From 1952, he was employed by the People's Liberation Army as head of a creative writing group based in Kunming,[3] and worked as secretary of Marshal He Long.
[2] In the mid-1950s, his support of disgraced art critic Hu Feng led him to be investigated and detained for eight months, during which he attempted to commit suicide.
Some of his plays were banned because they dealt with the political purges and murders in the Red Army that took place in the 1930s and offered a critical view of traditional patriotic values.
Among these the most famous was the film script Unrequited Love (1979), which became a movie by director Peng Ning, The Sun and the People (苦戀, 1980) that was never shown to the public.
In his script, Bai depicted an overseas Chinese painter who returned to China in order to devote his life to his motherland but ended up suffering political persecution and death.
The criticism threatened to become another wave of political prosecution until the General Secretary of the party Hu Yaobang interfered on his behalf.
Bai was later allowed to visit Japan and Southeast Asia and delivered public speeches, but his works were generally suppressed.