University, transfer not allowed, 73–74 Wu Chunhan and New History: influenced by Liang Qichao and Tao Xisheng, 59; on new history, 59, 60; New History discourse in 1930s, 117– 54; and social history issues, 64; Tao Xisheng’s influence on, 62; Western Han economic conditions, 58 Wu Chunxi (Wu Han’s brother), 29; anti-Japanese student activist, 103; assistant teacher at Lianda, 239; began studies in Beiping, 84; criticized by Wu Han in AntiRightist Campaign (1957), 399–420; December Ninth Movement, participated in, 210; evacuated with Wu Han from Beiping, 224–25; after father’s death stayed in school in Beiping, 182; fled to Changsha Temporary University, 224–25; graduated Qinghua at Lianda in economics (1939), 239; helped Wu Han with Shanghai league contacts, 310; hiked overland to Lianda University, Kunming, 239; house in Shanghai international concessions, 312; league members see Wu Han at his Shanghai home, 312; after mother died arranged family tombstone in village, 382; participated in peripheral Communist group in Beiping, 179, 210; and Qian Jiaju, becomes friends with, 102; Qinghua economics department student, 210; returned to Shanghai with wife and children, 243, 305–6; in Shanghai Democratic League, 306; worried about danger to Wu Han from GMD police, 310; Wu Chunhan helps, 89; Wu Han, blacklisted, took refuge at his home (1948), 343; Wu Han asked him to ship books to him from

506

Index

family home, 381; Wu Han criticized him as rightist in Anti-Rightist Campaign, 399 Wudian market town, 16, 24, 31, 32, 34 Wu Han (Wu Chunhan): became democratic activist, 300; chair of history department (1949), 356; chair of new Beiping Democratic League, 361; committed to following leadership of CCP by 1949, 361; contracts tuberculosis, 211–12; criticized family members in AntiRightist Campaign, 399; declined Central Research Institute position (1934), 181; graduated Qinghua (1934), took professional name of Wu Han, 149; historian of Ming dynasty, 2, 73–110; instructor in Qinghua History Department (fall 1934), 180; joined Communist Party secretly (1957), 393; League of Democratic Groups (1943), first political group he joined, 279; Lianda closed (May 1946), 300; member of Commission of Higher Education, 363; myths about Wu Han, 5–8; professor at Yunnan University (appointed 1937), 221; Qinghua dean of Liberal Arts College (1949), 356; Qinghua granted leave of absence, 221; Qinghua History Department’s tension around him, 220; as refugee fled Beiping to Tianjin and Xuzhou (1937), 223–24; rehabilitated after Cultural Revolution, 10, 429–31; returned to Qinghua as assistant professor (1941), 247; return to Kuzhutang home 1946, 306–9; return to Qinghua in Peiping, 313; sea/ rail route to Kunming to Yunnan University, 224, 231–33; snubbed by Hu Shi, 320; speaking at political meeting in Kunming, 283; target of Cultural Revolution, 1–5, 421–29; taught Ming history class at Beijing University (1956), 390; vice mayor of Beijing, 2, 369–79; and Yuan Zhen (his wife), 3; with Yuan Zhen to

Chongqing, then Shanghai on return to Beiping, 301 Wu Han, essayist and subjects: bureaucrats’ behavior, 316; Cao Cao, admirer of, 316; critical of intellectuals for not coping (1948), 374; democratic political issues, 281; on education and culture, 316; on Eighth Brigade guerrilla base, 306–9; equality, importance of, 321; forum essays on contemporary political and social issues, 274–77; Guomindang censorship of “Red Army,” 275; on halting civil war, 309–10; “Historical Talks,” 316; intellectuals necessary sociopolitical role, 375; and irony in Jin Ping Mei, 136; liberal western democracy, 320; morality essays, 413–15; “Old History, New Comments,” 316; pennames used, 146–49; political crisis, concern over, 104–5; Qinghua students, criticizes anti-Japanese response, 103–4; reeducation of intellectuals, 376; Roosevelt and the “Four Freedoms,” 320; satirizes foreign educated professors, 106–9; “Structure of Power” seminar with Fei Xiaotong, 338–41; thought he overcame his class viewpoint, 376; Three Family Village essays, 316, 412–15 Wu Han, essay series published volumes: Notes on Reading History (Dushi zhaji) (1956), 390; The Spring Collection (Chuntian ji) (1961), 390; Study Collection (Xuexi ji) (1963), 390; Throwing Spears Collection (Touxiang ji) (1959), 390; Under the Lamp (Dengxia ji) (1960), 390 Wu Han, fugitive: going to Liberated Area in North China, 342; planned to join Democratic League people in Hong Kong, 342; unable to leave Shanghai, 342 Wu Han, historian: Hu Shi’s mentoring of, 79, 92–94; Hu Shi’s thinking, divergence from, 94; Jiang Tingfu slates Wu as department Ming

Index specialist, 89; lectured on Ming history at Beijing University (1956), 390–91; Ming period, chooses to specialize in, 85; Ming use of political power in social context, 201; “Short Course on Ming History” for CCP cadre (1962), 391; and social history, interest grows, 110, 135, 339–41. See also Wu Han’s historical interests Wu Han and Beijing Democratic League: chairman of (1949–1966), 375, 397; as chairman transmitted CCP Central Committee policy to league, 397; league as important factor in leadership of political intellectuals, 375; took active part in anti-rightist criticism of “rightist” members, 398–401. See also Democratic League (post-1948) Wu Han and children, 382; arranged to adopt brother Chunxi’s son, 382; and children of his brothers and sisters, 382; gave up adopting nephew, 382; loved children, wanted his own, 382; sister-in-law unable to give up her son, 382; Wu and Yuan Zhen decided to adopt outside family, 382–83 Wu Han and Communist Party: activist in Anti-Rightist Campaign, 400; asked Mao to join (1948), 347; Mao and Zhou Enlai need him in United Front, 347; Mao postponed Wu’s joining to have him in United Front, Zhou explained to Wu, 390; with Mao’s permission became member secretly (1957), 347; member of Beijing municipal branch (1957), 393; membership only revealed in Cultural Revolution, 393, 401; wanted to be kuadang, dual party member, 392; wrote to Peng Zhen applying to join (1954), 392–93 Wu Han and cultural history, 50–58 Wu Han and Cultural Revolution, 426– 31; death in prison (10 October 1969), 429; detained at home on Beichang jie under Red Guard control, 422–25; detention in Beijing Party School

507

with Yuan Zhen, Liao Mosha and others, 428; in prison (March 1968), 429; as target of, 1–12, 375; Wu family, friends, and associates criticized and suffered for years, 425–29 Wu Han and Democratic League (post1948): carried letter for Shanghai people to Liberated Area, 344; elected chairman of new Beiping Municipal Branch (1949), 361; entered Beijing in victory parade, 355; first league cell organized by Wu Han and Hu Yuzhi, 350; key league member invited to Political Consultative Conference, 349; met with CCP people to plan league transformation, 357–59; one of four leaders at reorganization discussion with United Front head, 350; signed Unified Declaration, 353; temporary working committee of Beiping league planned league reunification, 358–59 Wu Han and Democratic League, 319–23; assassinations of Wen and Li concerned league, 318; key United Front meeting to make plans (1949), 357; after league banned, meetings at Wu Han’s, 327; league political meetings at his home, 320–22; political ideas for liberal democracy, 320; as rallying point for Shanghai league, 310, 312; as “revolutionary” leader, 360; role in changes in league, 356–59; and strategy opposing GMD pro-civil war policy, 312 Wu Han and Hai Rui: Hai Rui baguan (Hai Rui Dismissed) opera, 408–11; and Ma Lianliang, lead actor and director of Beijing Opera Troupe, 408–11; Mao asked Wu to write about Hai as honest official, qingguan, 401; opera cancelled by Jiang Qing, 410; plot advocated return of land to peasants by ruler, 410; under penname Liu Mianzhi wrote “Hai Rui Rebukes the

508

Index

Emperor” “Hai Rui ma Huangdi” (June 1959), 408; wrote Hai Rui as incorruptible official in 1934, 196 Wu Han and Mao Zedong: admired Mao, 347–48, 392; first meeting of, 345; and Hai Rui as model official, 196, 405, 407; Mao inscribed and sent Wu Han his Selected Works (vol. 4, 1961), 423; Mao invited him to talk at Shijiajiang (1948), 345; Mao letter, 347; at National People’s Congress talked about historical publishing projects, 385; read Mao’s works, 347; theme of relation of past to present, need for understanding, 403–5; told Mao wanted to join Communist Party (1948), 347; Wu Han gave Mao Zhu Yuanzhang biography, Mao discussed, 345–47; Wu Han’s ideas on Chinese cultural values challenged Mao’s ideas, 420 Wu Han and Qian Jiaju: close friends as students in Beiping, 99; disagree how to oppose Japanese (1931), 99–100; bonded by shared historical interests, 179; both on Qinghua Zhoukan editorial board, 179; fell in love, 178; history discussions enjoyed by both, 177; introduced by Liang Fangzhong, 177; kindred spirits (zhiyin), 245–46; married secretly, 242–43; native place bonds and school ties, 96–98; Qian compared Wu to Wen Suchen in novel, 212; sisters brought Yuan Zhen to Wu Han in Kunming, 240; spend weekends together in Beiping, 10; together went to Liberated Area, 345; tuberculosis of the spine meant Yuan Zhen unable to stand for four years, 177; visit to Dong Biwu in Chongqing, 260–61; wedding photo, 242; were mutually dependent, 288; Wu Han and Yuan Zhen’s relationship, 177; Wu Han attracted by her mind and beauty, 179; Wu Han helped Yuan Zhen and Fuzhi with money, 182; Wu

Han’s mother, brother, and friends opposed the marriage, 211; Xuyong Lianda branch, sent to, 257–60; Yuan Fuzhi did work for Wu Han, 182; Yuan Zhen, signer of democratic people’s “Unified Declaration,” 353; Yuan Zhen could not bear children, 178; Yuan Zhen influenced Wu Han favorably on United Front, 273; Yuan Zhen’s influenced Wu Han in discussions on Marxism, 245; Yuan Zhen’s reputation with CCP brought respect to Wu Han, 330–32 Wu Han and Zhang Yinlin, 188, 193–95; general history multivolume project plans, continued in Kunming, 248– 50; and general history project, 216– 18; and New History, 195; planned popular histories for elementary students, 248; Zhang Yinlin died (1942), 250; Zhang Yinlin influenced Wu Han’s interest in popular history in 1960s, 387 Wu Han as vice mayor: appointed vice mayor November 1949, 370; asked to become vice mayor spring 1949, 369; considered as “party member outside of party,” 377; established after-school play school, 378–79; established Beijing Half-Work Half-Study school for delinquents, 378–79; established Beijing Normal Academy, 378–79; established Beijing planetarium, 378–79; established Beijing radio/television university, 378; established new municipal programs, 378–79; gave up home at Qinghua, moved into city, 379; his vice mayor position related to coalition in United Front, 372; as left-centrist intellectual, 374; lived in Toufa hutong compound for city government officials, 379; moved later to Beichang jie west of Forbidden City, 380; one of two vice mayors until 1957, 377; responsibilities related to his role in the United Front coalition, 372;

Index responsible for administration of health, education, and cultural activities in municipal area, 377; supervised education and culture in the municipality, 372; vice mayor for sixteen years until Mao removed him in 1966, 377; and Yuan Zhen remote from old friends and family, 380–81 Wu Han as vice mayor, educator: concerned to prevent elimination of the premodern past from curriculum, 404–5; “great men” of the past important for education, 405; relation of past to present important, 403–4 Wu Han at Lianda University: assistant professor, taught general history and Ming history, 247; general history course used Zhang Yinlin’s book, 262–63; left Kunming to return to Qinghua in Peiping, 305, 313; Lei Haizong asked Wu Han to return to Qinghua faculty in Kunming (1939), 247; popular teacher, 263–64; returned to main campus, taught general history and Ming history (1941–1946), 262; university closed branch (1941), 260; Xuyong branch, taught general history, 257–60; Xuyong living conditions very bad, 258 Wu Han at Qinghua, postwar: dean of College of Liberal Arts and chair of history department (1949), 356; edited Wen Yiduo’s works, 318; full professor, teaching advanced classes in Ming and Song history, 314; home in Western Garden with Yuan Zhen, 313–14; hunted by GMD police in Beiping, 342; leaves for Shanghai and Hong Kong, 342; university transferred to Wu for Military Control Commission after GMD left, 355 Wu Han at Yunnan University (1937), 236; full professor, 238; gave up professorship 1939 to return to Qinghua faculty at Lianda, 247;

509

taught Chinese general history and Ming history, 236 Wu Han letters to Hu Shi, 64–67, 77, 101–2, 125, 126; asks for Hu Shi’s advice on entering university, 77; on dating Honglou meng, 77; on Japanese Shanghai invasion, 101–2 Wu Han’s family in Yunnan, 239–43; fled Zhejiang to join Wu Han in Kunming, 239; Kunming air raids increase, 241; lived at Wu Han’s house in center of Kunming, 239–40; Wu Han moves family to Luosipo village, 241–42; Yuan Zhen joined in Kunming house, 240–41 Wu Han’s historical interests: bibliophiles as social history, 90–91; contextualizing, 79; course in Ming social history, 205; cultural history, 190–93; document removal from China, 123; general history, 188; general history project with Zhang Yinlin, 216–18; history and fiction, relation of, 136–40; “Hu Weiyong Affair,” 140–42, 255; Hu Yinglin, 78, 83; intellectuals’ responsibility to criticize, 341; intellectuals role more important in late civil war, 374; Jianzhou prior to Qing dynasty, 197– 200, 391; Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), authorship and dating, 119–21, 134–36; Jin Ping Mei social background, 195; Korean Shilu, Wu Han’s compilation from, 199, 391; Korean Yi dynasty, Veritable Records of, 198, 391; Li Zicheng and Ming collapse, 196, 245; Ming founding period and Hu Weiyong, 125, 255; Ming shi (Ming History), begins reading, 124, 129; Ming shi (Ming History), evaluation of, 133; Ming shi Lu (Ming Veritable Records), 134; Ming social history, 205–10; Ming use of political power, 201, 255; New History, 146–49; Nuzhen Manchu independent rise and unification, 199–200, 391; political oppression basic problem, 315; popular history

510

Index

for school children, 248; power of literati officials and gentry (1948), 339–41; Queen Mother of the West, 118–19; social and economic history, farmers at end of Ming, 130, 148, 196; social history issues in Ming, 195–96; space historically important, 219; space in Chinese political theory, centrality of, 204; sprouts of capitalism, 391; totalitarian discourse in 1930s and 1940s, 202, 255; Wang Shizhen, 119–20; Yuan-Ming social and political history, 197–206; Zhu Yuanzhang, view of changed, 314–15; Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography, began, 251–54. See also Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming Taizu), issues of concern to Wu Han Wu Han’s letters from Hu Shi, 92–94 Wu Han under attack: debate sparked by his essays on inheritance of morality, 411–15; Deng Tuo and Peng Zhen try to protect him, 421– 22; Mao convinced Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography (1965) intended as attack, 419; Mao said crucial point was Wu Han defending Peng Dehuai as Hai Rui, 422; Mao talked of criticizing Wu Han (Sept. 1965), 421; morality question and Hai Rui controversy, 414–15; target of the left, 419; two self-criticisms, 426; sent to Chang Ping village Four Clean-ups reeducation, 426; Yao Wenyuan, Jiang Qing’s group, criticism of Hai Rui opera, 421 Wu Puxing (Wu Han’s younger sister), 20; with mother after father’s death, stayed with, 182; refugee in Kunming, 239; returned to Kuzhutang with mother, 243; went to Yan’an, 306 Wu Puyue (Wu Han’s sister), 20; asked Wu Chunhan to help her oppose arranged marriage, 127; attended Hangzhou Middle School, Wu Chunhan helped, 127; graduated from Yang Zhibing’s school, 126;

opposed marriage arranged by her father, 126; refugee in Kunming, 239 Wu Xiaoling, 411; editor of Chinese literature series of Chinese popular history series, 406 Wu Xiaoyan (Wu Han’s adopted daughter), 383; committed suicide September 1976, 429; raped, imprisoned in 1976, 429 Wu Xuan (Wu’s nephew), 382 Wu Zhang (Wu Bizhang): killed in antiJapanese war, 106; Wu Han’s friend and teacher in Wudian school, 34 Wu Zhang (Wu Han’s adopted son), 383; rehabilitation memorial meeting for Wu Han with Wu Zhang receiving condolences, 431 Wu Zhichun, 171–75; forced to flee to Moscow in United Front breakup, 172; in Foreign Ministry of Nationalist government, 171; in Foreign Ministry of United Front Nationalist government, 171; Qinghua administrative dean, 174; saved Yuan Fuzhi from prison, 174; special relationship with Yuan Zhen, 171 Xia Nai (archeologist and historian), 133; student at Qinghua, 129 Xiang Yangsheng (penname of Deng Tuo), 426; defended Wu Han in Beijing Daily article (Dec. 1965), 426 Xiang Zemin, 369, 428; in detention with Wu Han in Cultural Revolution, 428; sent by Central Committee with Liu Ren to ask Wu Han to be vice mayor of Beijing (1948), 428 Xiao Yaonan (Hubei warlord): opposed labor organizing, 168; troops drove teacher Liu Zitong from Women’s Normal School, 166; warlord backed expulsion of rebel students at normal school, 166 Xu Bing, 329; representative of CCP leaders to Beiping Democratic League, 318 Xu Daling (history instructor at Beijing University): met Liu Shaoqi

Index at Ming tombs, Liu talked about Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan (Wu Han) biography, 416; Wu’s student in 1956 Ming history class at Beijing University, 391 Yang Dali, 402 Yang Jiang (Qian Zhongshu’s wife): felt alienated from Yuan Zhen after 1949, 380–81; Yuan Zhen’s friend, 175–76 Yangtu: Qing dynasty maps by Yang Shoujing, 386 Yang Zhibing: encouraged Wu Chunhan to continue advanced schooling, 30; Nourishing Virtue Primary School teacher, 21–24; Wu Chunhan’s letters to, 81, 83, 84, 89, 100; Wu Chunhan’s teacher, 21–24 Yanjing students: Blue Gown Group, 77; Western Clothes Group (Bourgeoisie Group), 77 Yanjing University: campus became Beijing University in 1949, 76; founded 1910, closed by PRC regime 1949, 390–91; Gu Jiegang teaching at Yanda, 74; Wu Chunhan’s transfer not allowed, 73–74 Yanjing University library: Wu Han worked as cataloguer, 76 Yan Yuan, 121–23, 145, 403; Liang Qichao on, 122–23 Yao Wenyuan, 1, 5–6, 12 Ye Jianying: acting mayor of Beijing, 370; head of Military Commission at PLA takeover of Beijing, 370 Ye Meiying (Wu Chunxi’s wife), 128; in Beiping with Wu Chunxi, 209; December Ninth Movement, participated in, 209–10; helped Wu Han’s mother, 242; refugee in Kunming with Wu Chunxi and two children, 239; returned to Shanghai with Wu Chunxi, 243; unable to give up her son to Wu Han, 382 Ying Ruocheng: Wu Han’s student sees him in PLA base, 354 Yiwu Communist Party organizing in 1927–1928, 35

511

Yiwu county in Zhejiang, 16–18; county Guomindang sent messenger to warn Wu Han, 285; Yiwu county town, 16 Yuan Fang: Fei Xiaotong’s sociology student at Yunnan University, 339; Qinghua Sociology Department chair (1980s), 339 Yuan Fuzhi (Yuan Zhen’s elder sister): brought Yuan Zhen to Kunming, 240; cared for Yuan Zhen, 177; Communist Party member, 179; imprisoned in Anhui on death row as Communist bandit, 174; joined Communist Youth Corps (1925), 169; left for Chongqing to see Dong Biwu (1939), 246; lived in Beijing with husband, Chen Yu, 380; Moscow Sun Yatsen University, studied at, 170; moved to Beiping, 175, 177; released from prison (1933), 175; returned from Moscow, sent by CCP to work in Anhui, 173–74; spent four and a half years in Guomindang prison, 174; taught at Wuhan Preparatory School, 170; went on to Yan’an, 246 Yuan ming yuan (Ming Summer Palace), 313 Yuan Shutang (Yuan Zhen’s uncle), 157; killed by Guomindang, 173 Yuan Xizhi (Yuan Zhen’s sister), 177, 328, 399–400; helped bring Yuan Zhen to Kunming, 240; married Rong Zhaozu (historian), 246 Yuan Zhen, 1, 3, 10, 423–24, 428–31; in core group of Dong Biwu’s women revolutionary students, 330; Dong Biwu connected her with Yuan Fuzhi in Yan’an, 260; entered liberated zone with Wu Han, 345; Hu Shi, critical of, 320; in Japanese occupation of Beiping unable to flee, 223–24; joined CCP and openly active in 1950s, 392; joined Wu Han in Kunming (1939), 240; met Dong Biwu in Chongqing, 260; preferred living at Qinghua, not center of city, 279; Qinghua University student, 16;

512

Index

sister Yuan Fuzhi lived nearby in Beijing, 380; speaks of Mao and Wu Han’s relationship, 423–24; surgery for uterine cancer, 305; traveled with Wu Han to Shanghai, 305; Wu Han met her in Haiphong, 240 Yuan Zhen, girlhood: and brothers Yuan Shutang and Yuan Zhiying, 157, 159; Dong Biwu’s student, 162– 64; English taught children by elder brother, Zhiying, 159; family home, northwestern Hubei, village near Guanghua, 157; father, rural gentry, 157; father taught family children, 158; New Thought ideas introduced to family by brother Shutang, 157; patriarchal Confucian family, 157–58; revolutionary group of girls at normal school, 165–67; sisters, Yuan Fuzhi and Yuan Xizhi (adopted), 157; women’s equality important in family, 158–60; Women’s Normal School in Wuchang, attended with Fuzhi, 160 Yuan Zhen, student years: Communist Youth Corps, did not join, 170; contracted tuberculosis, 156; diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine, 176–78; entered Wuhan University, studied Chinese literature, 171; graduated from Hubei Normal School (1925), 170; hidden by friend from danger of GMD terror, 174; Ministry of Education, worked in, 171; Normal School in Wuchang, attended, 160; popular with Qinghua men students, 245; sympathetic to CCP, not a member, 179; terror of United Front breakup, in danger, 173; transferred to Qinghua University, 156, 174; tuberculosis, hospitalized with, 175; Wu Han introduced by Liang Fangzhong, 177; Yuan Fuzhi cared for her in Beiping, 177; Yuan Shutang (uncle) purged by Guomindang, 172. See also Yuan Shutang; Yuan Zhiying

Yuan Zhen in Cultural Revolution: detained with Wu Han at Beichang jie home by Red Guards, then moved together to southern part of Beijing, 428; in detention with Wu Han in Beijing party school, 428; released from correction team (March 1969), sent home, died in hospital, 439; when Wu Han was imprisoned she was sent to labor correction team (March 1968), 429 Yuan Zhen’s historical interests, 245; national heroes her focus, 219–20; traditional research subjects chosen, 219 Yuan Zhiying (Yuan Zhen’s brother), 159; executed by Communists, 173 Yunnan province 1930s and 40s, 232–33; Guomindang did not control, 234; Long March passed through, 234; Long Yun, provincial commander, 233–35; war worsening, Burma Road closed, 257 Yunnan University: new national university in Kunming, 221; Wu Han became professor at (1937), 221; Xiong Qinglai (president) offered Wu Han position at, 221 Yu Pingbo: history of fiction, taught at Qinghua, 129, 132 zawen. See Wu Han, essayist Zhang Bojun, 344, 350, 358, 362; attacked by Wu Han as anti-rightist, 398–401, 420 Zhang Dedi (sculptor), 5 Zhang Dongsun, 319, 327; North China Democratic League chairman, 354, 358 Zhang Lan, 324, 352, 358, 360–61; Democratic League national president, 324; statement supporting United Front, 353 Zhang Shenfu, 319; Qinghua professor, 109; Wu Han satirizes as “western product professor,” 109–10 Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin), 53–57

Index Zhang Wensong: Communist Party official in Beijing government, 377–78; special emissary from CCP Central Committee, 328–29 Zhang Xikong: Wu Han’s editorial assistant for Brief Chinese Histories Series, 406 Zhang Xiruo: appointed to official position in PRC, 374 Zhang Xuecheng, 122–23; modern Chinese historiography, forerunner, 121; literatus-historian in Qing, 122 Zhang Yinlin, 144, 148; Chinese intellectual history and Song period, 144, 188–89, 190–93; died of kidney failure (1942), 250; general history project with Wu Han, 216–18, 248– 50; Historical Research Association member, 195; Liang Qichao’s student at Qinghua, 193; lived at Wu Han’s house while refugee in Kunming, 247; Outline History of China to the End of Eastern Han, 250; popular history series for school children, planned with Wu Han, 248; in Qinghua History Department, 193– 95; and Qinghua History Department tension, 220; turned away from Western thought after return to China, 208 Zhang Youyu: first vice mayor of Beijing in charge of daily operations, 370; Wu Han saw him in Chongqing (1946), 301 Zhedong, eastern Zhejiang: as cradle of historians, 22; Zhedong historical school, 91 Zhejiang province, 16; Hangzhou, capital of, 17 Zheng Zhenduo, 55, 109–10, 343; became friends with Wu Han, 137; editor of Shanghai Democratic League paper, 310; editor of Wenxue jikan, 134, 136; invited Wu Han on Wenxue jikan editorial board, 110; literary historian and critic, admired by Wu Han, 109; Qinghua professor, 109, 129

513

Zhongguo gongxue. See China College Zhou Enlai: has Yao Wenyuan article published in Beijing, 421; oversaw planning for United Front, 351; Political Consultative Conference, brought key democratic people into, 354; wanted Wu Han in redefined United Front, 329; Wu Han met in Shanghai 1946, 312; Wu Han’s connection personal through Yuan Zhen, 331 Zhou Fucheng: on patriotism and Japanese attack in Manchuria, 98–99; Wu Han’s Qinghua roommate, 98 Zhou Xinmin (Yunnan University professor), 270; Li Wenyi’s husband, 270; sent by Dong Biwu to promote Kunming Democratic Movement, 270 Zhou Yang: League of Leftwing Writers leader, 318 Zhu Jingnong: and Encyclopedia of Education, 56 Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming Taizu), issues of concern to Wu Han: absolute power of, 126, 142, 202; boy Yuanzhang in first pages of biography, 255; and Hu Weiyong affair, 124–26, 140–42; location of capital, 204; Ming founding emperor, 124–26; Ming suppression of opposition and heterodoxy, 201–2; Ming unification, a war of national liberation, 252, 346; second version 1949, 345–46; as strong revolutionary peasant leader, 251, 345–46; Wu Chunhan first talked about, 77 Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan, writing the biography: began fourth revision in 1964, published in 1965, 416–19; began to write biography at Lianda, in Kunming, 251; first sketch (1936) to initial publication in 1944, 251–54; four editions, 254; fourth version criticized Zhu’s imperial policy instructions for dynasty, 419; Liu Shaoqi knew about unpublished

514 third version (1955), 416–19; published in 1944 under two titles, 254, 275; revising first version using archival material, 314–15; second version, viewpoint changed (1948), 315; third revision (1955), unpublished, 388–90; working on biography (1948), 328; Wu Han and modern biography, 253–56; Wu Han’s final evaluation of Zhu Yuanzhang, 418

Index Zhu Yuanzhang zhuan biography and Mao Zedong: copy of 1949 version given to Mao, 345; Mao read and discussed with Wu Han, 345–46; Mao saw 1965 version as critical of Communist regime, 416–19; Mao saw “revolutionary” aspect, 346; Monk Peng Yingyu, Mao critical of interpretation, 346; national loyalty, idea of, 346 Zhu Ziqing, 318, 322, 332

About the Author

Mary G. Mazur, an independent scholar, completed a Ph.D. in Chinese history at the University of Chicago in 1994 in midlife. A historian and biographer, she conducted extensive research in China on Wu Han’s life while based at Beijing University. Now she lives near Tacoma, Washington.

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