Lu Dingyi (; June 9, 1906 – May 9, 1996) was a leader of the Chinese Communist Party. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China and before the Cultural Revolution, he was credited as one of the top officials in socialist culture. Biography Lu Dingyi joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1925, while he was studying electrical engineering at the Nanyang Public School. After graduation, he fully joined revolutionary activities, being mainly involved in the Communist Youth League, writing articles for its newspaper Chinese Youth (later renamed Proletarian Youth and then Leninist Youth). In 1927 he took part at both the 5th CCP National Congress and the CYL Congress, being elected a member of the CYL Central Committee working with its Propaganda Department. He was actively involved in countering Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist coup, organizing communist unities in Guangdong. In 1928 Lu Dingyi took part at the 6th CCP National Congress and the CYL Congress, both of which were held in Moscow, remaining in the Soviet Union until 1930 as a junior representative of the CYL to the Comintern. Lu Dingyi then returned in China. He was a member of the CCP Propaganda Department starting from 1934. He participated in the Long March, during which he was editor of the Red Star newspaper. Also during the Long March, he was the head of the Propaganda Department of the Eighth Route Army. Later, he was the head of the Eighth Route Army's Political Department. In 1942, Lu was promoted to chief editor of the Liberation Daily after his predecessor Yang Song fell ill. During his editorial tenure, the newspaper increased its focus on promulgating Communist Party policies. Because the party relied on grassroots cadre to communicate its messages to the masses at a time when literacy was still limited, the newspaper used simple and direct language. In an effort to give clear instruction, it typically published a piece of reporting side-by-side with an instructive editorial. Seeking to implement principles of the mass line, the newspaper dispatched reporters to collect news stories from villagers and sought contributions from local cultural workers. Circulation methods included village newspaper reading groups, community blackboards and bulletin boards, night study groups, and public meetings. Lu established the requirement that the paper's content had to be approved by Party Central. During Lu's tenure, the paper became more aligned with those who supported Mao's leadership, and less with the Soviet-leaning members of party leadership. During the Yan'an Rectification Movement, Lu Dingyi wrote Our basic view for journalism, which was considered the basis for Chinese communist journalism. In 1943 he was appointed head of the CCP Central Propaganda Department, a post he held until 1952 and then again from 1954. He was elected CCP Central Committee member in 1945. The Communist Party's first mass campaign against superstition occurred in Yan'an in 1944 and 1945. The campaign sought to eliminate shamanic ritual practices, reform shamans into productive workers, and to promote public health and hygiene. During this campaign, Lu dispatched Liberation Daily journalists to cover the trials of shamans and called on doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, doctors of Western medicine, schoolteachers, and other educated individuals to help promote modern medicine among the people and to encourage them to avoid shamanic practices. A political commissar in the PLA, Lu Dingyi gave important contributions to the revolutionary struggle in Shaanxi along with other top leaders like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi, according to his official biography. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Lu Dingyi was deputy chairman of the Culture and Education Committee of the Central People's Government from 1949 and member of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress from 1954. At the 8th Party Congress in 1956, he was re-elected a CCP Central Committee member and promoted to Politburo alternate member, concurrently serving as secretary of the CCP Secretariat from 1962. In 1957 and 1960, he accompanied major Party leaders Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to international meetings of communist parties held in Moscow. His main political activity was in the cultural front, as he directed cultural criticism campaigns.
On 27 April 1956, at an enlarged meeting of the Politburo, Lu argued that scholarship and the arts should be allowed to develop through free debate rather than administrative fiat; Mao endorsed the proposal in his summing-up the next day, and Chen Boda suggested the slogan by which it became known. On 26 May 1956 Lu delivered the report "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend" at Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai to an audience of natural scientists, social scientists, physicians, writers and artists. He called for academic and technical questions to be kept strictly separate from political ones, for scholars not to be labelled politically for their views, and for freedom of independent thinking, of debate, of creation and criticism, and to express, maintain and reserve one's own opinions. In 1958 he promoted the founding of the first rural vocational secondary school in the People's Republic, in Hai'an, Jiangsu.
His record on intellectuals was nonetheless uneven. At the 1962 Guangzhou conference, when Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi proposed that the great majority of intellectuals should no longer be labelled "bourgeois intellectuals", Lu objected, arguing that nothing had changed and that the label should stand; Mao adopted Lu's position.
In June 1958, Mao changed the party and government structure by establishing groups in charge of finance, legal matters, foreign affairs, science, and culture and education which bypassed the State Council. Lu was made the head of the culture and education group. In 1959 he was appointed a Vice Premier of the State Council, and Minister of Culture in 1965. Lu was criticised and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Shortly after the Cultural Revolution broke out, Lu was accused of being a promoter of the reactionary line in culture, since he did not adhere to Mao Zedong's idea that culture should extensively serve proletarian politics. In May 1966 he was accused of being part of the "Peng-Luo-Lu-Yang anti-Party clique" (the others being Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing and Yang Shangkun) and dismissed. He was also criticised for his activity in the Five Man Group, a Central Committee agency in charge of leading the first stages of the Cultural Revolution led by Peng Zhen, another purged official. He was detained for nearly 13 years.
Lu had been appointed deputy head of the Five Man Group under Peng Zhen in July 1964. In February 1966 the group produced the so-called February Outline, which explicitly opposed treating academic disputes as questions of political line; three months later the May 16 Notification repudiated the Outline and dissolved the group. In March 1966 Mao had described the Propaganda Department as a "palace of the King of Hell" that should be overthrown. At the enlarged Politburo meeting held from 4 to 26 May 1966 Lu was criticised and suspended from his posts as secretary of the Secretariat and head of the Propaganda Department; after the meeting Lin Biao confronted him over the dozens of anonymous letters his wife Yan Weibing had sent to Lin's wife Ye Qun and their children between 1960 and 1966, telling him he would have liked to shoot him. On 30 September 1966 a decision placing him under "isolation for reflection" was formally announced, and in late April 1968 he was transferred to Qincheng Prison.
According to his eldest son Lu De, Lu Dingyi was held in solitary confinement in a cell of about six square metres and was identified by the number 68164 in place of his name, the digits denoting the year of his imprisonment, his prisoner category and his serial number. Although relatives of many detained officials were later permitted regular visits, the family did not see him once in thirteen years, because he consistently refused to confess to the charges or to implicate others and was therefore recorded as having a "bad attitude". He Fangba, procurator-general of the Beijing Municipal People's Procuratorate and a juror at the trial of the Gang of Four, later told Lu De that of all the interrogation files of detained central leaders he had read, Lu Dingyi's stood out: an intellectual who had been strung up and beaten and had still not given way.
The special case group extended the investigation to Lu's relatives regardless of whether any accusation lay against them, and as many as 63 were detained. Yan Weibing was kept in behind-the-back handcuffs for more than five years, which she was not allowed to remove to eat or sleep. Lu De, named personally by Jiang Qing, was taken from Tsinghua University to the Ministry of Public Security and spent six years in custody, during which he was beaten for refusing to denounce his father. Lu's mother-in-law Guo Ying and a brother-in-law died under investigation, a witness who declined to give false testimony was beaten to death by the case group, and one vice-minister took his own life.
In 1975 Central Committee Document No. 25 described Lu as a "class alien, anti-Party element and suspected traitor" and expelled him from the party "permanently"; the document, circulated nationally, also provided for his release to his native place on a monthly allowance of 200 yuan. Lu refused to accept the three charges and was consequently not released. At the end of 1976 he was moved to the prison ward of Fuxing Hospital for treatment. The Central Committee formally rehabilitated him on 8 June 1979.
Lu Dingyi was rehabilitated by the new leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping. His case was among the 445 cases reviewed directly by the Organizational Department over 1979-1980. In 1979 he was co-opted in the Fifth CPPCC National Committee as its vice-chairman; in the same year, he was co-opted in the CCP Central Committee as a consultant to the Propaganda Department. He was later a member of the Central Advisory Commission. Lu opposed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, contending that the students were "arrogant" and that it was necessary to think about the "negative side effects." In 1990, he contended that the turmoil in Eastern Europe demonstrated that had the protestors in Tiananmen Square not been suppressed, they would have implemented "another Cultural Revolution."
After his return to office Lu's positions on ideological questions contrasted sharply with his role under Mao, and overseas commentary at times described him as a reformer within the party. In 1986, writing to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers policy, he restated that questions of scholarship and art should be settled by free discussion rather than political means, citing the adoption of Li Siguang's geological theories and the rejection of Ma Yinchu's views on population as contrasting examples.
At the Sixth Plenum of the 12th Central Committee on 28 September 1986, before the vote on the resolution on the building of a socialist spiritual civilisation, Lu, then a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Advisory Commission, objected to the phrase "bourgeois liberalization" in the draft and proposed deleting it. Wan Li and others agreed, while Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo and Yu Qiuli opposed deletion and Hu Yaobang took a conciliatory line. Deng Xiaoping then spoke, saying that opposition to bourgeois liberalization was the point he had made most often and insisted on most firmly, and the phrase was retained.
Lu Dingyi died in Beijing in 1996, several years after his retirement. He was hailed as an outstanding Party member and promoter of socialist culture.