Background
A native of Chuji County, Zhejiang province, Yao Wenyuan is the son of the Leftist writer Yao Pengzi.
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A native of Chuji County, Zhejiang province, Yao Wenyuan is the son of the Leftist writer Yao Pengzi.
He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while attending middle school in Shanghai in 1948. After the Communist takeover of the city, he became a resident correspondent for the Literary Gazette's the official publication of the Chinese Writer's Union, and began a career that two decades later was to make him one of the most powerful people in Chinese cultural and literary circles.
During the CCP’s 1955 campaign to denounce the prominent Left-wing writer Hu Feng, Yao emerged as a representative of a new breed of young and fierce Party polemicists and literary critics. Over the next few years, his relentless attacks on allegedly bourgeois, revisionist, or decadent writers and works of literature appeared frequently in Shanghai newspapers like the Wenhui Bao and Liberation Daily as well as in major national literary journals. By March 1957, he had attracted the attention of Mao Zedong, who found his essays “quite convincing.”
In the early 1960s, Yao continued to publish in the fields of literary criticism, theory, and aesthetics. Many of the ideas he developed in his writings at this time later became cornerstones of Cultural Revolutionary literary orthodoxy. Around 1963, together with Zhang Chunqiao, he became close to Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing, who was attempting to reform traditional Beijing opera, using Shanghai as her base. With Jiang as his patron, Yao took part in some of the preparations for what eventually was to become the Cultural Revolution. On November 10, 1965, the publication of his article, “On the New Historical Play "Hai Rui's Dismissal from Office" in the Wenhui Bao triggered off a series of events that eventually led to the downfall of Beijing's mayor Peng Zhen.
In May 1966, Yao was made a member of the CCP Politburo’s Central Cultural Revolution Group, of which Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were deputy heads. In February 1967, he became vice-chairman of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. At the National Day celebrations in Beijing in 1968, he ranked number eight among the Party and government leaders present. With the backing of Mao Zedong, he soon became one of the Party center’s chief ideological watchdogs,and it was primarily in his capacities as censor and ghostwriter for the CCP Central Committee that he was to exercise power over the following years.
In April 1969, the Ninth CCP Central Committee elected him onto its Politburo. He was reelected to this position in August 1973, when the Tenth CCP Central Committee held its first plenary session. On March 1, 1975, the Peopled Daily published his highly significant article, MOn the Social Base of Lin Biao’s Anti-Party Clique,” in which he in the ideological jargon of the time explained the correctness of the politics pursued by the CCP since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the spring of 1976, together with Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, he was largely responsible for the orchestration of a nationwide media-campaign to disgrace Deng Xiao-ping. He also attempted to use his influence over the media to mobilize public opinion against a departure from Cultural Revolution policies and practices after the death of Mao Zedong.
On October 6, 1976, four weeks after Mao’s death, Yao was arrested at the orders of a coalition of senior government and military leaders opposed to the Cultural Revolution. Together with Jiang Qing,Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen (known collectively as the Gang of Four), he was accused of counterrevolutionary crimes and of having attempted to usurp state power. The Party press he had once controlled now heaped abuse on him and compared him to the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. On January 23, 1981 at a major trial in Beijing he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In the late 1990s, rumor had it that he was living in freedom in Shanghai.
(Yao Wen-yuan On The Counter-Revolutionary Double-Dealer C...)
Central Cultural Revolution Group, CCP 1966. Politburo, CCP Central Committee 1969-1976. Of “Gang of Four” October 1976.