Yao Wenyuan

Early Life and Career as a Literary Critic

Yao Wenyuan was born on 11 December 1931 in Shanghai; his ancestral home was Zhuji, Zhejiang. His father, Yao Pengzi, was a left-wing writer who was arrested by the Nationalists in the 1930s and later defected to their side. Yao never attended university: after finishing high school in 1950, he went to work in the Communist Youth League apparatus while teaching himself literary theory and writing criticism. He secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party in October 1948 while still a student. In 1955, an article he published in Literary Gazette (文艺报) attacking the writer Hu Feng caught the attention of Zhang Chunqiao, marking the start of their long association. In 1956 he moved to the Shanghai Writers' Association as an editor of the magazine Sprout (萌芽); in 1962 he transferred to the editorial board of Liberation Daily (解放日报). Through the 1950s and 1960s Yao made his name as a radical literary critic, writing politically charged attacks on dissident writers and establishing a reputation as an ideological enforcer in Shanghai cultural circles. On 10 November 1965, his article 'On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office' appeared in Shanghai's Wenhui Bao (文汇报); planned by Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao and reviewed multiple times by Mao Zedong before publication, it is widely regarded as one of the opening salvoes of the Cultural Revolution, and it was this piece that propelled Yao onto the national political stage.

Ideological Role during the Cultural Revolution

During the Cultural Revolution, Yao oversaw ideology and media. On 28 May 1966 he was named a member of the newly formed Central Cultural Revolution Group. In February 1967 he became a Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, and from 1971 he concurrently served as Second Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. The 9th Party Congress elected him to the Politburo in April 1969. He controlled the censorship of national newspapers and publications and directed several Party writing groups used for propaganda and political attacks, including 'Liang Xiao' (the Peking/Tsinghua universities group), 'Chi Heng' (the PLA Daily group), and 'Luo Sicheng' (the Shanghai committee's group), serving as a central operator of the Party's propaganda apparatus. Within the Gang of Four, his role was primarily as an ideological mouthpiece; he exercised less independent political weight than Jiang Qing or Zhang Chunqiao.

Trial and Later Years

On the night of 6 October 1976, Yao was arrested along with Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen and placed under isolated investigation. In July 1977, the 3rd Plenum of the 10th Central Committee expelled him from the Party and stripped him of all posts. From November 1980 to January 1981, a Special Tribunal of the Supreme People's Court publicly tried the 'Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Cliques' case; Yao was tried as one of the principal defendants and, on 25 January 1981, was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment and five years' deprivation of political rights — the lightest sentence among the four defendants. Released on 5 October 1996, he settled in Shanghai and lived in obscurity, rarely making public appearances; his wife, Jin Ying, had died that August, shortly before his release. Yao died of complications from diabetes on 23 December 2005, at the age of seventy-four.