Time Has Begun: Hu Feng's Poesis in Socialist China, 1937-50

This paper examines the poetry of the Marxist poet and critic Hu Feng 胡风 (1902-85) within the context of the modernizing transformations that took place in the People's Republic of China (PRC), with a particular focus on Hu's claims of the political effects of the Chinese Revolution (1927–50) on creative practices during the 1940s and early 1950s, specifically, the phenomena presented by his poesis. Hu, a fellow traveller of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), came into his own in the 1940s during a series of debates with his colleagues in the Party. In his career as a poet and critical intellectual, literary editor and publisher, Marxist-in-exile in socialist China, and political prisoner of the CCP, Hu practiced and called for writings that eventually became oppositional forces against authoritarian practices and populist nationalism.¹ The literary and political career of Hu as a Marxist literary critic at work is an instructive case, not just in the study of the broad history of modern China, but also in our efforts to continue to expand the concept of the "committed critic" in relation to debates about the parameters in which creative freedom and political commitment negotiate with each other. This paper will augment incipient critical discussions of modern Chinese writing in the wide scholarly and cultural sphere of global literatures and advanced criticism.²

Hu's poesis, which extended beyond poetry to embrace pedagogical and editorial work that nurtured a group of emergent writers (the July writers) of his time, gave the poet-critic a chance to develop a subjectivity and poetic form that tantalized the literary space beyond the confines of the CCP's wartime politics. Hu's Time Has Begun 时间开始了, a book-length elegy to the founding of the PRC, written amid his longstanding conflicts with Party writers, conflated many of Hu's mixed sentiments about the arrival of a power regime he simultaneously anticipated and apprehended.

Time Has Begun

The poet is "a soldier in life," "a fighter of human freedom and happiness," and "a monk who sacrifices himself for the good life of millions of people"; he is "the owner of a philanthropic soul" (Hu, "A Brief Discussion of Literature from Nowhere" 427-30). Anyone who lives up to these standards "can be honored as a poet even if he or she has not written a single line [of poetry]" (Hu, "Man and Poet" 74). These statements are just some of Hu's plainest and most instructive claims on the personae and tasks of the poet, claims that lie at the heart of his own writing and his editorial and pedagogical work. Each of these claims leads to the question of the poet as "a soldier in life": what sort of person can shape such a central place during a decade of wars that defined much of the sociopolitical reality of China and that bore the mark of China's long journey to modernity? The terms "soldier" and "poet" bear ideologically specific connotations relating to the Chinese Revolution. By putting them together, Hu presented a vision of different elements and goals of the revolution that entered the same historical moment while waiting for the day they would be in equilibrium—a balance of forces guaranteed by the condition of poesis.

In October 1949, Hu recorded in his diary, "a song has been churning in my mind for two months; it strikes the strongest chord and reaches the height of harmony" (Mei 569). This song, which Hu wrote to celebrate the PRC's founding, was the grand historical epic Time Has Begun. In this epic of heroes inciting historical events and imagery of the triumphant joy of transformations in society, Hu presented an overview of the key moments that emerged during the new PRC's celebratory events. He recorded the poet's joy in seeing the CCP's expansion into political, ideological, and social institutions, and in witnessing its historical role in the Chinese socialist struggle. The complete epic, around 4,600 lines in length, is structured around five songs: "Joyous Praise 欢乐颂" (November 11-12, 1949...