Hu Feng

Early Life

Hu Feng was born in Qichun, Hubei, in 1902. According to an article on the China Writers' Association website, he was drawn to Marxism as a young man, joined the Communist Youth League and took part in street propaganda in Nanjing during the May Thirtieth Movement. While studying in Japan he belonged to the Tokyo branch of the League of Left-Wing Writers and later joined the Japanese Anti-War League and the Japanese Communist Party, and was deported by the Japanese police for anti-war activities. Back in China he worked in left-wing literature under Lu Xun's guidance; his Japanese party membership was never converted into membership of the CPC. From the War of Resistance onwards he edited the journals July (Qiyue) and Hope (Xiwang).

Early PRC Years

In early 1949 Hu travelled from Shanghai via Hong Kong to the liberated Northeast, then to Beiping to help prepare the First National Congress of Literary and Art Workers, and attended the first session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Between November 1949 and January 1950 he wrote the long poem "Time Has Begun!", whose first movement, "Ode to Joy", appeared in the People's Daily on 20 November 1949. He long differed with mainstream positions on literary theory. On 22 July 1954, as an NPC deputy and council member of the Writers' Association, he submitted to the CPC Central Committee, through Xi Zhongxun, his "Report on the State of Literary Practice in Recent Years" — the "300,000-character memorial".

The Hu Feng Case

From May 1955 the People's Daily published three batches of material on the "Hu Feng anti-Party clique" with notes by Mao Zedong, and in June Hu and his associates were designated a "counter-revolutionary clique". Hu was arrested in mid-May, and the nationwide purge touched 2,100 people. After ten years in custody he was sentenced on 26 November 1965 by the Beijing Higher People's Court to 14 years; in January 1970 the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee added a life sentence, without appeal, for "writing reactionary poems". He was released in 1978.

Rehabilitation and Last Years

In September 1980 the CPC Central Committee declared the "Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique" a wrongly decided case and rehabilitated those involved, while still describing the group as having "the nature of a small clique". Hu then served on the Standing Committee of the 5th and 6th CPPCC, on the national committee of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and as an adviser to the Writers' Association and the Chinese National Academy of Arts. He died of illness in Beijing on 8 June 1985. On 18 June 1988 the General Office of the Central Committee issued a supplementary notice "further rehabilitating Comrade Hu Feng". The scholar Ruth Y. Y. Hung describes him as having "become a representative persecuted intellectual soon after 1949"; Wan Tonglin notes that his rehabilitation "took three stages to complete".