F Hu Feng's Prison Years

Hu Feng, the counterrevolutionary leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in Chinese Communist Party prison system. But back in the early days of Communist China he was among the party's chief literary theoreticians and critics-at least until factional infighting, and his short fuse, made him persona non grata among the establishment. His wife, Mei Zhi, shared his incarceration for many years. F is her account of that time, beginning ten years after Hu Feng's initial arrest, as she navigates the party's Byzantine prison bureaucracy, searching for his whereabouts. Eventually imprisoned then released, she cares for her husband in his rage and suffering, watching his descent into madness as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution take their toll. Both an intimate portrait of Mei Zhi's life with Hu Feng and a stark account of the prison system and life under Mao, F is at once beautiful and harrowing.

Mei Zhi (1914–2004), originally known as Tu Qihua, was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu. She joined the Left-Wing Writers’ Union in 1932. In 1944, she joined the All-China Anti-Japanese Association of Literary and Art Circles. She helped Hu Feng edit the literary periodicals July and Hope. In the 1930s she began writing essays, novels, children’s stories and poetry. She published several books of poems for children. In 1955, she was forced after the attack on Hu Feng to stop her creative work. In 1980, after Hu Feng’s rehabilitation, she was appointed as a writer in residence of the Chinese Writers’ Association. As well as resuming her writing for children, she published a large number of memoirs and essays, including the present book and a full-length biography of Hu Feng.

Gregor Benton is Professor Emeritus of Chinese History at Cardiff. He has published twelve prior books on Marxism, political humor, the history of the Chinese Communist Party, Red guerillas in the 1930s, the Sino-Japanese War, dissent in China, Chinese Trotskyism, Hong Kong, the theory of moral economy, and overseas Chinese. His Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934–1938 (1992) won several awards, including the Association of Asian Studies’ prize for the best book on modern China.