Lu Dingyi

The Youth League and the Long March (1906–1937)

Lu Dingyi was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, on 9 June 1906. As a student at Nanyang University in Shanghai (forerunner of Jiaotong University) in 1925 he took part in the May Thirtieth Movement, joining the Communist Youth League that autumn and the Chinese Communist Party that winter. In 1927 he attended the Party's Fifth Congress, was elected an alternate member of the League Central Committee and became head of its propaganda department, and attended the 7 August Emergency Conference as the League's representative; elected to the League Central Committee at its Fifth Congress in the autumn of 1928, he edited Chinese Youth. At the end of 1928 he went to Moscow as the League's representative to the Young Communist International, returning in 1930. After Wang Ming's "leftist" line gained control in 1931 he was removed from the League Central Committee and as its propaganda chief.

In October 1934 Lu set out on the Long March with the Second Column of the central organs. After the Zunyi Conference he became head of propaganda in the Red Army's General Political Department and editor of the Red Star newspaper; his account "Laoshan Pass", written on the march, was later included in school textbooks.

From Liberation Daily to the Propaganda Department (1937–1949)

After war with Japan broke out, Lu served as head of propaganda of the Eighth Route Army's General Political Department and deputy director of the field political department at its forward headquarters, directing the north China edition of Xinhua Daily. Returning to Yan'an at the end of 1940, he became editor-in-chief of Liberation Daily in August 1942. His 1943 essay "Our Basic Views on Journalism" defined news as "the report of recently occurring facts" and insisted that "facts come first, news second"; Gong Yuzhi, who later worked in the Propaganda Department, called it "the founding work of Chinese materialist journalism".

In 1945 he became head of the CCP Central Propaganda Department and was elected to the Central Committee at the Seventh Congress. In January 1947 he published "An Explanation of Several Basic Questions concerning the Post-war International Situation", which, Gong recalled, the US ambassador sent to the State Department and which was later included in the China White Paper. When Hu Zongnan attacked northern Shaanxi in 1947 he served as political commissar of the central organs' detachment, moving with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi.

Propaganda Chief and the "Double Hundred" Policy (1949–1966)

After 1949 Lu remained head of the Propaganda Department and was deputy director of the Central People's Government's Culture and Education Committee; according to a Phoenix News feature on the department's successive heads, Xi Zhongxun held the post from September 1952 to July 1954, after which Lu returned to it until 1966 — 22 years in all, as Gong Yuzhi put it. In the Hu Feng case of 1955 he headed the central five-man group handling the case. On 26 May 1956 he delivered his report "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend" to representatives of the scientific and literary worlds at Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai; published in full in the People's Daily on 13 June, it opened by saying that "the Chinese Communist Party advocates letting a hundred flowers bloom in art and a hundred schools contend in science, as Chairman Mao has announced at the Supreme State Conference". In September that year the Eighth Congress elected him to the Central Committee and as an alternate member of the Politburo.

He became Vice-Premier in 1959, was added to the Central Secretariat at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September 1962, and also became Minister of Culture in 1965. Gong Yuzhi judged that Lu's greatest contribution as propaganda chief was the establishment of the "double hundred" policy, and that the failing "for which he should bear more personal blame" was his opposition to the 1962 Guangzhou conference's move to lift the "bourgeois" label from intellectuals; after his rehabilitation Lu publicly acknowledged that his view on the question "was leaning to the left at the time, and so was wrong".

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1979)

On 23 May 1966 an enlarged Politburo meeting suspended Lu as a secretary of the Secretariat and removed him as head of the Propaganda Department, branding him, Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing and Yang Shangkun an "anti-Party clique". A Central Committee circular of 24 May, "Explanation of the Errors of Comrades Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun", said his wife, Yan Weibing, had written dozens of anonymous letters between 1960 and 1966, "ninety per cent of them concentrated on attacking and reviling" Lin Biao and his family, alleged that Lu was "closely involved" in the case, and accused him of opposing the slogan of "creatively studying and applying" Mao Zedong Thought. According to a Party-history entry on the CCP's official news site, his so-called "errors" also included resisting, with Peng Zhen, the campaign against the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.

He was then subjected to struggle sessions and detention. On 10 April 1967, at a rally of some 300,000 people at Tsinghua University to denounce Wang Guangmei, Lu, Peng Zhen, Bo Yibo and others were paraded alongside her. According to the biographical panel at his grave in Babaoshan, he was "imprisoned for nearly 13 years". The Party-history entry says the Central Committee formally rehabilitated him in June 1979.

Later Years (1979–1996)

In June 1979 Lu was elected a vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at its Second Session, and in September he was added to the Central Committee at the Fourth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee; he became an adviser to the Propaganda Department in March 1980, was again elected CPPCC vice-chairman in June 1983, and was elected to the standing committee of the Central Advisory Commission at the 12th and 13th Party Congresses.

Lu Dingyi died in Beijing on 9 May 1996, aged 90. His gravestone in Wuxi is inscribed with the words "August 7 Conference, the 25,000-li Long March, the definition of news, the Double Hundred policy, the education policy, whoever attacks township enterprises attacks 800 million peasants". In September 2016 his ashes were moved, with central approval, to Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, where the stone before his tomb bears his last words: "Let children go to school, let the people speak."