Storm under the Sun is a remarkable historical document on the anti-Hu Feng campaign. Accompanied by a book, this documentary film undertakes to reevaluate the events of 1955 as the first among a series of cultural campaigns defining Maoist politics and paving the way for the Cultural Revolution. Its outstanding feature is without doubt the significant amount of first-hand material here gathered. “Fifth generation” director Peng Xiaolian, as the daughter of Hu Feng's friend Peng Boshan (arrested in 1955 and intermittently imprisoned until he was beaten to death in 1968), gained unequalled access to almost all of her father's contemporaries who were arrested with Hu Feng, and interviewed many of them in the very last years of their lives (most of them have since died). The film effectively uses first-person narration and Peng Xiaolian's own family story as a framework and a recurring point of reference to structure the narrative, which uses interviews, analyses by scholars, and original writings by members of the Hu Feng group, as well as family photographs, woodcuts and political cartoons.

Although Hu Feng's case is well known, it is not often given prominence in discussions of Chinese politics in the 1950s, a field currently at the centre of new historiographic interest (e.g. Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz [eds.], Dilemmas of Victory, Harvard University Press, 2008; Mechthild Leutner [ed.], Rethinking China in the 1950s, LIT Verlag, 2007). In China, several of the persecuted Hu Feng “elements” have published their memoirs, but public discussion of the movement remains limited. The film vividly underlines the scope of the campaign, in which 92 people were arrested (mostly writers and “cultural workers”) and over 2000 people were persecuted in some manner. While there is no decisive revelation about the sequence of events, the interviews give a striking sense of how the cultural institutions of the Maoist state dealt with ordinary intellectuals in the 1950s: the anti-Hu Feng campaign no longer appears as Mao or Zhou Yang's individual revenge, but rather as an example of the “routinization” of bureaucratic dictatorship in the cultural field. Many of the incriminated writers – Ah Long, He Manzi, Lü Yuan, Jia Zhifang, and, the most well known, Lu Ling – are discussed individually, and their poems and other writings are quoted at length, providing a rare opportunity to rediscover a forgotten generation of writers (also recently studied by Kirk Denton, who is interviewed in the film). It is unfortunate that the literary critic Shu Wu, who probably sparked the campaign by submitting personal letters from Hu Feng to the authorities, refuses to grant an interview; however, literary historian Zhu Zheng provides Shu Wu's version, according to which the letters were requested for verification purposes by the People's Daily editor, who circulated them without authorization (p. 206).

But the film's contribution goes beyond the events and the responsibilities of individual actors, raising several important historical issues. The first is the question of continuity between the post- and pre-1949 eras, in particular the May Fourth movement. From Mao's extolling of Lu Xun as the “commander in chief” of the great Cultural Revolution of May Fourth in New Democracy (1940), it had become clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was intent on claiming for itself the heritage of the New Culture movement, and drawing a straight line from New Youth and New Culture to the “Liberation” and new socialist culture of 1949. Wooing “progressive” intellectuals was therefore an important priority in 1949, as demonstrated for example by Mao's personal invitation to Lao She to return from America. The anti-Hu Feng campaign appears as a significant point of friction in the unfolding of this communist narrative. The film shows how closely Hu Feng was linked with Lu Xun in the mind of his associates (and enemies), not lastly because, in his writings of the early 1950s, he upheld the idea of an autonomous, rather than politically controlled, literature; a literature grounded in a cosmopolitan conscience, rather than in the “national forms” advocated by Mao. In this respect, one of the excerpts from an original audio recording of Hu Feng's voice, made in December 1984, six months before his death, seems to confirm that Lu Xun's position in the “Two slogan quarrel” in which he opposed Zhou Yang shortly before his death in 1936, was indeed motivated by his wish to uphold the autonomy of literature, and is worth quoting at length: “We felt this slogan [National Defense literature, proposed by Zhou Yang] had a problem (…). The very wording of ‘national defense’ sounds like protecting the state, while the state is only a machine oppressing the people. Fighting against the Japanese imperialist oppression and invasion does not aim to defend the state machine. Our slogan suggests the task still depends on the people” (pp. 89–90). Without overstating the importance of the theoretical content in the debate between Hu Feng and Zhou Yang (Shao Quanlin for example defended similar positions to Hu Feng, stressing that literature did not need to be “representative,” and continued to hold a high position in the cultural bureaucracy until the early 1960s), the film effectively highlights the incompatibility between the actual legacy of May Fourth and the CCP's instrumentalization of its historical significance.

The second contribution of the film is that, in illustrating the CCP's cultural policy, it goes a long way in destroying the “myth of the 1950s” and in questioning the unique nature of the Cultural Revolution. Mao's cultural policy should have been clear to intellectuals at least since the Yan'an talks of 1942; as the film perhaps omits to underline systematically, there was no truce after 1949: the attacks against Sun Yu's film The Life of Wu Xun in December 1950 marked the beginning of a new “Rectification campaign” (zhengfeng yundong), followed by persecution of Yu Pingbo (1953), Feng Xuefeng (1954), Hu Feng (1955), the “Rightists” (1957), Shao Quanlin (1963), and finally Zhou Yang himself in the Cultural Revolution. Figures like Hu Feng, who were intent on demonstrating their “loyalty” to the government after 1949, appear as tragic: the use of animated figures in the film, in particular of original political cartoons that are set into motion by animation, conveys an acute feeling of the manipulation of intellectuals, transformed into puppets by the CCP, in theoretical discussions that they always seem to take more seriously than the Party (special mention should also be made of the music which discreetly comments on the revolutionary, traditional, and poetic strains of the film).

Even today, as the film shows, many of the former “Hu Feng elements” still crave nothing as much as “redress” (pingfan) and recognition of their “loyalty” by the Party (the interview with Wang Rong in the hospital shortly before his death, asking for financial compensation as a form of official redress, is particularly moving). This question is central in the current wave of independent Chinese documentaries, with directors like Hu Jie turning to commemorating the victims of the Cultural Revolution (Though I am Gone, 2006). The protagonist of Wang Bing's documentary He Fengming (2007), a three-hour interview of a victim of the anti-Rightist movement, displays the same yearning for recognition of her revolutionary credentials by the very state that has persecuted her. S. Louisa Wei, Peng Xiaolian's co-director, underlines how, from an initial rejection of politics, she evolved towards embracing the idea of writing stories “on the margin of official history” (p. 46) to document the “spirit of independent thinking” (p. 36) of some of the intellectuals she had met.

Therefore, in addition to the unique historical material it presents in a visually compelling way, the film also invites its audience to a much-needed reflection on Chinese intellectuals' complex relationship with the state: for this reason alone it merits wide discussion in academia and public forums, both in the West and in China, where, through semi-official channels, it will hopefully find its way to the audience that is most closely concerned by it.