At the centre of China's Cultural Revolution in its first stages stands the ambiguous figure of Wu Han. Occupying until the mid-sixties a favoured position among the intellectual elite of the People's Republic, he was the eighth-ranking figure in the Chinese Communist Party, and his Peking Opera Hai Jui's Dismissal was performed all over China. Gradually it became apparent that Wu Han was using Hai Jui to lampoon Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the core policies of the CPP. Other dissidents began to pen articles and plays on similar themes. For several years Mao chafed under these literary attacks, but in late 1965 he retaliated. A sudden, scathing attack on Wu Han and his play by an obscure newspaper editor marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a cataclysm in which the Party leadership was decimated while Mao regained full supremacy. This volume presents the first translation of Wu Han's plays and helps to clarify the obscure origins of a national phenomenon that was at once intellectual, social, and political.

Examines Wu's satirical writings from the Kuomintang period up through the 1960s. Wu was part of the anti-party literary campaign from 1959 through 1965.

This is the first book ever published in the West on drama in the People's Republic of China. The plays, playwrights, theories, and performances range from the play that inflamed the Cultural Revolution to a post-Mao satiric drama that upset party leaders; from Jiang Qing's drama theory for her model plays to the discovery of Bertolt Brecht; from the problems and dilemmas that confront theater reform in the post-Mao era to the performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Viennese operettas; and from a historical play glorifying Mao's supremacy to a playwright calling for individualism and women's rights. This book not only depicts aspects of drama in the People's Republic of China, it also provides analyses of the political and social conditions that shaped and are represented in this drama.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What kind of 'ruler' was Mao Zedong? Utilizing a rich mix of analysis and new translations, this book examines other imperial predecessors and the elements linking Mao and Ming Taizu, the fourteenth-century peasant rebel who founded the Ming dynasty, as well as critiques of Western and Chinese scholarship. The book then presents translations with commentary of PRC scholars on Taizu and Mao, showing the evolution in Chinese though toward both rulers from the Cultural Revolution to the Deng Xiaoping reform era.