The history of the early People's Republic was marked by many mass criticism campaigns, some better known in the West than others. The film Storm under the Sun, directed by Peng Xiaolian and S. Louisa Wei, focuses on one of the lesser known of these campaigns, the anti-Hu Feng Movement of 1955.

At the core of the campaign was an ideological conflict between the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Hu Feng, a prominent cultural critic, about the role that literature, art and culture in general were to play in the new, Marxist-Leninist China. Mao advocated the subservience of arts to politics; Hu on the other hand saw arts as politics. Where Mao liked to see artists as mere " company men" , working in the pay and under the control of the State, Hu considered them as autonomous and independent actors with a role to play in the political domain. To us, this may seem a disagreement about a minor issue, but in China, culture, literature and art always have been considered to be more than mere artistic expression. Moreover, Hu was an opponent to be reckoned with: he was seen by many in the cultural domain as the heir of Lu Xun, the writer and essayist non-pareil who was considered and venerated widely as the founder of the new, post-Imperial Chinese culture. Not having Hu in his camp clearly was detrimental to Mao's own position as the Maximum Leader.

By revisiting and interviewing the surviving members of the so-called Hu Feng clique, by painstakingly compiling and quoting archival and visual materials, the film brilliantly follows the build-up of the campaign, all the way to the end, when Mao died, the Cultural Revolution ended and the prosecuted were rehabilitated after more than twenty years of incarceration or labor camp. It provides us with an insight in the mechanisms of ideological campaigning during the Maoist high tide. Gaining access to the survivors was helped, of course, by the fact that Peng Xiaolian's father was one of the targets of the anti-Hu Feng campaign who did not survive the ordeal.

If it had not been for real, it would have made for great drama: a " ring leader" who feels misunderstood by his government, in the traditional manner of a Chinese intellectual advocating a course he considers just; a turn-coat, snitching others to the authorities, gaining political status and symbolic capital in the process; " innocent bystanders" who unwittingly get sucked into the vortex of political events they have no knowledge of and do not know how to defend themselves against; children who bear the brunt of the alleged misdeeds their parents have committed and who have to suffer under the pressure of their peers

Storm under the Sun is a timely visual document of the inner mechanisms of the Chinese Communist Party during the period that many, both inside and out of China, see as the " golden years" . It is timely, because even during the production process, many former members of the Hu Feng coterie died of old age. Had this movie been produced ten years later, no eye witness accounts would have been available any longer. And it is precisely the directness of the memories of the participants that lends the documentary its vividness and urgency, which sheds light on their wretched fates and perseverance in the eye of adversity. At the same time, Storm under the Sun leaves us with many questions. How can people who have suffered so much, laugh so easily about their ordeals? How can these victims of historical circumstances continue to support a political system that has destroyed their lives and those of their descendants? Why haven't they left China as soon as the opportunity arose?

To understand the present, one must know the past. Contemporary China, with its high-rise buildings, conspicuous consumption, grid-locked traffic and migrant workers, emerged from an era when ideological conformity, political purity and revolutionary hope and enthusiasm reigned supreme. By addressing an almost forgotten event in history, Storm under the Sun takes us back to that time that seems simpler, but was not less fraught with risk than the present.