![\"hu_feng_and_his_wife-300\"](\"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/files\/2015\/01\/hu_feng_and_his_wife-300.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons)\nHu Feng and his wife, 1933<\/p>\n
But, beyond the bare bones of his case and my teacher\u2019s stories, I knew little about Hu Feng and always felt that I should learn more. The opportunity recently presented itself when I came across Gregor Benton\u2019s 2013 English translation of \u201cF: Hu Feng\u2019s Prison Years,\u201d a 1989 memoir by Mei Zhi\u2014Hu\u2019s wife, an established writer in her own right\u2014that recounts in gripping, heartrending detail the Kafkaesque detentions, disappearances, and arrests to which her husband was subjected by a Communist Party so intent on crushing those who refused to tow its line that it ate its own, destroying the best and brightest intellectuals of an era.<\/p>\n
Hu Feng was a product of the May Fourth Movement and a disciple of Lu Xun, a committed leftist who believed that literature should inspire social transformation and reflect reality, but who also insisted on the role of the individual in the creative process. In the lingo of the era, he supported \u201csubjectivism\u201d and argued that artists and writers should not be dictated to and controlled by political bureaucrats\u2014instead, they should be granted some autonomy so they could actually be creative.<\/p>\n
This stance earned him enemies early on\u2014well before 1949\u2014but he refused to back down, instead warning that a blind insistence on obedience to Party dictates would turn China into a \u201ccultural desert\u201d and founding several literary journals \u2013 like \u201cJuly\u201d and \u201cHope\u201d\u2014in which he promoted the works of like-minded young writers (among them the poet Ai Qing, the father of Ai Weiwei). Hu\u2019s beliefs became increasingly problematic after Chairman Mao gave his speech at the Yanan Forum on Arts and Literature, in which he decreed that \u201cThere is no such thing as art for art\u2019s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics\u201d and after which the Party began exerting ever tighter control over writers, artists\u2014and the individual in general.<\/p>\n
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