Cao Yu: China's Shakespeare, Silenced by His Own Success
He wrote his debut play in his final year of college and it is still being performed nine decades later; he wrote his best play at thirty and never again matched it in the sixty years he had left to live. *The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama* calls Cao Yu China's Shakespeare, and the label fits an uncomfortable way as well as a flattering one — like the man from Stratford, his greatest work belongs almost entirely to his youth, and everything after is commentary.
A Boy Raised in Two Theaters
He was born Wan Jiabao on September 24, 1910, in Qianjiang, Hubei province, into an upper-class family that relocated to Tianjin while he was still an infant, where his father worked as secretary to Chinese president Li Yuanhong. His mother took him regularly to both Western-style theatrical productions and traditional Chinese opera as a child, giving him an unusually early, dual fluency in two dramatic traditions that most Chinese playwrights of his generation encountered as opposites rather than complements.
At Tianjin's Nankai High School from 1920 to 1924 — a school with an explicitly Western curriculum and an active dramatic society — he performed in student productions of Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill, at one point playing Nora, the female lead, in *A Doll's House*. He went on to Nankai University's Department of Political Science before transferring to Tsinghua University, graduating in 1934 with a degree in Western Languages and Literature, having immersed himself along the way in Shaw, Chekhov, Gorky, and classical Greek tragedy.
Thunderstorm
He wrote *Thunderstorm* during his final year at Tsinghua, completing it in 1934. The play centers on a wealthy family's destruction through a buried incestuous relationship involving the patriarch, Zhou Puyuan — melodramatic material handled with a structural ambition and psychological density that Chinese spoken drama had not previously attempted. Critics have noted real structural flaws in the play, but its impact was immediate and lasting: productions followed in Jinan in 1934, Shanghai and Tokyo in 1935, Nanjing in 1936, and two competing film adaptations in Shanghai and Hong Kong by 1938. It is generally credited as the milestone that established China's first "Golden Age" of modern spoken theater (huaju), and remains, alongside Cao Yu's own later work, the most performed play in the modern Chinese repertoire.
He followed it with *Sunrise* in 1936, tracing the moral disintegration of women in Shanghai society under the pressure of a world offering them no real affection or standing — an early and explicit engagement with feminist themes in Chinese drama — and with the more expressionist, O'Neill-influenced *The Wilderness* in 1937, a revenge narrative that drew less critical attention than its two predecessors.
Peking Man
Most critics, including Cao Yu's own later assessments, treat *Peking Man* (1940) as his most accomplished play: the story of a once-prosperous Beijing family unable to adapt as the social order that sustained it collapses around them, its title drawing an implicit line between the family's obsolete grandeur and the ancient hominid fossil discovered outside the city — old forms of life made suddenly, irreversibly extinct. Written in the middle of the Sino-Japanese War, after Cao Yu had relocated with Chiang Kai-shek's wartime government to Chongqing, it marked the high point of a run that had begun with *Thunderstorm* six years earlier.
The war years also produced *The Metamorphosis* (1939), a more overtly patriotic work set in a bombed military hospital, and an adaptation of Ba Jin's novel *Family* for the stage in 1941. He finished *The Bridge* in 1945 and translated Shakespeare's *Romeo and Juliet* into Chinese in 1948. In 1946 he and the novelist Lao She spent eleven months touring the United States as guests of the State Department, lecturing American academic audiences on Chinese drama — an unusual degree of international engagement for a Chinese writer of that generation, and evidence of how quickly his reputation had crossed borders.
Institutional Power After 1949
After the Communist victory in 1949, Cao Yu was absorbed into the new cultural establishment on favorable terms. He became founding director of the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1952, a position he held for life, and went on to serve as president of China's leading modern drama theater and chairman of the China Theatre Association from 1968 to 1998. His prewar plays, for all their bourgeois settings, admitted a reasonably comfortable Marxist reading — the decay of an old feudal and capitalist order — which helped them remain in circulation through the Mao era when so much prewar literature did not.
He kept writing under the new system, producing *Bright Skies* in 1956 and, in 1961, the historical drama *Courage and the Sword*, a play later read by some critics as carrying pointed, if obliquely coded, allusions to setbacks in Mao's own political program. The Cultural Revolution that followed brought him real personal distress and professional alienation, though — unlike contemporaries such as Tian Han — he survived it, and was formally rehabilitated after Mao's death and Deng Xiaoping's rise. His final major work, *Wang Zhaojun*, appeared in 1979. He died in Beijing on December 13, 1996, at eighty-six.
Why Cao Yu Is Called a Genius
The claim is built almost entirely on the six years between *Thunderstorm* (1934) and *Peking Man* (1940), during which a writer barely out of university produced, in rapid succession, the four plays that essentially define the mature form of modern Chinese spoken drama — structurally ambitious, psychologically dense, and staged with a professionalism in lighting, set design, and costuming that Chinese theater had not previously demanded of itself. *The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama* calls him China's Shakespeare outright, and the actor Lan Tianye said his plays were "the nutrition for all the dramatic artists of New China" — testimony from within the profession he shaped, not merely institutional praise.
The honest complication is that the label cuts both ways: like Shakespeare's own reputation, Cao Yu's rests overwhelmingly on a handful of youthful masterworks, and the fifty-six years of playwriting life that followed *Peking Man* produced nothing that critics rank alongside his first four plays. His prestige position after 1949 — director for life of a major state theater, decades atop the national theater association — was itself partly a reward for the ideologically convenient bourgeois-decline reading of his early work, complicating any clean line between his talent and the political usefulness of what he had written as a young man.
Legacy
*Thunderstorm* is still staged in Chinese theaters and taught in Chinese classrooms nine decades after a college senior wrote it, and the institution he built — the Beijing People's Art Theatre — remains one of the country's principal stages for spoken drama. Cao Yu proved, earlier and more completely than any Chinese playwright before him, that modern Chinese theater could carry the psychological weight of the Western tradition he had studied and still speak in a voice unmistakably its own.
