ABSTRACT
From the Qin, monarchs have been bandits. (Tang Zben) Political conflict in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has often provoked critical commentary and debate over historiographical issues in China. Since the early 1950s, various intra-party factions have appealed to history to justify competing political and ideological positions, especially on the proper role of executive authority} When Mao Zedong's arbitrary decisions produced the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958-60), historical analogy was used to criticize the Chairman's actions with strong moralistic overtones. Zhou Xinfang thus questioned the Great Leap by portraying the efforts of the imperial official Hai Rui to appeal to a despotic and ill-informed emperor in the Ming dynasty [see Chapter Two of this book]. Condemning the
'tyrannical way' (ba dao) of ancient emperors, former People's Daily editor Deng Tuo voiced similar traditional arguments apparently to protest the purge of People's Liberation Army commander Peng Dehuai, who had openly challenged Mao at the 1959 Lushan Party Plenum.2 During the struggle over Mao's succession in the mid-1970s, however, radical leftists, led by Jiang Qing, took the opposite tract by glorifying despots. In the 1973-75 Anti-Confucian campaign, the historian Shi Ting praised the imperial despotism and violent methods of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang (221-210 BC) to legitimize the Gang of Four's support of extreme autocracy.3 Just as the creation of a unified empire and centralized state in the third century BC had justified Qin' s 'burning of the books and burying of the scholars', so too, Shi Ting argued, was tyranny necessary to achieve radical political goals in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution.
