Storm Under the Sun is a film inspired by the memories of Peng Xiaolian, a film director who has, in her large oeuvre of feature films, tended to focus on female characters and the life and history of Shanghai. 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 (1910–68) was at the time head of the Ministry of Propaganda in Shanghai; 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 at odds with Maoist dogma, and to have published a few short stories in a journal Hu Feng edited back in the 1930s. Imprisoned until 1957, Peng Boshan was then exiled to various remote regions—including a stint in Qinghai. In 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, he wasbeaten to death by Red Guards. As she recounts in her moving published memoir, Their Lives, Their Times (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 and powerful documentary.

The documentary was produced and co-directed by S. Louisa Wei, a much younger filmmaker originally from the Mainland but now working in Hong Kong, who was also responsible for designing the film's visual and musical style. One characteristic of that style is a frequent use of animated scenes. The film opens, for example, with an animated sequence that shows Mao Zedong rising into a red sun that is then slashed by a lightening bolt descending from a stormy sky. The sound of thunder immediately introducesa sequence of anti-Hu Feng cartoons, accompanied by a drum cue from composer Robert Ellis-Geiger. Animated sequences intersperse throughout the film: some accompany narrations of Peng Xiaolian's personal feelings and memories; others illustrate poems written by poets in the Hu Feng group. These animations lighten the heavy tone of the rest of the film, but at the same time they seem to reinforce the tragedy of youthful innocence willfully stolen by a state to enforce ideological conformity.

Who Is Hu Feng?

Near the beginning of the film are 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 footage depicting moments in the history of the communist movement, culminating in a shot 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. 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 early 1930s, when he joined the League of Left-wing Writers. In his capacity as an administrator in the League, Hu Feng developed a close relationship with Lu Xun (1881–1936), whom he had long considered a literary mentor. Like his mentor, Hu Feng 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. He was an ardent supporter of realism, but 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, the Communist Party attempted to co-opt Lu Xun as a "Communist" (he had 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: the critical spirit and enlightenment values he embodied.

During the 1940s, by which time Hu had created a name for himself through his journals—in particular July and Hope—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 and threatened Party hegemony over ideological matters. 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 of the role of the writer—a cog in the wheel of the revolutionary movement. The clash between the Party and Hu Feng centered on 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 who shared his literary vision. In Maoist logic, this was sectarian and treasonous behavior. A reaction from the party was inevitable, especially after Hu wrote a long report to the Central Committee outlining 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 its individualist literature, "bourgeois" literary platform, and counterrevolutionary activities. From 1955 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, after which the Party slowly initiated political rehabilitation, the core members of the group were personae non gratae in the Chinese literary and social worlds.

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 trials, 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 and the complex and interrelated personal, cultural, and ideological motivations behind it. 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.

One of the most tragic cases is that of Lu Ling (1923–94), 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. Other members of the group, including Hu Feng himself, also suffered psychic breakdowns.

An Investigation of the Hu Feng Case

Storm Under the Sun is a personal film that follows Peng Xiaolian's search for the meaning of her father's death, but that personal motivation 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 of 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 firsthand the effects of the campaign, and the other who grew up after the Cultural Revolution and knew little about the political movements in Mao-era China before embarking on this project. 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's five-chapter structure may seem conventional, but Peng Xiaolian's first-person female voiceover interplays with Hu Feng's own voice (recorded in 1984, six months before he passed away) and a male voiceover that recites poems, narrates the story of Ah Long, and reads Mao's May 13, 1955 People's Daily editorial. Storm under the Sun makes copious use of archival film, as well as images of historical documents, original manuscripts, books, journals, photographs, paintings, and political cartoons, along with interviews of Hu Feng group members, their relatives, and scholars. In several scenes, especially those related to Lu Ling, the directors juxtapose narration of the suffering of Hu Feng group members in the Mao era with woodblock prints from the Republican era, thus ironically turning the leftist discourse about the horrors of the "old society" against the Maoist "new society."

The most powerful moments in the film come through the voices and stories of the Hu Feng group members and their families. The first voice we hear is that of Hu Feng himself; feeble and expressionless, the voice is heavy with a profound despair that seems to carry through the rest of the film. Mei Zhi (1914–2004), Hu Feng's wife, stoically, though not without cynicism, recounts the day her husband was taken from her in May of 1955. With tears brimming in his eyes, Chen Pei tells of the day his father, Ah Long (1907–67), was arrested and how he later missed a chance to see him one last time, a regret he has carried with him his whole life. Lin Xi (1935–), 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. Xie Tao (1922–), Lu Yuan (1922–), and Xu Fang (1921–) 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. Jia Zhifang (1915–2008), who spent years as a janitor in the university in which he had formerly taught, reveals a feisty and youthful spirit in his interviews. These are but a few examples of the powerful stories that are the crux of Storm Under the Sun. One particularly poignant moment in the film is a reading of a prison letter by Ah Long. 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 held an idealistic faith in the essential rightness of the system. This generation of Chinese intellectuals was too personally invested in the revolutionary movement to reject its legacy altogether. As evidenced by his poem "Time Begins," an ode to Mao and to the founding of the People's Republic, Hu Feng was no dissident; he was a committed and loyal Communist. The campaign against him reveals Mao's paranoia about threats to his authority and the obsession with the post-revolutionary regime in instilling ideological uniformity. The virulence of the campaign is seen in the nasty tenor of the many political cartoons the filmmakers show us in the film and in a poem, written by Zang Kejia (1905–2004), called "Why Can't You Hate Your Enemy," appealing for his readers to "hate Hu Feng as you should."

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 a prison"; and the poet Lu Yuan describes how he studied German and composed poems to make it through his many years of solitary confinement. Whereas the published memoirs and scholarship on the Hu Feng group has paid scant attention to them, this film highlights the suffering of the Hu Feng group women and the ways they managed to survive under very difficult political and economic conditions. Lu Dian's wife, Li Jialing (1927–), the only woman to be arrested, staunchly refused to give testimony against Hu Feng. (Lu Dian, for his part, went mad.) At one moment, the long-suffering wife of Sun Dian (1917–), Hu Lijuan, recounts selling her blood to keep her large family alive in the wake of the campaign. Zeng Zhuo's wife Xue Ruyin 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.

The last "chapter" of the film deals with contemporary "remembrances" of the Hu Feng campaign. Although group members have been "rehabilitated," some remain bitter about the state's lack of financial restitution. On his deathbed, Wang Rong (1919–2004) expresses his bitterness about not being compensated for the salary he did not receive during his twenty-two years in labor camps. Following Wong Rong's story is the story of Xu Junjing (1927–1988), a Hu Feng group member who had never met Hu Feng, survived prison and labor camps only to find life after rehabilitation far from what he had imagined it might be: he committed suicide in 1988.

Storm Under the Sun is part of a growing movement of 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 and without being subject to state censorship. This film may never be shown publicly on the Mainland, but like many such documentaries it will find its way into the hands of mainland spectators. Probably among them will be some young people who generally know little of the repressive history of Maoist China and buy into the myth, propagated by the state, that the 1950s was an idyllic period of enlightened state socialism.