The question raised by The Life of Wu Hsun is fundamental
in nature. A fellow like Wu Hsun,1 living
as he did towards the end of the Ching Dynasty in an era of great
struggle by the Chinese people against foreign aggressors and
domestic reactionary feudal rulers, did not lift a finger against
the feudal economic base or its superstructure; on the contrary,
he strove fanatically to spread feudal culture and, in order to
gain a position for this purpose previously beyond his reach, he
fawned in every way on the reactionary feudal rulers -- ought we
to praise such disgusting behaviour? How can we tolerate praising
it to the masses, especially when such praise flaunts the
revolutionary banner of "serving the people" and when
the failure of revolutionary peasant struggles is used as a foil
to accentuate the praise? To approve or tolerate such praise is to
approve or tolerate abuse of the revolutionary struggles of the
peasants, abuse of Chinese history, abuse of the Chinese nation,
and to regard such reactionary propaganda as justified.
The appearance of the film The Life of Wu Hsun, and
particularly the spate of praise lavished on Wu Hsun and the film,
show how ideologically confused our country's cultural circles
have become!
In the view of many writers, history proceeds not by the new
superseding the old, but by preserving the old from extinction
through all kinds of exertion, not by waging class struggle to
overthrow the reactionary feudal rulers who ought to be
overthrown, but by negating the class struggle of the oppressed
and submitting to these rulers in the manner of Wu Hsun. Our
writers do not bother to study history and learn who were the
enemies oppressing the Chinese people and whether there was
anything commendable about those who submitted to these enemies
and worked for them. Nor do they bother to find out what new
economic formations of society, new class forces, new
personalities and ideas have emerged in China during the century
and more since the Opium War of 1840 in the struggle against the
old economic formations and their superstructures (politics,
culture, etc.) before they decide what to commend and praise, what
not to, and what to oppose.
Certain Communists who have allegedly grasped Marxism merit
special attention. They have studied the history of social
development -- historical materialism -- but when it comes to
specific historical events, specific historical figures (like Wu
Hsun) and specific ideas which run counter to the trend of history
(as in the film The Life of Wu Hsun and the writings
about Wu Hsun), they lose their critical faculties, and some have
even capitulated to these reactionary ideas. Isn't it a fact that
reactionary bourgeois ideas have found their way into the militant
Communist Party? Where on earth is the Marxism which certain
Communists claim to have grasped?
For the above reasons, it is imperative to unfold discussion on
the film The Life of Wu Hsun and on the essays and other
writings about Wu Hsun and thereby thoroughly clarify the confused
thinking on this question.
NOTES
[1] Wu Hsun (1838-96), born in Tangyi, Shantung Province, was
originally a vagrant. Using the slogan of "schools through
alms", he went about cheating people out of their money,
bought land and lent money and eventually became a big landlord
and usurer. He ganged up with despotic landlords to set up a few
so-called "tuition-free schools" in which he fanatically
spread feudal culture and trained lackeys for the exploiting
class, thus winning praise from reactionary rulers of successive
regimes.
—from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung