Yü P'ing-po (1899-), essayist, poet, critic, scholar, and professor. He was best known for his writings on the Hung-lou-meng and for the nation-wide campaign against them and him in 1954.
A native of Tech'ing, Ghekiang, Yü P'ing-po was born into a family which had a long tradition of scholarship and literary endeavor. He was the great-grandson of the famous classical scholar Yü Yueh (ECGP, II, 944-45) and the son of Yü Pi-yün (1868-1950; T. Chieh-ch'ing), a chin-shih degree holder and Hanlin compiler who in 1902 became assistant examiner in the provincial examinations in Szechwan. After the republican revolution, he lived in retirement in Peking. His publications included an itinerary of the journey to Szechwan entitled Ju Shu i-ch'eng chi, a collection of poems in the tz'u form entitled Lo ching tz'u, and an introduction to the "regulated verse" of the T'ang dynasty entitled Shih ching ch'ien shuo. Although his parents resided in Peking after 1912, Yü P'ing-po seems to have spent the first 1 6 years of his life at the family home in Soochow. In the absence of his parents, his elder halfsisters supervised him. Yü P'ei-hsün, the second of his elder sisters, who died when Yü P'ing-po was about 30, wrote poems which were collected after her death and published as Han yen T'ang ch'in shih i shih, Ju ying lou tz'u. In 1916 Yü P'ing-po enrolled at Peking University. The following year, he married Hsü Ying-huan. Her brothers Hsü Pao-k'uei and Hsü Pao-lu became close friends of Yü and collaborated with him on a translation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Oblong Box," which was published in the Hsin-yueh yueh-k' an [crescent moon monthly]. While at Peking University, Yü came under the influence of Lu Hsün (Chou Shu-jen) and Chou Tso-jen (qq.v.), and he began writing in pai-hua [the vernacular]. Yü was also associated with the student group at Peking University which in 1919 began publication of the magazine Hsin-ch'ao [renaissance] ; the group also included Chu Tzu-ch'ing, Feng Yu-lan, Fu Ssu-nien, and Yeh Sheng-t'ao (qq.v.).
After being graduated from Peking University in 1919, Yü P'ing-po spent a few months at Hangchow before sailing for Europe with Fu Ssu-nien in January 1920. It is unlikely that Yü derived much pleasure or profit from this trip, for he was a lifelong xenophobe. He quickly succumbed to homesickness after arrival in England. Although Fu Ssu-nien followed him to Paris and Marseilles in a vain effort to dissuade him, Yü returned to Peking in 1921. At that time Ku Chieh-kang (q.v.), who had been reading the first draft of the Hung-lou-meng k'ao cheng by Hu Shih (q.v.), was collecting materials bearing on the origins of the great eighteenth-century novel, the Hung-lou-meng ( The Dream of the Red Chamber) . His enthusiasm infected Yü P'ing-po who, when Ku Chieh-kang went to Soochow to care for his ailing grandmother, corresponded with him on the subject in April-July 1921. This correspondence became the nucleus of Yü's Hung-lou-meng pien, completed in 1921 and published, with a preface by Ku, by the Oriental Book Company in 1923.
In 1922 Yü P'ing-po went to the United States. While in New York, he wrote "Ch'angshih ti wen-i t'an" [common-sense talk about literature], which appeared in Chien Ch'iao, a collection of essays and short stories by Yü and Yeh Sheng-t'ao which was published in 1924. Hsi huan [return from the West], a collection of poems published after his return from America, also must have been written abroad, for Yü wrote elsewhere that the postscript to Hsi huan was composed "in 1922 on a ship in the Pacific." Yü spent most of the period from the autumn of 1922 to the autumn of 1924 in central China, teaching for a time at Shanghai University and then living in his great-grandfather's house on West Lake in Hangchow. Yü's account of a 1923 excursion on the Ch'in-huai river with his life-long friend Chu Tzu-ch'ing, "Chiangsheng teng-ying li ti Ch'in-huai ho," was a classic of its kind. After witnessing the collapse in September 1925 of the tenth-century Thunder Peak Pagoda, he wrote two scholarly studies about it—one on the history of the pagoda and another on the miniature sutras sealed inside it. On the basis of lectures he had delivered at Shanghai University, in October 1923 he wrote what was to become the main part of the Tu shih cha chi [notes on the Book of Songs] . Yü's comical preface to this book describes the difficulties and delays he encountered before it was finally published in 1934. Parts of it appeared in 1924 in the Yenching Journal and in 1931 in the third volume of the Ku-shih pien, edited by Ku Chieh-kang.
In the late autumn of 1924 Yü P'ing-po went to Peking to join the faculty of Yenching University. He later taught at Tsinghua and Peking universities. Apart from some early experiments in "new poetry" collected in Tung yeh, Hsi huan, and /, his creative writing in the pre-war period consisted almost entirely of short prose pieces, many of which were introductions, prefaces, and appreciations written for or about books by his friends. Some were in wen-yen, others in pai-hua, and still others in that strange mixture of the two which is peculiarly characteristic of his style. Very few of his essays dealt with political matters. He wrote a few articles deploring foreign encroachments on China's rights, one of which showed that he was familiar with Marxist terminology and turns of phrase. On such topics as education or the position of women in society, he expressed conservative views. Collections of these shorter writings include Tsa pan erh, of 1928; Tsa pan erh II, of 1933; Yen chiao chi, of 1936, and Ku huai mengyu, of 1936. His scholarly publications included an introduction to the tz'u form entitled Tu tz'u ou te, which was published in 1934.
Yü P'ing-po remained in Peiping after the Sino-Japanese war began in July 1937, and he taught at Peking University throughout the Japanese occupation. At war's end, he was allowed to resume his duties as a professor of literature after the professors and students who had been in west China returned to Peiping and reestablished Peking University. His research during and after the Second World War centered on tz'u poetry and on the poets Chou Pang-yen and Tu Fu. He published a revised edition of Tu tz'u ou te in 1947 and a commentary on selected poems of Chou Pangyen, Ch'ing-chen tz'u shih, in 1948. He also produced a revised version of the Hung-lou-mtng pien entitled Hung-lou-meng yen-chiu, which was published in Shanghai in 1952.
Although Yü P'ing-po remained in Peking after the People's Republic of China was established, he made no attempt to incorporate Marxist ideas into his published writings. His lack of enthusiasm for political indoctrination, his slightly haughty manner, and his sometimes unintelligible Chekiang accent made him a far from popular lecturer. In 1952 he resigned to become a member of the Peking University Literary Research Institute, where he devoted his time to the task of collating all available manuscripts of the so-called Chih-yen-chai commentary on the Hung-lou-meng.
In the autumn of 1953, a year after the publication of Yü's Hung-lou-meng yen-chiu, a congress of the Writers' Union took as its theme the rehabilitation of China's literary heritage, a matter which had been discussed by Wen Huai-sha in his postscript to Yü's work. The Tso-chia ch'u-pan-she [author's publishing company] and a related institute of literary studies were established to publish new editions of Chinese classical literature. The first publication of this new organization, a three-volume edition of the Hung-lou-meng, appeared in December 1953. As an authority on the Hung-lou-meng, Yü P'ing-po was now under constant pressure to produce articles and reviews for popular consumption. Because he realized that anything he wrote of this nature probably would be politically unacceptable, he was unwilling to comply with most of these requests. It appears that several articles published under his name at this time were partly or wholly the work of his research assistant, Wang P'ei-chang. He offended an important Chinese Communist party propagandist, Hu Ch'iao-mu, by failing to incorporate suggested alterations in an article entitled "Hung-loumeng chien lun," which was published in the magazine Hsin chien-she. He also published a savagely critical review of the Tso-chia ch'u-pan-she edition of the Hung-lou-meng in the 1 March 1954 issue of the Kuang-ming jih-pao.
Late in 1954 Chou Yang (q.v.) and others launched a campaign against Yü P'ing-po and Hu Shih which began with the publication of articles attacking them for failing to interpret the Hung-lou-meng as a novel of class struggle and an indictment of the extended Chinese family system of traditional times. On 24 October 1954, at a plenary session of the Writers' Union, Yü was directed to study Marxism and to mend his ways. Thereafter, he was denounced in the press, in periodicals, and at meetings (which he was forced to attend) throughout China for the better part of three months. Feng Hsueh-feng lost the editorship of the IVen-i pao because he defended Yü. Under the circumstances, it is surprising that Yü managed to publish an important contribution to Hung-lou-meng studies in December 1954, the Chih-yen-chai Hung-lou-meng chi-p'ing [collected commentaries on the Hunglou-meng]. Although Wang Erh was listed as the chief compiler of this work, his sole contribution to it was a three-paragraph foreword stating that the book had been examined carefully because of the serious charges against Yü and that it had been judged fit to print. When the campaign against him ended, Yü P'ing-po, who had shown signs of breaking down in the course of it, demonstrated a remarkable resilience in returning to his Hung-lou-meng studies. In 1958, assisted by Wang Hsi-shih, he published the four-volume Hung-lou-meng pa-shih-hui chiao pen, a definitive edition of the Hung-lou-meng with extensive notes. In the preface to this work Yü admitted that hfe formerly had been misled by Hu Shih and conceded that the general sense of the Hung-lou-meng is "anti-feudal," but he carefully pointed out that in no sense are its characters "politically conscious."