Hai Rui Dismissed from Office

Hai Rui is relieved of his duties (Chinese海瑞 罢官, Pinyin Hǎi Rui bà Guan ) is a play by Wu Han, considered to be one of the starting points of the Cultural Revolution in China.

Wu Han, who wrote the play, was a historian who focused on the history of the Ming Dynasty. In addition, he has been Vice - Mayor of Beijing. He wrote an article about Hai Rui. This was minister during the Ming period and was imprisoned for sharp criticism of the emperor and deprived of his office. The article Wu Hans was later converted into a play, which had its premiere in 1961. Mao Zedong praised the piece first.

Later, however, Mao saw in the play an indirect criticism of the dismissal of Peng Dehuais during the Lushan Conference in 1959 after he denounced Mao for his economic policies during the period of the Great Leap Forward in a personal letter. Hai Rui is intended to refer to Peng Dehuai, while the emperor Mao symbolizes. This type of indirect criticism and the reference to events of the earlier Chinese history to the disapproval of current events (以 古 喻 今, yǐgǔ Yujin ) is very popular in China.

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution published Yao Wenyuan, a journalist and confidant of Mao, on 10 November 1965, a review of the play in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Bao. Therein, however, the author attacks not only the piece itself, but also his literary environment and the Beijing party leadership to Wu Han and Peng Zhen, who represented, among others, Mao's opposition in the period before the Cultural Revolution.

Wu Han was a victim of the Cultural Revolution and died in 1969 in prison. In 1979 he was rehabilitated