Nie Cyan crossbow talked about a letter from Hu Feng

Hu Feng's (1902-1985) experience after liberation is worthy of sympathy, and the "Hu Feng anti-party clique" is definitely an unjust case. On December 16, 1952, Zhou Yang's symposium on "helping" Hu Feng to understand the problem at the literary and art circles concluded: "Hu Feng pursued an anti-party line in literary and art theory. In 1953, the "Literature and Art Daily" successively published Lin Mohan's "Hu Feng's Anti-Marxist Literary and Artistic Thought" and He Qifang's "The Road of Realism, or the Road of Anti-Realism?" " criticism of Hu Feng. Unconvinced, Hu Feng spent four months from February to July 1954 writing a report on the practice of literature and art since liberation (commonly known as the "Book of 300,000 Words") of more than 300,000 words, reflecting the problems of the literary and art circles to the Party Central Committee and Mao Zedong, and pointing the spearhead at Lin Mohan, He Qifang, and Zhou Yang. As a result, Hu Feng was charged with a series of crimes such as "anti-Marxism", "anti-party", "anti-socialism", "anti-people", and "anti-realism". He was arrested on 17 May 1955 and sentenced to 14 years in prison, and at the end of 1965 was executed outside of prison by "leniency". At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Hu Feng was again imprisoned, re-sentenced to life imprisonment, and released in January 1979. In 1980, the Central Committee said in a document rehabilitating Hu Feng that the "Hu Feng anti-party clique" case had "touched" more than 2,100 people and arrested 93 people, of whom 78 were designated as "Hu Feng elements."

　　

Hu Feng is a poet, literary and art theorist, and literary activist, and when we study Hu Feng as a poet, literary theorist, and literary activist, we must pay attention to separating hu Feng from his unjust cases and making a real evaluation of his achievements in poetry, literary and artistic theory, and literary activities; similarly, when we study Hu Feng and his people, we must also separate them from Hu Feng's unjust cases and make an objective evaluation of Hu Feng and his people. Do not bring sympathy for Hu Feng's unjust case to study Hu Feng's personal writings. A letter written to Shu Wu on October 25, 1982 by Nie Cyan, which is included in the Complete Works of Nie Cyan Crossbow, is very helpful for a comprehensive understanding of Hu Feng, and is reproduced below:

Lu Xun said that the slogan was raised by me, and the article was written by my name Hu Feng. Hu Gong said: On that day, he overlooked the clouds, which was exactly where the two were separated. I have not read his autobiography, when I was in Guilin, Peng Yanjiao said to me, there is an overseas Chinese interested in running a publishing house, asked me if I would like to cooperate with it? I had no such far-sighted ambitions, so I asked him to go to Hu Gong, but I don't know if this led to the "Southern Heavens". ...... I did not speak to him at the end of Chongqing, and only after the liberation did Luo Bingji pull the line and talk again. When I talked, I forgot about the previous things.

The letter "Lu Xun said that I proposed the slogan, and the article was written by my name Hu Feng", which refers to the "controversy between the two slogans". On June 1, 1936, Hu Feng's "What Does the Masses of the People Demand from Literature?" The article was published in the third issue of the "Literature Series", and the article proposed "popular literature of the national revolutionary war" and formed a confrontation with the "national defense literature" of Zhou Yang and others. Articles refuting Hu Feng sprang up, attacking him for "deliberately being innovative, trying to confuse the public and divide the line of the entire literary and art movement."

Lu Xun wrote "Answering Xu Maoyong and on the Question of the Anti-Japanese United Front" in his illness, and in addition to stating in detail the correctness of this slogan, the article also said: "This slogan was not proposed by Hu Feng, and it is a fact that Hu Feng wrote an article, but that was what I asked him to write, and it is also a fact that his article is not clearly explained." This slogan is not a 'novelty' for me alone, it was discussed by several people, and Mr. Mao Dun was one who participated in the discussion. Lu Xun took all the responsibility on himself and directed the firepower of criticism to himself, so as to alleviate the pressure on Hu Feng and ease the antagonism between the "national defense literature" theorists and Hu Feng; but on the other hand, he also severely criticized Hu Feng. Xia Yan once said that if Hu Feng's article was signed by Lu Xun, or if Hu Feng said in the article that the slogan of "popular literature" was put forward after consulting with Lu Xun and others, they absolutely did not dare to stand up and refute it. This statement probably won't be false. In January 1945, after Shu Wu's "On Subjectivity" was published in the first issue of Hope edited by Hu Feng, it triggered criticism in the literary and art circles, and Hu Feng admitted that he had "overlooked". The "Nantian" in the letter refers to the "Nantian Publishing House" founded by Hu Feng in Guilin. Nie's remark that "I did not speak to him at the end of Chongqing" is also circumstantial evidence. And look at Song Yunbin's diary on July 2, 1955:

At four o'clock, a meeting was held in the lobby of the new building of the Beijing Hotel, and Peng Zhen reported on the preparations for the meeting. After dinner,...... Feng Binfu was Yu Yan, and Nie Cyan had been declared a Hu Feng element. When Nie was in Guilin, he admired Hu Feng very much, and Yu often "raised the bar" with him, but since 1945, Nie seemed to have fallen out with Hu Feng, and had said how bad Hu Feng's style was. In May this year, Nie came to Hangzhou to make a report on the anti-Hu Feng Group, and Yu Zeng laughed at Nie: "Didn't Jun admire Hu Fenghu very much in the past?" He replied, "Backward thinking in the past...", and even said "backward and backward", and laughed, but at first Nie Guo was also a Hu Feng element. The language cloud "people are not easy to know, and it is not easy to know people", believe it!

In July 1955, Nie was expelled from the party and later changed to "probation in the party" and did general editorial work at a publishing house. In 1958, he was designated as a rightist, and was imprisoned for "counter-revolutionary arson" during the Labor Reform in Beidahuang. He returned to Beijing in the winter of 1960. In January 1967, he was arrested for "active counter-revolution" and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released in September 1976 and returned to Beijing in November. In June 1983, he was elected as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He died on 26 March 1986.