Pay Serious Attention to the Discussion of the Film, the Life of Wu Xun

On May 19, 1951, Mao Zedong wrote and rewrote several paragraphs when he aimed to evaluate the editorial published by People's Daily under the title “Pay Serious Attention to the Discussion of the Film, The Life of Wu Xun”, these paragraphs written by Mao Zedong constitute the main body of this work.

These remarks by Mao Zedong was published in People's Daily on May 20. Included in the Collected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 6. At the beginning of 1951, the important content of the Party's publicity and ideological work was to make Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought the guiding ideology of all national undertakings, to publicize and educate the people, and to mobilize all social forces to build New China.

The primary task of the publicity of ideological and cultural work is to advocate and guide people to study and explain history from the scientific, that is, Marxist point of view. The Party's work in this area was centered on the evaluation of the film The Life of Wu Xun. The film The Life of Wu Xun was shot in 1949 and has been shown in Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin since the end of 1950.

Wu Xun was a beggar in Tangyi County of Shandong Province in the late Qing Dynasty. During his lifetime, he set up a free school by begging to help poor children receive education, which was praised by the Qing government.

After the film was released, the controversy of different opinions arose. Two opinions, praise and criticism, appeared in the newspapers and periodicals.

On May 20, 1951, the People's Daily published an editorial that Mao Zedong rewrote “Pay Serious Attention to the Discussion of the Film, The Life of Wu Xun”, which extends from how to evaluate Wu Xun, a historical figure, to how to look at the fundamental issues of modern Chinese history and Chinese revolutionary road.

(1) Mao Zedong pointed out that the appearance of the film The Life of Wu Xun, and particularly the spate of praise lavished on Wu Xun and the film, show how ideologically confused our country's cultural circles have become!

Wu Xun lived under the oppression of the reactionary rule inside and outside the feudal society in the late Qing Dynasty. Instead of thinking about how to fight against the feudal rule, he fanatically propagated the feudal culture, and even showed his servility to the feudal rulers. These behaviors cannot be praised by our publicity ideological and cultural work.

“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 publicity as justified.”

(2) Mao Zedong pointed out what publicity ideological and cultural workers, especially literary and artistic workers, should strive to study, praise or oppose.

In Mao Zedong's view, the history proceeds by the new superseding the old, by waging class struggle to overthrow the reactionary feudal rulers who ought to be overthrown, but not by negating the class struggle of the oppressed and submitting to these rulers in the manner of Wu Xun.

Our writers should to study history and learn who are the enemies oppressing the Chinese people and whether there is anything commendable about those who submitted to these enemies and worked for them. They should 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.

(3) 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 Xun) and specific ideas which run counter to the trend of history (as in the film The Life of Wu Xun and the writings about Wu Xun), they lose their critical faculties, and some have even capitulated to these reactionary ideas. We should be vigilant against the phenomenon that bourgeois reactionary thoughts invade the fighting Communist Party.

After the editorial was published, it was reprinted one after another in major newspapers and magazines across the country, and cultural and educational organizations and groups were organized to study and discuss it, followed by criticism of the film and Wu Xun. Under the background of the ideological transformation in the early days of the founding of New China, it is necessary to reexamine Wu Xun, a specific historical figure, under the historical conditions of modern China, so as to help people distinguish between people's revolution and reformism, and to improve people's understanding. However, there have been some one-sided and arbitrary elements in the criticism.