In 1951, Mao Zedong personally ordered a political campaign that destroyed the careers of the team behind Song of Wu Xun, a celebrated film about a 19th-century beggar who spent his life building free schools for poor children. The film was sealed in a Beijing vault for six decades. When a restored print was finally screened in Shanghai in 2012, the Chinese film world greeted it with silence. A professor from Tokyo did not.
A Japanese scholar traveled from Tokyo to see a film China had buried
In June 2012, the Shanghai International Film Festival screened a restored print of Song of Wu Xun, a three-hour black-and-white film that had been sealed in a Beijing archive since 1951. Yoshikawa Tatsuo, a professor of modern Japanese literature at Keio University in Tokyo, traveled to Shanghai with his graduate students specifically to attend the screening. Nearly no one in China remembered the film. Yoshikawa had come for it anyway.
I had tried to see Song of Wu Xun back in 2005, while making a documentary called Shanghai Rumba and studying the performance of Zhao Dan, one of the great actors of Chinese cinema’s golden age. A call to the China Film Archive in Beijing revealed that even fifty years after the ban, access required a formal written application, a letter of authorization from the Shanghai Film Studio, and a documented statement of purpose, all pending approval from senior officials.
When the approvals came through, the production’s budget had collapsed. We ended up paying 500 yuan to watch a videocassette copy instead. The archive permitted only five viewers at a time. We flew from Shanghai to Beijing, stood in the wind outside the building, and felt something I could only call reverence, the same reverence, I thought later, that had brought those Japanese researchers across the Pacific.
Our cinematographer was Taiwanese. We shielded him at the entrance, nervous about questions. Watching a videocassette had become something furtive and strange: a small group of people filing into a darkened room to see a film that officially did not exist.
Success
You are now signed up for our newsletter
Success
Check your email to complete sign up
Mao personally condemned the film and launched a campaign against its creators
Song of Wu Xun tells the story of Wu Xun, a 19th-century beggar from Shandong province who spent his life enduring beatings and humiliations to save enough money to build free schools for poor children. He had become a celebrated figure in Chinese cultural memory, honored in picture books and folk songs, held up by the educator and reformer Tao Xingzhi as a model of selfless devotion.
The film was directed by Sun Yu, a Chinese filmmaker who had studied literature at the University of Wisconsin, film direction and screenwriting at Columbia University, and cinematography and editing at the New York Academy of Photography; he was the first Chinese director to receive systematic training in the United States. After the Second World War he worked in Hong Kong and was celebrated as a “poet-director.” He came back to the mainland in 1947 and spent three years making Song of Wu Xun, navigating the transition from studios under Nationalist Party control to those under the newly established Communist government, finishing the film in late 1950.
The film opened in Shanghai and Nanjing in February 1951 to packed theaters and enthusiastic reviews. Sun Yu took the print to Beijing, where Zhou Enlai, then China’s prime minister and a former classmate of Sun’s at Nankai Middle School, attended a screening.
Three months later, everything collapsed.
On May 20, 1951, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official propaganda organ, published an editorial that Mao Zedong, then the Party’s chairman and China’s supreme leader, had personally revised and approved. The editorial declared that Song of Wu Xun amounted to “frenzied propaganda for feudal culture” and “capitulation to reactionary feudal rulers.” It accused the film of slandering peasant revolutionary struggles, distorting Chinese history, and defaming the Chinese nation. A Party-organized investigation team, led by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, traveled to Wu Xun’s hometown to find damaging materials. They reported that Wu Xun had lent money at interest. Under normal circumstances this was unremarkable; a beggar accumulating coins over decades would naturally have deposited them somewhere. Under the new political logic, it became proof of class exploitation.
The filmmakers had no idea what had hit them. Zhao Dan, who played Wu Xun, stepped onto a Shanghai tram the morning after the editorial appeared and was recognized by the conductor, who asked, with audible surprise: “You’re still out here? You haven’t been locked up?” Zhao Dan said everything was fine. He did not sound entirely sure.
The Party used the filmmakers, then destroyed them
What the filmmakers could not understand, and what the actress Huang Zongying, who played the schoolteacher in the film, explained to me sixty-one years later from her hospital bed, was that Song of Wu Xun had been made at the Party’s own direction.
Yang Hansheng, a prominent playwright and covert Communist Party member, had approached Zhao Dan in 1947 and instructed him to demand an extravagant fee from the Nationalist-controlled Central Film Company, which was financing the production, and to inflate the budget as much as possible. The goal was to drain Nationalist resources so they could fund fewer counter-revolutionary war films. Zhao Dan and Huang Zongying were both under the impression that they worked for Kunlun Film Studio, a private company. They did not know that Kunlun was secretly Party-run, or that Yang’s instructions came from the Party itself.
When the political campaign came, Yang was untouched. Sun Yu and Zhao Dan were not.
Huang Zongying, a small woman of 87 in the summer of 2012, spoke slowly from her hospital bed, where I found her, as I always found her, reading a book. I asked her how things had eventually calmed down after the campaign. She said they had not calmed down. Every film studio in China shut down production. Nobody knew what they were allowed to make. Between 1952 and 1954, China’s total film output did not reach 20 titles.
Sun Yu fell silent. When I joined Shanghai Film Studio in 1982, I did not know he existed, had no idea where he was or what had become of him. He attempted a return with two films in 1957 and 1958, then retired early, citing poor health, and stopped touching film.
A Tokyo scholar found no rational explanation for the 1951 purge
After the 2012 screening, Yoshikawa and I sat in a café, and he looked at me with genuine confusion. “I can’t understand,” he said, in careful Mandarin. “Why did they launch such a serious political campaign in 1951 over one film? There’s nothing in it. The teacher Huang Zongying plays is constantly criticizing feudalism, isn’t she?”
We sat with that for a long time.
He was right. Nothing in the film, seen today, explains what happened to it. The performance by Zhao Dan, the visual language that Sun Yu had developed across four decades of filmmaking, the quality of the craft: all of it belongs to a standard that Chinese cinema has rarely reached since.
I told Yoshikawa I could take him to meet Huang Zongying, who was recovering at Huadong Hospital. He put down his coffee before I finished the sentence.
When we walked into her room and he saw her, he went quiet for a long moment. Then: “I, I didn’t expect to meet you. I’m too moved.” He was a scholar who had spent years studying what these artists had endured, and he was now in the room with one of them. His reaction moved me more than I expected. This reverence, I thought, was something we Chinese had been steadily eroding in ourselves.
The film’s quiet restoration brought no public reckoning from China’s film world
When the restored print screened in Shanghai, there were no announcements, no advertisements, no public statements from the surviving artists or the film establishment. If Yoshikawa had not contacted me, I would not have known the restoration existed.
Huang Zongying heard about it and said, quietly and repeatedly: “This means the film has been rehabilitated.”
In Chinese political culture, rehabilitation, expressed by the term ping fan, is the formal reversal of a wrongful political verdict. It means the Party acknowledges, however obliquely, that a campaign was unjust. Rehabilitation without acknowledgment is its own kind of silence, though. The young people who saw the restored film had no knowledge of the 1951 campaign; for them, rehabilitation carried no meaning because the original verdict had never reached them.
I looked at the credits and recognized names I had known: old actors, art directors, a director. The name that stopped me was that of the film’s composer, Lu Hongen, a devout Christian. During the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long campaign of mass terror that Mao launched in 1966, Lu asked a single question: should Beethoven listen to the masses, or should the masses listen to Beethoven? For that question, Jiang Qing called him “a great calamity for China’s artistic world and a great calamity for the Chinese people.” She had him shot.
The composer was executed; the actress spent sixty years without an apology
Walking home in the rain along Huashan Road, I kept thinking about Zhao Dan on that tram, the conductor staring at him, asking if he had been locked up yet.
Then I thought of Wu Xun himself, the character Zhao Dan played: a man in rags on a street corner, offering strangers the chance to punch him for a coin, so that one day the children of the poor could go to school. Passengers pressing back against the walls of the tram. Someone shouting to throw this madman off.
The print, sealed in a vault, survived. The posters survived.
Huang Zongying, in her late eighties, still reading books in a hospital corner, said she hoped to live with quality. She said she no longer needed to remember everything she had read. In the film, she is twenty-five years old forever, teaching children about Wu Xun’s story, leading them gently into history. In the sixty years since, history had swallowed her, and she had come out the other side still reading, still quiet, still waiting for something that looked, inadequately, like justice.
By Peng Xiaolian, Vision Times
