Ban Gu's History of Early China By Anthony E. Clark

Dong placed interpretive power in the hands of ministers; comets, calamities, and odd events could be seized by ministers as opportunities—or rather excuses—to render their criticisms of the ruler’s behavior. It was not the ministers who were remonstrating, but it was Heaven. Naturally, emperors were not unaware that a minister could falsely make such an appeal, and there were conflicts regarding the validity of claims that Heaven had made its censure known through some strange sign. This tension emerges in Ban Gu’s biography of Wang Mang (45 BC–AD 23), for in this chapter, readers see Gu trying to discredit Wang’s appeals to Heaven’s will by demonstrating that Wang’s claims were contrived. But on the other hand, Ban Gu demonstrated in his “Treatise on the Five Phases” that portent interpretation is valid if employed by the right minister.³⁶ Ban Gu inscribed his opinions into history as history’s author; Dong Zhongshu is affirmed in his conviction that ministers function as the rightful interpreters of Heaven’s messages, but in the end, it is Ban Gu who decided which ministers correctly and incorrectly interpreted omenological signs. Wang Mang, Ban Gu asserted, was a false interpreter. The author of history is the ultimate arbiter, or gatekeeper, of what is said, who is correct, and how events are to be interpreted.

Ministers and rulers have not changed; ancient history reasserts itself. The antagonism between a minister’s desire to remonstrate and a ruler’s fear that criticism could endanger his authority has shown itself in recent times. After Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) failed economic strategies during the Great Leap Forward (1958) and his resulting abdication as chairman of the party, Mao experienced a growing disappointment over his loss of political power. While he retained his iconic presence—the ubiquity of statues and images of Confucius yielded to those of Mao—he lost his administrative voice. His displeasure was exacerbated in 1966 when the mayor of Beijing, an academic named Wu Han (d. 1969), wrote and performed a play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office . The play was ostensibly about a virtuous Ming (1368–1644) courtier who was dismissed from his official post by an egotistical ruler.