#guo moruo

"Laughing and talking gratifies people - happy to hear that the Divine Land [China] is youthful again" (笑谈大快人心事 喜闻神州重芳华).

Poster commemorating the death of Guo Moruo (1892-1978), playwright, poet and government official of 20th century China. A widely celebrated author during the New Culture Movement and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Guo was well renowned in the People's Republic of China until the turmoil of the first years of Cultural Revolution, when he was harshly criticized, but after which he gained his relevance again, starting from the early 1970s.

Here Guo Moruo is depicted in heaven, meeting with characters from his historical dramas (Cai Wenji, Qu Yuan, Xinling Jun and Wei Wuhou). He's wearing the hearing aid he used in his late years. In the bottom left corner, a poem by Guo celebrating the elimination of the "Four Demons" (the Gang of Four), his "Four Dramas" (whose characters he's meeting in the poster), and the Four Modernizations (source).

Poster by Wen Dugeng (温读耕), 1979.

📜 I. THE COMMUNIST HISTORIAN'S MANDATE TO REINTERPRET THE PAST

Kuo Mo-jo — dean of mainland Chinese letters since 1949 — issued a landmark call for reappraisal of Ts'ao Ts'ao (155–220 CE), poet-general-statesman of the Wei dynasty

First published in the People's Daily (Jen-min jih-pao), March 23, 1959, later reprinted in Wen-shih lun-chi (Peking, 1961)

Traditional Chinese literature had typecast Ts'ao Ts'ao as the archetypal villain — a grotesque historical injustice exceeding one thousand years of accumulated slander

The reevaluation of historical figures was not optional academic sport — it was the ideological responsibility of Communist historians to strip feudal distortion from the record

The villain's white-masked face painted on Ts'ao Ts'ao by stages and storytellers was not the people's authentic verdict — it was feudal consciousness manufactured by the ruling class

🌾 II. THE YELLOW TURBAN PROBLEM: EVERYONE FOUGHT THEM, NOT JUST TS'AO TS'AO

Yes, Ts'ao Ts'ao suppressed the Yellow Turban peasant revolutionaries — described as "the most ignominious page in his whole life"

But the selective condemnation of Ts'ao Ts'ao alone is intellectually dishonest to the point of comedy:

Liu Pei, Sun Chien, Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu — all suppressed the Yellow Turbans

Liu Hsiu (Emperor Kuang-wu of Later Han) crushed the Red Eyebrows and Bronze Horses

Li Shih-min (Emperor T'ai-tsung of T'ang) suppressed Tou Chien-teh and Liu Wu-chou

Chu Yuan-chang (Emperor Kao-tsu of Ming) built his empire by defeating other revolutionary leaders, not the Yuan directly

The relevant question is never merely whether Ts'ao Ts'ao fought the Yellow Turbans — it is what happened afterward, what structural consequences followed

🍚 III. TS'AO TS'AO WAS ULTIMATELY COMPELLED TO FULFILL THE YELLOW TURBANS' CORE AIMS

The Yellow Turbans' fundamental goals were elemental and human: food, land, and life for ordinary people

The Later Han court — corrupt eunuchs, royal relatives, and great families — had strangled the peasantry's food supply, dragged them into endless military campaigns, and stripped them of their livelihoods

Ts'ao Ts'ao's own "Ode to Hao-li" captured the devastation: "No cockcrow is heard for a thousand li / And of each hundred of the people, only one survives"

Far from exterminating the revolutionary impulse, Ts'ao Ts'ao was shaped by it — forced to grapple with the same structural crises that drove the rebellion

💀 IV. THE YELLOW TURBAN MILITARY ORGANIZATION WAS CATASTROPHICALLY INADEQUATE — MAKING TS'AO TS'AO'S ABSORPTION OF THEM A MERCY

The History of Wei (Wei-chih, Wu-ti chi) records Pao Hsiu's testimony: armies marched with entire families — men, women, old and young — with no regular food supplies, surviving only through plundering

This was not unique to the Yellow Turbans — all of North China lacked adequate grain:

Yuan Shao's forces in Hopei ate mulberries

Yuan Shu's forces in the Yangtze-Huai area ate snails and mussels

Multiple forces — including Liu Pei's and Ts'ao Ts'ao's own at times — resorted to cannibalism

The Records of Wei (Wei-shu): "Whoever turns the feeding breast is my mother" — armies dissolved and switched allegiances based purely on who could feed them

Chang Chueh and his brothers — leaders of the Taoist T'ai-p'ing Sect revolt — failed for precisely this reason: no sustainable logistical foundation

🛡️ V. TS'AO TS'AO REORGANIZED THE DEFEATED YELLOW TURBANS WITH REMARKABLE EFFECTIVENESS

After defeating the Yellow Turbans east of Shou-chang in the winter of the third year of Ch'u-p'ing (193 CE):

Over 300,000 rebel troops surrendered, along with families numbering more than one million

Ts'ao Ts'ao selected the strongest contingents and organized them into the Ch'ing-chou Forces — the very foundation of his military power

This mirrors Emperor Kuang-wu of Later Han, who after defeating the Bronze Horse rebels was supported by them as the "Bronze Horse Emperor"

The logical question that condemners never answer: if Ts'ao Ts'ao were a brute without principles, why did hundreds of thousands of Ch'ing-chou soldiers and over a million peasants willingly accept his leadership? They neither overthrew him nor deserted — this demands explanation

🌱 VI. THE MILITARY FARM SYSTEM (196 CE): TS'AO TS'AO SOLVED THE FOOD CRISIS THAT DESTROYED EVERYONE ELSE

Three years after absorbing the Yellow Turban forces, in the first year of Chien-an (196 CE), Ts'ao Ts'ao adopted the suggestions of Ts'ao Ch'i and Han Hao and established the tun-t'ien (military farm system)

The Records of Wei records his reasoning: the Ch'in people conquered China through agricultural achievement; Emperor Hsiao-wu of Han subjugated western frontier states through the military farm system

Results: one million hu of grain harvested at Hsu in the first year alone; military farm officers appointed across all chou and chün; campaigns waged without the logistical nightmare of long-distance grain transport

Two types of military farms:

Soldiers cultivating land: government/tiller split

Peasant farms: 60/40 split favoring the government when government cattle were lent; 50/50 when farmers owned their own cattle

Critics who call this "exploitation" miss the crucial structural point: there were no private landlords as intermediaries — only government and tiller, with no parasitic extraction layer

Ts'ao Ts'ao himself lived with exceptional personal frugality — wearing the same clothes for over ten years, patching bedsheets rather than replacing them — his grain exactions were for the state, not personal enrichment

🌾 VII. THE YELLOW TURBAN PEASANTS THEMSELVES ENABLED THE FARM SYSTEM

The order establishing the farms reads: "Having suppressed the Yellow Turbans, pacified Hsu, and taken possession of the working capital belonging to the rebels, it is imperative to establish military farms" (Anecdotes of Emperor Wu of Wei)

The "working capital" included farm tools, draft cattle, and crucially — farming expertise brought by Yellow Turban peasants

Between 193 and 196 CE — three years — over one million Yellow Turban men and women were not simply being fed from stored rations (there were none) — they were actively clearing and tilling waste lands

The military farm system was not Ts'ao Ts'ao's invention imposed from above — it was built on the labor and knowledge of the very people he had defeated

🏹 VIII. TS'AO TS'AO WAS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE OF BIG FAMILIES — HE ACTIVELY SUPPRESSED THEM

Despite originating from a large landowner family, the historical record directly contradicts the claim that Ts'ao Ts'ao served the interests of powerful local bosses

After defeating Yuan Shao in the ninth year of Chien-an (204 CE), he immediately promulgated "laws enforcing the limitation of encroachment on land by big families and local bosses" and exempted Hopei from that year's land tax

His order from the Records of Wei:

"The people of a state or family worry not about scarcity but about inequality, not about poverty but about insecurity"

Under Yuan family rule: big families freely oppressed and exploited, relatives freely encroached on each other's property, and the powerful evaded taxes while the poor overpaid

Ts'ao Ts'ao's tax: 4 shen of grain per mou, plus 2 p'i of silk cloth and 2 chin of silk per household — fixed, transparent, and universally applied

He even performed manual labor alongside workmen when forging a sword — scandalizing contemporary intellectuals (T'ai-p'ing yu-lan, Ch. 346)

⚔️ IX. THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE WU-HUAN (207 CE): AN ANTI-AGGRESSION WAR, FULL STOP

The Wu-huan — a branch of the Hsien-pi people — were a seminomadic people still in the early slave society stage who had displaced the Hsiung-nu on China's northern frontiers

In the fifth month of the twelfth year of Chien-an (207 CE), Ts'ao Ts'ao campaigned to the northeast Liao River valley and suppressed the Wu-huan tribes of the three chün

Over 100,000 Chinese households — numbering several hundred thousand people — had been captured by the Wu-huan and enslaved; Ts'ao Ts'ao liberated them all

Even torrential rains and flooded roads didn't stop the campaign — the enlightened landowner T'ien Ch'ou, who had repeatedly refused Yuan Shao's requests to collaborate, immediately came down from his hill and offered his support and guidance when Ts'ao Ts'ao called

T'ien Ch'ou's "mountain people" opened more than 500 li of trails through the mountains of east Jehol for a surprise rear attack on Wu-huan headquarters at Liu-ch'eng (south of present-day Ch'ao-yang hsien, Liaoning)

To feed liberated captives on the return march, Ts'ao Ts'ao — per the hostile "Biography of Ts'ao Man" from the rival state of Wu — killed several thousand horses for food, demonstrating he valued human lives over military assets

Chairman Mao's poem on Pei-tai-ho (to the tune of "Lang T'ao Sha") explicitly references Ts'ao Ts'ao's northeast campaign — an implicit endorsement from the highest possible authority

🗡️ X. THE ACCUSATIONS OF "WANTON KILLING" COLLAPSE UNDER HISTORICAL SCRUTINY

The T'ao Ch'ien campaign massacres: conflicting sources demand careful analysis rather than credulous acceptance

History of Wei: "over ten thousand" of T'ao Ch'ien's soldiers died — casualties of battle, drowning, and crushing in retreat, not necessarily deliberate massacre

Biography of Ts'ao Man (written by a man from the enemy state of Wu — i.e., propaganda): inflated to "tens of thousands of male and female" civilians, with cities left without "even a fowl or a dog"

Fan Yeh's History of the Later Han (Sung period): further inflated to "hundreds of thousands, male and female" — a tenfold escalation that Ssu-ma Kuang then enshrined in the Tzu-chih t'ung-chien

Mencius — writing 2,000 years earlier — was wiser: "To have indiscriminate faith in all that is in the book is worse than having no books at all"

The Biography of Hsün Yü in the History of Wei records Hsün Yü advising Ts'ao Ts'ao that Hsu-chou's "sons and younger brothers of the fallen" would fight to the last man — definitively proving the population was not annihilated

Kuo Mo-jo's devastating comparison: people also said Chang Hsien-chung "massacred the people of Szechuan, leaving not even a single fowl or dog" — yet Szechuan's population stands at over 70 million

📖 XI. THE LÜ PO-SHE STORY ILLUSTRATES THE SNOWBALLING DISTORTION MECHANISM

Three versions of the same event, each increasingly damning:

Wei-shu (History of Wei): Lü Po-she's sons attacked Ts'ao Ts'ao and seized his horses; Ts'ao fought back and killed "several men" in self-defense

Shih-yü: Ts'ao Ts'ao killed eight family members by night out of paranoid suspicion

Sun Sheng's Tsa-chi: adds the fabricated quote "I would rather have others be betrayed by me than myself be betrayed by others" — a line P'ei Sung-chih identified as Sun Sheng's own invention, contradicting common sense

P'ei Sung-chih (Chin dynasty annotator of the History of the Three Kingdoms) explicitly condemned Sun Sheng's version as the product of "curiosity, scarcely realizing his words contradicted common sense"

Those hostile to Ts'ao Ts'ao naturally preferred Sun Sheng — the version most divorced from plausibility — because it served their narrative

🔥 XII. THE KILLING OF K'UNG JUNG AND HUA T'O: COMPLEXITIES DEMAND NUANCE

K'ung Jung (one of the Seven Masters of the Chien-an period, descendant of Confucius): "idiosyncratic and perverse in character and ideas" — publicly mocked Ts'ao Ts'ao's prohibition on drinking with pointed sarcasm

The story of K'ung Jung's two eight-year-old sons being executed alongside him: the Shih-yü merely says the boys believed they would suffer death — whether they actually were executed is unconfirmed

Sun Sheng's version, which "positively" states the sons "were both killed," was condemned by P'ei Sung-chih as embellishment

Hua T'o (renowned physician): his death was "certainly not right" — his offense was merely staying home on pretext rather than attending to Ts'ao Ts'ao; the death penalty was disproportionate

Chia K'uei: Ts'ao Ts'ao imprisoned him in anger but later forgave him — evidence that impulsive harshness was sometimes corrected by deliberate mercy

The mass displacement of 100,000+ households from the Yangtze River area in 213 CE when Ts'ao Ts'ao ordered civilian evacuation before a planned attack on Sun Ch'iian: an error of excessive alarm, not malice — Kuo acknowledges this as a genuine mistake

📚 XIII. TS'AO TS'AO'S PROGRESSIVE PERSONAL QUALITIES WERE EXTRAORDINARY FOR HIS ERA

Rationalism: believed neither in the mandate of heaven nor in spirits and gods — demolished shrines and temples dedicated to unorthodox creeds; worked to dispel popular superstition

Egalitarianism of merit: promoted men from obscurity; had the courage to publish an order explicitly stating he wished to select officials who lacked virtues of humanity and filial piety but possessed administrative and military ability

Magnanimity: after defeating Yuan Shao at the battle of Kuan-tu (fifth year of Chien-an), he captured Yuan's entire archive of correspondence — including treasonous letters from his own officials — and burned them without investigation

Anti-formalism: forbade extravagant burials; outlawed private reprisals; administered punishment regardless of the offender's social rank

Intellectual vitality: "Constantly in military commands and with the army for more than thirty years he always had a book in hand" — a man of genuine erudition who attended personally to cultural production

The Chien-an literary flowering — one of classical Chinese poetry's greatest periods — was explicitly fostered by Ts'ao Ts'ao and his sons

🎭 XIV. THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS BUILT THE VILLAIN ON FEUDAL CONSCIOUSNESS, NOT HISTORICAL FACT

Lo Kuan-chung's Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a great novel — nobody is burning it — but its evaluation of historical figures was grounded in feudal consciousness, not historical reality

Su Tung-p'o's Miscellaneous Notes (Chih-lin): children at street-corner storytelling sessions wept at Liu Pei's defeats and "shouted with joy" at Ts'ao Ts'ao's defeats — but this "popular sentiment" was not organically generated

Wang K'un-lun's argument that this reflects authentic popular choice spanning "a great number of years" fails critically: this popular image dates to the Sung dynasty at the earliest — it is not ancient

The consciousness of people under feudalism — except its revolutionary and democratic best — was "willfully cultivated by the ruling class" and must not be mistaken for genuine popular verdict

Proof: peasant revolutionary Lo Ju-ts'ai — rising in revolt at roughly the same time as Li Tzu-ch'eng and Chang Hsien-chung — called himself "Ts'ao Ts'ao Wang" (King in Ts'ao Ts'ao's style), demonstrating that not all peasant heroes accepted the feudal defamation

🏛️ XV. TS'AO TS'AO'S CONTEMPORARIES AND THE T'ANG DYNASTY DID NOT HATE HIM

Chang Lu — who ruled the Han-chung area for thirty years before finally being defeated by Ts'ao Ts'ao — said he would "rather be the Duke of Wei's slave than Liu Pei's honored guest" (Annals of Hsien-ti of Han)

Emperor T'ai-tsung of T'ang in his essay "Offering Sacrifice to Ts'ao Ts'ao" (Complete Collection of T'ang Essays): called Ts'ao Ts'ao "a man of wisdom," "a born leader of martial gifts," and declared his achievements as "guardian and rectifier of the state surpassed that of his predecessors"

Tang Emperor Hsuan-tsung called himself "Ah Man" — Ts'ao Ts'ao's own childhood nickname — a gesture utterly inconceivable if Ts'ao Ts'ao were regarded as a villain by T'ang society

The vilification was a Sung dynasty phenomenon, not a timeless cultural verdict

🗺️ XVI. THE "FIVE BARBARIANS" ACCUSATION AGAINST TS'AO TS'AO IS HISTORICALLY ILLITERATE

Some attempted to blame Ts'ao Ts'ao's nationality integration policy for the "overrunning of North China by the five barbarian tribes" at the end of the Western Chin dynasty

Li Hsien (Prince Chang-huai of T'ang) in annotations to the History of the Later Han criticized this policy but targeted his main criticism at Tou Hsien, not Ts'ao Ts'ao

The actual cause of the five barbarians' rise: the "War of the Eight Princes" — sixteen years of Ssu-ma princes fighting each other over the imperial throne after the Ssu-ma family usurped Wei

The structural reason: the Ssu-ma family changed the institutional system — granting Ssu-ma princes real authority over local officials, troops, and administration, hoping to prevent usurpation by outsiders; instead it generated catastrophic internal dynastic warfare

Ts'ao Ts'ao and the Wei dynasty maintained the Han institutional framework, which gave nominal Prince-kings no real authority — the Ssu-ma usurpation was enabled by Wei's stability being cut short, not by Ts'ao Ts'ao's policies

⏳ XVII. THE SHORT-LIVED WEI DYNASTY EXPLAINS THE DISTORTED HISTORICAL LEGACY

Emperor Wen-ti of Wei (Ts'ao P'i): reigned only seven years, died at forty

Emperor Ming-ti of Wei (Ts'ao Jui): reigned only fourteen years, died at thirty-six

Two capable emperors dying young in succession gave the Ssu-ma family its opening to usurp the throne

Had either lived and ruled longer, Wei would have endured, and the Ts'ao family's historical evaluation would have been fundamentally different

Parallel case: the Ch'in dynasty ended with its second emperor after only nineteen years — Emperor Shih-huang-ti suffers similarly distorted historical condemnation

The pattern is clear: dynasties that didn't last long enough to write their own triumphant historiography were condemned by the dynasties that followed them

🎯 XVIII. THE UNIFICATION OF CHINA VINDICATED TS'AO TS'AO'S ENTIRE PROJECT

Some argued the partition into Three Kingdoms had social and economic inevitability, and that Ts'ao Ts'ao's southward campaigns were "against the laws of history and the wishes of the people"

This argument collapses under the most elementary scrutiny: Chu-ko Liang and the Sun family of Wu also led repeated northward expeditions — if southward campaigns were against history, so were northward ones

All parties during the Three Kingdoms period shared the common conviction that a unified China was the legitimate and necessary goal — Chu-ko Liang himself stated: "The legitimate Han ruler will not tolerate the coexistence of the usurper; the kingly government will not limit its authority to a section of the realm"

The decisive fact: although Ts'ao Ts'ao did not personally complete China's unification, less than fifty years after his death, it was achieved by the very military and administrative forces he had organized — this is an unalterable historical verdict

✊ XIX. THE HISTORIAN'S DUTY: RESTORE TS'AO TS'AO'S REPUTATION

More than one thousand years of unjust vilification demands active rectification by historians committed to historical truth

Wang An-shih — another distorted historical figure — had his reputation restored, but his defamation reached only the intellectuals; Ts'ao Ts'ao's white-masked vilification penetrated to women and children three years old through the Romance and stage performances

The solution is not to burn the Romance, stop the plays, or forcibly revise them — but to develop new artistic forms grounded in historical reality as seen from modern viewpoints

Simply adding a little red to the white mask of traditional plays solves nothing — the entire foundation must be rebuilt on historical truth

The people, once shown genuine historical truth, will not permanently consign figures who contributed to national and cultural development to the status of negative examples