Storm under the Sun: An Introduction

Kirk A. Denton
Associate Professor
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Storm Under the Sun is a film inspired by the memories of Peng Xiaolian, a Shanghai director who has, in her large oeuvre of feature films, tended to focus on women and women's issue. In 1955, when she was just two, her father, Peng Boshan, was arrested as part of a national campaign directed at the "counterrevolutionary" Hu Feng clique. Peng Boshan was at the time head of the propaganda department of the Shanghai city government; he had since the 1930s been a devoted revolutionary activist in the communist movement. His tragic "mistake" was to have had befriended Hu Feng (1902–85), a literary critic and theorist who promoted a vision of literature that was at odds with Maoist dogma, and to have published a couple of short stories in a Hu Feng-edited journal back in the 1930s. Imprisoned until 1957, Peng Boshan was then sent to various remote regions_including a stint in Qinghai. In 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, he was beaten to death by red guards. As she recounts in her moving published memoir, Their Age (Tamen de suiyue), Peng Xiaolian grew up without a father, or rather with a father who was like a stranger coming in and out of her life and then finally disappearing forever. This absent father was the stimulus for the making of this moving documentary.

Directed with S. Louisa Wei, a much younger filmmaker originally from the mainland but now working in Hong Kong, the film opens with two short sequences of archival footage. First we see images of the 1936 funeral of Lu Xun (1881–1936), a progressive May Fourth writer who was greatly admired by the young Hu Feng and Peng Boshan for his seething indictments of traditional ideology and for his literary excellence; these are followed by shots of Chairman Mao greeting the throngs in Tian'anmen Square in 1966. This juxtaposition establishes the film's central theme: the clash between May Fourth enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy, for which Lu Xun was a powerful symbol, and the Maoist program to eliminate such autonomy and instill ideological uniformity.

The Poet and Literary Theorist Hu Feng

A product of the May Fourth ethos, Hu Feng was a young poet and critic who emerged on the literary scene in China in the 1930s, when he joined the League of Left-wing Writers. In his capacity as an administrator in the League, Hu Feng established a close relationship with Lu Xun, whom he had long considered a literary mentor. Like his mentor, Hu was a leftist who thought that literature should contribute to social transformation; however, both objected to the narrow politicized role for literature that was being promoted in the Communist Party–sponsored League. Hu Feng was an ardent supporter of realism, but he felt that literature could reflect the real only if it drew from the subjectivity of the author and was unconstrained by political ideologies. When Lu Xun died in 1936, there was a struggle over the meaning of his legacy. On the one side, Hu Feng and others sought to uphold Lu Xun's unwavering spirit of critical realism. On the other side, the Communist Party attempted to coopt Lu Xun as a "communist" (he never joined the Party) and shape him into an iconic symbol of the revolution. The conflict between Hu Feng and the Party was, at least in part, a contestation over the idea of Lu Xun and the larger May Fourth enlightenment values he embodied.

During the 1940s, by which time Hu Feng had created a name for himself through his journals and book series as an "independent" literary figure closely affiliated with the spirit of Lu Xun, the Party launched an attack on Hu Feng that focused on his central concept of "subjectivism," which Party cultural officials felt smacked of bourgeois individualism. Shortly before this attack, Mao had given a series of lectures called "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature" that presented a very different view_the writer should be a cog in the wheel of the revolutionary movement. The class between the Party and Hu Feng centered around the question of whether the writer was to be an active or passive agent in the creative process.

Had Hu Feng succumbed to the pressure to conform after 1949, things might have turned out less tragically. But Hu was an intransigent man who believed strongly in his ideas. Moreover, he gathered around him a group of like-minded intellectuals whose writings he promoted and with whom he shared his literary vision. In the Maoist logic, this was treasonous. A reaction from the party was inevitable, especially after Hu wrote a long report to the Central Committee that outlined his views on literature and the unfair treatment he and his followers had received under the new regime.

In May 1955, the Party arrested group members, some with only tenuous ties to Hu Feng, and launched a national media assault that included thousands of articles and satirical cartoons indicting the group for it "bourgeois" literary platform and counterrevolutionary activities. From 1955 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, when the Party slowly initiated political rehabilitation, the core members of the group were personae non gratae in the Chinese literary and social worlds. One of the most tragic cases is that of Lu Ling, generally recognized as Hu Feng's most promising disciple. For twenty years, Lu Ling endured detention, self-reflection, prison, and psychiatric wards; he suffered a severe mental breakdown and emerged from his years of hell a pale shadow of his former self. Had Lu Ling been alive at the time of the making of this film, he would have offered a truly pathetic testimony to the state's ability to break a man.

The film narrates the historical background of Hu Feng's pre-1949 conflicts with the Party, the virulence of the year-long campaign itself, the various forms of imprisonment suffered, the farce of the 1965 show trial, the tragic consequences for families of the purged, and the eventual lukewarm "rehabilitation" of group members after Mao's death. In the process, we are presented with a detailed picture of the nature of political persecution in Maoist China. That picture includes fascinating testimony of a former interrogator of Hu Feng and rare glimpses of Qincheng, the notorious prison outside Beijing where some Hu Feng associates where locked up and which the filmmakers shot at some personal risk.

Storm Under the Sun is a personal film that has as its narrative thread Peng Xiaolian's search for the meaning of her father's death. But that thread is just a small part of the whole canvas of the film, which seeks to paint a picture of the larger "family" of the Hu Feng group and the Party's campaign against it. There is thus a tension in the film between personal and documentary impulses, a tension that is perhaps reflected in its two very different directors_one who experienced first hand the effects of the campaign and the other for whom the events of the 1950s were only vaguely known before embarking on this project. In interviews and voiceover narration, we can hear the voice of Peng Xiaolian address interviewees as "Auntie" or "Uncle." At one moment, she holds the hand of the long-suffering wife of Sun Dian, a Hu Feng group member, as she recounts selling her blood to keep her large family alive in the wake of the campaign. Yet most of the film is narrated in a much more dispassionate, documentary tone in the persona of Peng Xiaolian (though actually spoken by Louisa Wei). This tension between the personal and the historical is at the heart of the film's power. Indeed, the film presents us with the reality that politics and history were always personal and the personal always political in Mao's China.

The film is structured in a fairly conventional documentary format, with voiceover narration and copious use of archival film, images of historical documents, original manuscripts, photographs, paintings, and cartoons, along with interviews of Hu Feng group members, their relatives, and a few scholars. But interspersed into this structure are wonderful animated sequences, done in a child-like style, that accompany narrations by interviewees or reflect the feelings and memories of Peng Xiaolian, who suffered as a child because of the alleged crimes of her father. These animated sequences lighten the heavy tone of the rest of the film, but at the same time they seem to reinforce the tragedy of youthful innocence stolen by a state willfully disposed to create ideological conformity.

The most powerful moments in the film come through the voices and stories of the Hu Feng group members and their families: Mei Zhi, wife of Hu Feng, stoically, though not without cynicism, recounts the day Hu Feng was taken from her in May of 1955; with tears brimming in his eyes, Chen Pei tells of the day his father Ah Long was arrested; Lin Xi, a student of Ah Long, narrates the absurd story of how he was arrested because of a single mention of his name in one of Hu Feng's letters and movingly tells of his uncontrollable emotions when later forced to testify against his mentor; Hua Tie describes how prisoners like he and Ouyang Zhuang were prevented from sleeping for days, a technique to break their wills; Xie Tao, Lu Yuan, and Xu Fang offer dramatic details of life in Qincheng Prison; Zhang Xiaogu, Hu Feng's oldest son, narrates his father's continuing paranoia_"walking around like a hunted animal"_after his release from captivity.

We also see glimpses of resistance against and survival within state repression: Xu Fang, a former journalist for People's Daily, tells of how he stubbornly refused to admit his crimes to his captors, declaring that he wished to die in prison because "in a country without freedom, everywhere is like a prison"; poet Lu Yuan describes how he studied German to make it through his many years of solitary confinement; Niu Han reveals that at the 1965 show trial he brazenly declared that Hu Feng was not a counterrevolutionary, thus breaking with the scripted testimony his captors had given him; Zeng Zhuo's wife tells the story of how she came to marry her husband after his release from prison and how the two found a measure of happiness in a world that continued to stigmatize him.

One particularly poignant moment in the film is a reading of a letter by Ah Long that he wrote in prison. The letter vents outrage at the state for the injustice of the campaign, declaring that "if a party lies to its people, it is already morally corrupted . . . I can be crushed but I cannot be bent." This same letter, however, also harbors what some might see as a naïve hope that Mao would somehow rectify the injustice. Even in the face of their own oppression, members of this group continued to hold an idealistic faith in the essential rightness of the system. This generation of Chinese intellectuals was perhaps too personally invested in the revolutionary movement to reject its legacy altogether.

Storm Under the Sun is part of a growing movement in documentary filmmaking in the People's Republic of China that presents views of history and society alternative to the official discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. Liberated by DV technology, filmmakers can make films outside of the state-run studio system or without being subject to state censorship. This film may never be shown publicly on the mainland, but as many such documentaries, it will find its way into the hands of mainland spectators. Hopefully there will be among them some young people, who generally know little of the repressive history of Maoist China and who may buy into the myth, propagated by the state, that the 1950s was an idyllic period of enlightened state socialism.