Hu Feng , livre ebook

HU FENG
SUNY series in Global Modernity

Ravi Arvind Palat and Roxann Prazniak, editors
HU FENG
A MARXIST INTELLECTUAL IN A COMMUNIST STATE, 1930–1955
RUTH Y. Y. HUNG
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hung, Ruth Y. Y., author.
Title: Hu Feng: A Marxist Intellectual in a Communist State, 1930–1955 / Ruth Y. Y. Hung, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series in Global Modernity | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479538 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479552 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations
I Introduction
II Foolishness and Consciousness
III In the Path of Lu Xun
IV Criticism as Contest
V The Problematics of Literary Subjectivism
VI Time Has Begun
VII The Hu Feng Incident Revisited
Epilogue
Chronology of Hu Feng’s Life: 1902–1985
List of Chinese Names and Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Works by Hu Feng
Biographies of Hu Feng
Periodicals
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Two papers of mine served as earlier versions of chapters VI and VII of this book. I cite “ ‘Time Has Begun’: Hu Feng’s Poiesis in Socialist China, 1937–1950,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 44, no. 3 (September 2017), and “The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism in China: The Hu Feng Incident Revisited,” in Writing under Socialism Past and Present , edited by Meesha Nehru and Sara Jones (Nottingham: Russell Press, 2011). I am grateful to the editors and publishers for their assistance. Cordial thanks to the four anonymous readers, whose constructive suggestions I wisely followed. I also want to extend my appreciation to the acquisitions editor, Andrew Kenyon, for his support in putting this book in print.
I could not begin to thank individually all the people from whom I have learned and through whose life and work I strive to become the person and critic I aspire to be. But foremost among the individuals I must mention is the late Arif Dirlik (1940–2017), whose struggle for the conditions for democracy compassed my scale of criticism. Arif was moreover a great mentor, one of the rare models of critical consciousness not in any degree disparaged by “authority” outside of himself. Arif gave this book its current title. I owe special thanks to Paul A. Bové, whose Poetry against Torture , a seminar series delivered at the University of Hong Kong, taught me criticism’s capacity for poiesis and what remains valuable in the provision of poetry. Wlad Godzich encouraged my work and taught me to stay focused on what matters most in criticism. Liu Tao Tao, my advisor at Oxford University, spent a generous amount of time and mind instructing me and commented on the manuscript. Wendy Gan, Elaine Y. L. Ho, Douglas Kerr, Wang Aihe, and Wang Xiaoying contributed to my education in ways I always cherish and remember. I would also like to thank Catherine Li and Julie Ma, under whose tutelage I crossed the line between ignorance and knowledge without losing the space for wonder.
This book had taken close to a decade to finish, witnessing the formation of my ever-growing family. During this time, my two Japanese Spitz dogs—Bai Bai and Xiao Xiao—flourished into their senior years and became my next teachers after Hu Feng. They, along with Sasha Hua Tong, made more expansive and inclusive my radar of love and understanding of humanity. Finally, in reflecting on the process of my constant search for the right ethics and clarity of mind within my writing, I came to realize that I had written a tribute to Q. S. Tong.
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Wherever possible, I used a readily available English translation for all translations from Chinese, and the references for those translations are provided in the endnotes. Where no translation is specified, the translation is mine.
I
INTRODUCTION
Beautifully simple himself, he loved everything simple, genuine, sincere, and he had a peculiar way of making other people simple.
In order to live well and humanly one must work—work with love and with faith.
—Maxim Gorky 1
The purpose of this book is to make a statement on critical literature’s humanistic aims and methods by inserting into the archives of global modernity a historically significant case of intellectual engagement: the dilemma of Hu Feng (1902–85). Hu was a believer in the Chinese Marxist cause, but, as an intellectual, he could not accept its takeover by an apparatus of repression. In his career as a Marxist literary critic and a fellow traveler of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hu practiced and called for thinking that eventually became an intellectual force critical of the CCP’s authoritarian control over cultural and ideological matters. In 1955, the CCP, under instructions from Mao Zedong, mobilized a nationwide campaign to demonize Hu as an ideological enemy and a counterrevolutionary element. The Hu Feng Incident (hereafter the Hu Incident) was the first and the most revealing political onslaught against a critic and his associates in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unprecedented in scale and exceptional in its intensity, the Hu Incident implicated more than two thousand people, ranging from Hu’s closest family members, associates, and colleagues to remote literary correspondents. In the end, the CCP charged seventy-eight people with the crime of being “elements of the Hu counterrevolutionary clique,” many of whom were driven mad or died in prison. Among the surviving “elements,” most were imprisoned for more than two decades. Despite apparent facts, the Hu Incident was not an entirely straightforward case of state coercion, nor was it symmetrically related to political violence. Hu’s literary and political career, especially as it overlapped with the period in which Marxist literary criticism had transformed from a motivated sociopolitical force into an oppressive establishment following the CCP’s political ascendancy, affords a unique entry point into the study of China’s journey toward modern authoritarianism.
Today, Hu’s status as a modern intellectual remains representative because, over time, his revolutionary experience and overall aesthetics have provided cherished lessons on the politics of Marxist critical engagement. For instance, by epitomizing such intellectual events as the Hu Incident and the Cultural Revolution, historians have demonstrated the vicissitudes of Marxism in China. What did Marxist criticism in China under Mao mean? Specifically, what did it denote to the “committed writer” who seemed to have found in it a resolution to the paradox of literature and politics? Did Chinese “New Literature” emerge from the negotiations between the CCP’s revolutionary politics and the intellectuals’ revolutionary aspirations? At what point did realpolitik and radical visions walk separate paths, and to what extent was “literature” a praxis , an expression, a statement of “revolution”? Did Hu, in his role as an intellectual critic, really “practice” Marxism as he “practiced” literature and criticism? If not, how did he exploit the chasm between ideology and practice? These questions did not solely belong to Hu, as their significance converged at a growing scope of intellectual discourses on a socialist commitment that was self-critically tinged.
In terms of Mao, the Marxist intellectuals’ questions oscillated between assumed objectivity in self-assessment and a visible effort to remain politically active. By charting and analyzing Hu’s developing relationships with historical figures from what Mao called “the mass of revolutionary intellectuals,” 2 and by showing the fundamental conflicts and agreements between them, this book intends to confirm the necessity of Hu’s brand of intellectual impulse. Hu’s intellectual life and career, I believe, revealed much of what was essential to the era’s revolutionary spirit, Chinese modernity’s historical goals, and the critical humanist’s aesthetic aims.
To get a better idea of my perspectives on Hu, one notes first that my focus will be on Hu as a Marxist intellectual and CCP fellow traveler, not as a victim of the CCP’s revolutionary scheme. For instance, I am less interested in asking whether Hu had been treated fairly by Mao and in the political movements that persecuted him than in exploring how Hu’s literary criticism exemplified a case of modern literary criticism and its contribution to international revolutionary politics. Hu, a protégé of Lu Xun (1881–1936) and a member of the Japanese Communist Party, came into his own in the 1940s during a series of debates wit