ABSTRACT
When rehabilitation of the intellectual vIctIms of the Cultural Revolution began in 1978, the leadership had to decide on what basis they should now be praised. Some of the most prominent had been attacked by Red Guards and Kang Sheng's machine for disagreeing with Mao Zedong or even openly criticizing the Chairman. Should the historian Wu Han, the dramatists Meng Chao and Tian Han, the essayist Deng Tuo, or the actor Zhou Xinfang be rehabilitated as people who dared to speak up when the common people were in distress during the Great Leap years, as people who stood up to the strong and mighty, as courageous defenders of civil liberties whose emulation would be the best defense against a recurrence of a Cultural Revolution?
