Background
Hu was born in 1-tu hsien in southern Hupeh, but his family later moved to Kichun (Ch’i- ch’un) hsien in the eastern part of the province.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Hu Feng
Edit Profile
also known as
Chang Ku-fei
Hu Feng was a Marxist literary critic, essayist, and poet, allied himself for almost 30 years with the CCP and left-wing groups. Although he was politically active and highly respected in intellectual circles, he became the main focus of attack in the intensive campaign against intellectuals in 1955.
Education
His original name was Chang Ku-fei. Although Hu’s father was an unskilled laborer, the family finances improved during his youth, and he was sent to school in the city. He knew little about Chinese culture, but he responded quickly to the Western ideas which were affecting China at the time. While at school in Nanking in 1923-1925, he joined the Communist Youth League, participated in the May 30 demonstrations of 1925, and joined the revolutionary movement developing in the south. It appears, however, that he never became a member of the Communist Party. During this period he wrote poetry in a pessimistic vein.
Career
In 1928 he went to Japan where he began to write essays on political and social issues. He was expelled from Japan in 1933 for participating in leftist demonstrations. Returning to Shanghai in 1934, he began to work as a professional writer and editor and joined the League of Left-Wing Writers, nominally led by Lu Hsun but in fact dominated by CCP member Chou Yang. Hu soon became one of Lu Hsun’s leading disciples and was himself surrounded by a coterie of talented young writers.
In the atmosphere of relative freedom that prevailed in Communist literary circles during the 1930's, Hu articulated independent literary theories and debated his views freely. At this time he defined his political and aesthetic ideas more precisely. Although a Marxist in name, he did not conform to the Party line but attempted to fuse certain orthodox Marxist beliefs with his own ideas about literary creativity. His view deviated from the orthodox Communist theory that literature was a reflection of the class struggle. He believed that literature was the fusion of the writer’s emotional intensity and spontaneity, which he called the “subjective struggling spirit,” with objective reality, which he frequently equated with the demands of the people for a livelihood and a democratic government. In assimilating objective reality into his consciousness, he felt that a writer moves closer to Marxism.
Mao’s “Talks on Art and Literature” of 1942, which formalized the doctrine that literature must be an instrument of political utility, aroused Hu and his group to a concerted campaign of opposition. Safe from direct Party pressure, they still were able to insist on independent aesthetic values and to criticize Party literary theory in public. In January 1945, Hu began to publish a magazine, Hsi-wang (Hope), in Chungking that was intended as a sounding board for his ideas and as a weapon against the doctrinairism prevailing in left-wing literary circles. A colleague’s article, “On Subjectivism,” in the first issue, aroused a literary controversy which raged for nine years. Hu was investigated by the Party, was forced to take part in ideological remolding sessions, and was obstructed in publishing his journal. Still, he was able to preserve a degree of independence in the period before the Party seized power in 1949. The advantages of his opposition to the KMT apparently outweighed the disadvantages of his heterodoxy.
Soon after the fall of Peking in early 1949 Hu was in Peking and in July of that year he attended the All-China Congress of Literary and Art Workers. While the congress was in session he served on two ad hoc committees, one to organize Chinese poets and the other to draft the regulations for the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (ACFLAC), which was established at this time. He was elected to membership on the Federation’s National Committee as well as to Standing Committee membership in the All-China Association of Literary Workers, the Federation’s most important subordinate organization, which was known after 1953 as the Union of Chinese Writers. Hu then went to Shanghai where he was to spend most of his time over the next five years. In February 1950 he was made a member of the East China Military and Administrative Committee’s Culture and Education Committee, retaining this post until the regional governments were disbanded in 1954.
While the Communist Party was consolidating its monolithic power structure from 1949 to 1951, Hu appears to have conformed. His expression of the proper political sentiment overbalanced his remarks on literature, and his poetry praised Mao in superhuman terms. Soon, however, he began to bridle under the literary restrictions imposed by the Party. He did not condemn the political leadership whose authority he accepted, but he charged those responsible for literary policy with distorting the leadership’s program. At the same time, he sought to gain Party sanction for his own literary ideas. He was no longer allowed to debate freely, nor was he equal to his opponents. Because of his stature in literary circles he was appointed to the above-mentioned positions in 1949-50 but was given no real authority. Doctrinal interpretation of literature was largely in the hands of his old rival, Chou Yang, then vice-chairman of the ACFLAC. Although Hu’s posts were nominal, they indicated that the Party still wanted his cooperation and this gave him some leeway to maneuver. His strategy seems to have been to comply with Party directives at first in order to gain a position in the hierarchy from which he could influence these directives.
In the ideological remolding movement begun in 1951, Chou Yang engineered formal attacks against Hu and his colleagues by means of public criticism in literary magazines. The attempts to reform Hu’s thinking failed, but he still was not condemned beyond reprieve. The primary aim of the Party in the early 1950’s was to incorporate Hu into its thought reform drives. He was not yet made the focus of a specific campaign. As these campaigns subsided in 1953 and the first half of 1954, Hu’s position in Party circles improved. He was made a deputy from Szechwan to the First National People’s Congress (1954-1959) and was appointed to the editorial board of Jen-min wen-hsueh (People’s literature), an important Party literary magazine.
Politics
Though Hu used his concept of the “subjective struggling spirit” to explain the individual personality and the creative process, he used Marxian dialectics to explain social and political trends. Nevertheless, his belief that a person acquires political ideology through his own experience and that Party discipline should direct a writer’s political life but not his creativity were bound in time to conflict with a party intent on imposing ideological control.
Hu’s sophisticated views plus the backing of Lu Hsun and a devoted coterie gradually gained him a leading position in left-wing literary circles. Even at this time, his group contended with more orthodox factions in a fierce struggle for pre-eminence which was motivated as much by personal antagonism as by aesthetic differences. Hu fought his most vehement battles with Chou Yang, a Party representative in the League of Left-Wing writers. Whereas to Chou politics and ideology were the foremost concern of literature, to Hu they were secondary to literary value. This basic conflict underlay all Hu’s controversies with the Party’s literary officials. In the factional squabbles of the 1930’s, Hu was charged with unorthodoxy and subversion. The dispute subsided with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War when Chou and his associates followed Mao to the Communist areas in Yenan. Hu and his followers went into KMT territory (principally Chungking) where they helped prepare for the eventual triumjph of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, their writings continued free and unorthodox.
The intensity and the nationwide proportions of the subsequent campaign can be explained by the Party’s internal policy at the end of 1954. As the Chinese Communists moved into the period of intensive collectivization and industrialization, it became imperative for them to eradicate all unorthodox tendencies. Hu provided an excellent symbol with which to attack heterodox views and independent thinking. One of the chief forces behind the drive for ideological purity was Hu’s old enemy Chou Yang. The campaign was not free from personal vindictiveness, but it must be considered largely as another phase in the Party’s over-all program of thought reform.
The 1955 campaign was different from the previous attacks on Hu. Whereas the previous aim had been to make him reform, the purpose now was to liquidate his unorthodoxy, He was no longer regarded as a deviationist guilty of “subjectivism, emotionalism, and aestheticism” in his thinking, but as a “counter-revolutionary” leader. The accusations brought against him were half-truths because, although the charge that he disagreed with the Party’s literary rulings could be substantiated, there 'was no evidence to show that his ideas were anti-Marxist in principle or that he intended to subvert political authority.
The campaign reached its climax in May and June of 1955, when the JMJP published three batches of letters between Hu and his followers. They were accompanied by interpretations which distorted Hu’s remarks about undermining the literary hierarchy into plans to overthrow the Party’s political leaders. On May 13, 1955, Hu presented a self-criticism which the Party rejected as false. Although Hu had begged his followers to dissociate themselves from him, with few exceptions they resisted the campaign against their own master. He was officially stripped of all his posts and on July 18, 1955, he was arrested and imprisoned.
-
Born
-
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
-
Political Party
Chinese Communist Party