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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,...