Lu Ting-yi (1901-), leading Chinese ' Communist propagandist and long-time head of the party's propaganda department. In 1965 he became minister of culture at Peking. The son of a landowner who also operated a textile factory, Lu Ting-yi was born in Wusih, Kiangsu. After receiving his primary and secondary education, he went to Shanghai, where he enrolled at Nanyang University. He participated in student activities during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. About 1924 he joined the Communist Youth League and the Chinese Communist party. After being graduated from Nanyang University, where he majored in engineering, he received a Peking government appointment to the Canton- Kowloon railway administration in 1925. By mid- 1926 Lu Ting-yi had returned to Shanghai and had become director of the propaganda department of the Communist Youth League, then headed by Jen Pi-shih (q.v.). He also served as editor of the league's magazine, Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien [China youth] until mid-1927, by which time the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party had split. In 1928 he went to Moscow, where he represented the Chinese Communist Youth League at the International Youth Congress and attended the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Moscow in June 1928.

Lu Ting-yi returned to Shanghai in 1929 to resume office as director of the Communist Youth League's propaganda department. In 1931, after the Nationalists executed Hsiang Chung-fa (q.v.), the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, Communists in the Shanghai area were forced to suspend operations. Lu went to the central soviet area at Juichin, Kiangsi, where he edited the party newspaper Hung-se chimg-hua [red China] and continued his work for the Communist Youth League. During the Long March to Shensi in 1934-35 he was a propaganda worker in the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army. In Shensi, he served as director of the Red Army's general political department in 1936 and as director of the propaganda department of the First Front Army in 1937. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war and the formation of the Kuomintang-Communist united front against the Japanese resulted in the reorganization, in August 1937, of Chinese Communist troops in the northwest as the Eighth Route Army, with Chu Teh (q.v.) as commander in chief. Lu became deputy director and then director of the propaganda department in the Eighth Route Army's political department. His achievements in propaganda work were recognized by the Chinese Communist party at its Seventh National Congress in 1945, when he was elected to its Central Committee. In 1946, the War in the Pacific having ended, he served as a Communist member of the Political Consultative Conference and as a negotiator at the Peiping Executive Headquarters. The Kuomintang-Communist peace negotiations were unsuccessful, and full-scale civil war between the two contending factions soon broke out. Little is known about Lu's activities in the period between the beginning of 1947 and the autumn of 1949, when he participated in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. After the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China was established in October 1949, Lu Ting-yi became director of the party propaganda department. He was demoted to deputy director in 1953, about the time that Kao Kang and Jao Shu-shih (qq.v.) were censured and accused of forming an antiparty alliance, but he was restored to the directorship in 1955. From 1949 to 1954 he also served as deputy chairman of the culture and education committee of the Government Administration Council. He was elected to the executive board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association in 1951, 1954, and 1959; and he served on the national committee of the China Peace Committee from 1950 to 1958. He represented Kiangsu at the first National People's Congress and became a member of the congress's Standing Committee. He also represented Kiangsu at the second and third National People's congresses.

Lu Ting-yi's importance in the Chinese Communist party was demonstrated on 26 May 1956, when he made the first public announcement of what became known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign. At a gathering of scientists, social scientists, doctors, writers, and artists he made a speech entitled "Let All Flowers Bloom Together, Let Diverse Schools of Thought Contend." The text of this speech was pubhshed in the Jen-min jih-pao [people's daily] on 13 June. It presumably was derived from a speech given by Mao Tse-tung to a closed session of the Supreme State Conference on 2 May. However, Mao's speech never was published. Mao later elaborated on the policy of "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend" in his "The Correct Handling of Contradiction Among the People" of 27 February 1957, but it was Lu Ting-yi who publicly inaugurated the Hundred Flowers period.

In 1957 Lu Ting-yi served as vice chairman of a committee for the popularization of common spoken language and as a member of the Central People's Government delegation, headed by Mao Tse-tung, to the celebrations at Moscow marking the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In 1965 he became minister of culture of the State Council.

Lu Ting-yi married twice. His first wife, who bore him two children, was killed by Nationalists in Fukien province about 1927. Lu remarried in 1941 ; he and his second wife reportedly had three children.