Ex-Smasheroo

Wu Hsun was an illiterate Shantung peasant who was kicked, starved, beaten and left to freeze as a reward for his ignorance. But Wu had vision and persistence. He determined to beg money for free schools so that other poor children should not grow up as he did. He stood in the cold outside rich men's houses for hours waiting for a dropped coin. Once he knelt begging for three days outside an official's mansion. By 1896, his persistence had earned him enough to build three schools and make him a legend among Chinese schoolchildren.

Last fall Shanghai's Kun Lun studios put one of their top director-writers, Sun Yu, to work on a script about the persistent peasant. Early this year, The Life of Wu Hsun unfolded on movie screens across the land. The film was a smasheroo. Newspapers and magazines turned handsprings to praise it. Communist writers acclaimed Wu as a "great new revolutionary hero." Author-Director Sun was sitting pretty--or thought he was.

Such moviemakers as Russia's Sergei Eisenstein--who got in trouble by making Czar Ivan the Terrible look too terrible--could have told Sun that the party line is not easily threaded through a movie projector. Just as Sun's acclaim was reaching its peak, Peking's People's Daily thundered that "his Life of Wu Hsun . . . showed that reactionary thoughts of the capitalistic class had seeped into the Communist Party." Far from being a hero of the people, Wu was a dangerous fool "who did not realize that his suffering was due to class oppression," and who committed the grave error of turning for help to the rich. Besides, the movie showed him pleading during a peasant uprising: "Killing people--is that the right thing?" China's Red spokesmen, who believe that it is (see above) concluded: "Wu Hsun behaved in a quixotic manner. His course was not the course of the masses." Party organizations in every city which had shown the film were ordered to start "re-indoctrination" courses on Wu.

"No matter what were my subjective hopes," groveled Writer Sun in a penitent doubletalk that sounded like a direct translation from the Russian, "the objective realization has proved to me that The Life of Wu Hsun ... is a movie harmful to the people. I can only hope to learn a lesson from my mistake and my failure."

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