Hu Feng (1903-1985) was born into a
worker's family in Yidu, Hubei Province. He joined the Communist Youth
League in 1923 while attending school in Nanjing. In 1928, he went to
Japan, where he earned his upkeep by writing political essays. As a
result of his leftist activities, he was expelled from Japan in 1933.
Upon his return, he joined the League of Left-Wing Writers, which had
been founded by Lu Xun.
Although considering himself a marxist, he opposed the Communist theory
adhered to at the time, that literature had to reflect class struggle;
he found an opponent in Zhou Yang, who would later rise to become the
'culture czar' in the People's Republic. In the following years, Hu
continued to express his resistance to what he saw as the doctrinairism
in communist literary circles in various articles. It should be no
suprise that he did not subscribe to Mao Zedong's "Talks on Literature
and Art", which were held at Yan'an
in 1942, and in which literature (and art) were defined as political
instruments. Despite Hu's continued clashes with the official ideology,
and with Zhou Yang, he embarked on a modest administrative carreer in
literary circles after the founding of the PRC.
In 1955, Zhou Yang directed a campaign aimed at liquidating Hu and his
followers, after the latter continued to express his opposition to what
he saw as the sterile literature policy of the Party. This time, he was
no longer regarded as a "deviationist guilty of subjectivism,
emotionalism and aestheticism", but as a counter-revolutionary leader.
The campaign against Hu Feng's counter-revolutionary clique evolved
into a reign of terror, and increased the estrangement between the
Party and the intellectuals. Hu was deprived of all his posts and
sentenced to 14 years imprisonment in the same year, to be served first
in Qincheng prison, later in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The Hundred Flowers movement
(1956-1957) was in part a response to the demoralization among
intellectuals, who subscribed to Hu's views protesting totalitarian
control of intellectual and artistic activity.
At the height of the Cultural
Revolution, in 1969, Lin
Biao and the Gang
of Four changed his sentence into life imprisonment
without appeal. Hu, who became mentally ill in prison, was only
rehabilitated and released in 1980, and subsequently resumed his
activities in the literary world until his death.
Sources:
Wolfgang Bartke, Who was Who in the People's Republic of
China (München: K.G. Sauer, 1997)
Wolfgang Bartke, Biographical Dictionary and Analysis of
China's Party Leadership 1922-1988 (München: K.G.
Sauer, 1990)
Donald W. Klein & Anne B. Clark, Biographic
Dictionary of Chinese Communism (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard
University Press, 1971)
Kwok-sing Li (editor) & Mary Lok (translator), A Glossary of Political Terms of the
People's Republic of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press
1995)
Li Zhisui, The
Private Life of Chairman Mao—The Memoirs of Mao's Personal
Physician (London, etc.: Random House,
1996)
Roderick MacFarquhar, The
Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Volume I: Contradictions Among the
People, 1956-1957 (Columbia University Press 1987)
Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, Eugene Wu (eds), The Secret
Speeches of Chairman Mao—From the Hundred Flowers to the
Great Leap Forward (Cambridge, etc.: Harvard University
Press, 1989)
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