The fact that a dead beggar should suddenly become the butt of Communist agitation is an event of rare interest which is well worth studying to see the workings of the Communist mentality and the motives behind it.
Wu Hsun (1838-1896) was a native of Shantung, the Province which gave birth to Confucius twenty-five centuries ago. His father was a common laborer and supported the family of five by the sweat of his brow. After the death of the old man, which occurred when Wu Hsun was only a lad of seven, he and his elder brother had to depend upon their mother, who did whatever sewing work and chare she could find to keep the pot boiling. Though the elder sister had been married off to reduce the family burden and the brother had soon gone away to shift for himself, the life of Wu Hsun and his mother was one of unrelieved anxiety and hunger. He could help her a little, but not much. When they could find no odd jobs to do, as it frequently happened, they resorted to the last expedient of begging.
As Wu Hsun grew older, he found employment as a farm hand. He was so conscientious and diligent in his work that all employers liked to have his services. But since he was meek and gentle in nature and unsuspecting in his dealings with other men, he was ever bullied and came off second best in all encounters with either friend or foe. Cumulative experience of this kind set him thinking, and he soon arrived at the conclusion that he was being kicked around because he was ignorant and that he was ignorant because he was too poor to go to school. By a little exercise of the sympathetic feelings, of which he had plenty, he took pity on all poor and ignorant children who were likely to go without education and be subject to insults throughout their lives. This simple train of reasoning, which is really most astonishing in a dirty and illiterate beggar, led him to wish that he could found some free school for poor boys and girls, so that they might learn to read and write and be spared humiliations in later life.
How preposterous, we are inclined to say, for a filthy and helpless creature like Wu Hsun to wish to be the founder of free schools! How could he raise money for the purpose? He had no access to polite society. Rich people would spurn his very presence and turn him away before he could say a word about his cherished dream.
Wu Hsun might not have heard of the homely adage, "where there is a will, there is a way," but he fully lived up to its spirit. He knew he could not depend upon the generosity of wealthy misers, and he decided to realize his pet scheme single-handed. The method he adopted was extraordinary: he proposed to achieve his end by the highly unorthodox means of begging.
We have read of stoic philosophers who deny themselves all worldly pleasures in order to attain individual perfection. Wu Hsun was not so selfish as that: though he was as self-denying as any of the most eminent stoics, he aimed at something more than personal edification. Indeed, he was not thinking of his own moral improvement at all, for the question of morals was beyond the reach of his simple and illiterate mind. He just set himself a goal and wanted to attain it through his own efforts. He knew no other means which was as efficacious as the profession of begging.
Once Wu Hsun had made up his mind, he swung into action. He began by giving up his employment, which stood in the way of his ambition. He donned the remnants of an old cap, slung an empty purse on his back, and walked off towards his ideal, dressed in a tattered suit of his profession.
Like all members of his tribe, Wu Hsun coined pithy sentences in the form of couplets to attract popular attention. The first one of the kind, which gives the gist of his life-work, says:
To work for others is to invite insults,
It's far better and freer to beg!
Don't scorn me for begging,
For I shall give you a free school some day.
Like all noble-minded individuals, Wu Hsun was satisfied with very little for himself. Whenever he was fortunate enough to get some better food, he would deny himself the pleasure of a treat and turn it into cash to be stowed away for the great day, This is what he had to say on the subject of food and drinks:
Good food is no good for me,
A free school is all the good I care for.
To drink dirty water is not dirty at all,
Not to plan a free school is dirty, indeed.
He was willing to slave like donkey and cow and to put up queer stunts, if it helped him to earn money for the purpose he had in mind. He cut off his queue, which was a big sacrifice in his day and which no one in his senses would think of doing without excellent reasons, to offer it for sale. He stood on his head and crawled on all fours to entertain little children, with only one object in view. He picked up odds and ends and reshaped them into useful articles, which he sold for cash.
Wu Hsun persisted in his efforts from the age of nineteen until his death forty years later. His ambition was realized in 1888 when the first free school, sponsored by him and financed with funds which he had earned cent by cent over a period of thirty years, was established at Liulincheng. The second one was established at Yangerchuang the next year, and the third and last one at Yushihhsiang in 1896, the year of his death.
When Wu Hsun had accumulated a reasonable sum of money, he began to buy lands and buildings for his future schools. But all the title deeds were drawn up in the name of the "Free Schools Endowment", and not over his own signature. Though he was founder of the school, he never meddled in school finance and administration, which he left entirely in the hands of the directors. As an expression of his gratitude to conscientious teachers, he would kowtow to them. In the case of an irresponsible schoolmaster, he would kneel before him to request better service. He would apply the same methods of kowtow and kneeling to students, when they happened to deserve either approval or disapproval, as the case might be.
Wu Hsun remained a bachelor through his whole life. Some people urged him to marry when his ambition of founding free schools was fully realized, but he replied by saying that he wanted neither wife nor children, that the schools were his main preoccupation, and that he would be buried wherever he should happen to fall dead, meaning that he did not care to have sons to attend to his funeral, as it has always been the Chinese custom even to this day.
Wu Hsun was parsimonious to the extreme and had never spent an extra cent for his own enjoyment. But if it came to be a matter of encouraging the filial and relieving the poor, he was as generous as he could possibly be. Once he heard of the filial piety of one Mrs. Chang Chung-ho, who cut off a piece of her own flesh to serve her ailing mother who wished to have meat which they could ill afford to buy, Wu Hsun immediately gave her ten mou (equivalent to one and a half acres) of the best land and sang her praises in a couple of doggerels. Similar cases are not adequately recorded, because Wu Hsun was in the habit of doing a good turn and forgetting all about it.
Wu Hsun lived a beggar's life, but his services to society were adequately recognized even before his death. The Governor of Shantung had granted him an audience and had presented him with two hundred taels of silver as a reward for his work. The Emperor was gracious enough to permit a stone arch to be erected to his memory as a sign of Imperial favor. Local officials and thousands of people took part in his funeral procession. The pupils from the schools he had established mourned his passing with so much feeling that all witnesses of the scene agreed that Wu Hsun had not died childless. Eight years after his death, the Governor of Shantung memorialized the Emperor for Imperial permission to insert his biography in the official history of the dynasty, to enter his name in the roll of local saints, and to build a separate temple in the district to house his departed spirit. All these requests were readily granted.
Wu Hsun's whole life was one of self-denial and self-sacrifice for a noble cause, in which he passionately believed. If the Chinese Communists really cared for the welfare and championed the cause of the downtrodden, as they pretend to do, they should claim him as one of themselves. But instead of doing anything of that sort, they mercilessly flay him for his attempts to inculcate respect for authority, order, and discipline and castigate him for having helped strengthen the power of the ruling class on the one hand, and weaken popular resistance to despotic rule on the other. The story of the Communists' defamation of Wu Hsun may be briefly summarized.
The Kuen Luen Motion Picture Company of Shanghai, which had gone over to the Communist side when the Red hordes swept across the Yangtse, shot a "Life of Wu Hsun" to please the Reds who were presumed by the director of the picture, Sun Yu, to be in sympathy with the nineteenth century beggar. It was shown in a number of theaters at Shanghai, Hankow, Peiping, and Tientsin early last year and won much applause from Communist sycophants, who hailed Wu Hsun as having "stood firm by the laboring class", as a "servant of the people", and as representing "the poor man's reversal of fortune on the cultural level". Ironically enough, the Reds themselves strongly objected to these views and launched an all-out attack on the hero and his adulators. The campaign began with a series of articles in the Literary and Artistic Review for April and May, 1951, in which these characterizations of Wu Hsun were flatly repudiated. On May 16, the People's Daily, Party organ of the Communists, called upon its readers to take a serious view of the discussions on the "Life of Wu Hsun" in a full-length editorial. The next day, it reiterated the call on Party members in the column on Party Life. Early in June, the Communist Ministry of Education picked up the battle-cry and instructed all educational institutions to join in the discussion and criticism of the movie and of the Wu Hsun spirit.
Once the Communists had decided to make an issue of the subject, they persisted in their efforts with a singular tenacity. They organized themselves into a Commission to Investigate the History of Wu Hsun and went straight to the famous beggar's native district in west Shantung to make, as they claimed, a "study on the spot". Meanwhile the Kuen Luen Motion Picture Company appreciated the blunder they had made and hastened to "accept the just criticisms" and to acknowledge that the movie had "produced undesirable effects from the point of view of propaganda," Needless to say, all public showings of the picture were prohibited.
The results of the "investigation", which were published in the People's Daily in July, can be easily imagined. The Commission, after two months of fieldwork, found Wu Hsun to be a "usurer", a "hobo", "a cheat", and fundamentally "not a worker of the people". It further found that the pupils whom his free schools took in were "all from families of landlords and rich merchants," and "none were poor men's children". It alleged that Wu Hsun had bowed to and compromised with the "feudal ruling class" and that his inculcation of respect for Confucius had helped to buttress the ruling caste. The Commission's report not only blackened Wu Hsun's memory and defamed his whole life-work, but also destroyed the entire moral edifice of Chinese society.
The motives behind these strange transactions are not difficult to determine. In the first place, the liquidation of a dead beggar is intended by the Communists to serve as a serious warning to the pinkish turncoats and fawning toadies that they have not yet ingratiated themselves into Red favor and that, if they do not slave for their Red masters, they will have to pay dearly for it. The management of the Kuen Luen Motion Picture Company, which produced the "Life of Wu Hsun", Mr. Sun Yu, who directed it, the theaters that showed it in Shanghai, Hankow, Peiping, and Tientsin, and the whole group of men who had prostituted their pen to laud the movie to the skies at its initial showings - these little puppets and many more were compelled to bow before the superior sagacity of the Red dictator and to confess their own unpardonable crime of having misread his whims and fancies. The most scared individual of all is perhaps Ho Ssu-yuan, formerly Commissioner of Education and the Chairman of the Shantung Provincial Government and last Mayor of Peiping before the Communist occupation, who joined the chorus of accusations by writing an article on "Han Fu-chu, Wu Hsun, and Myself", which appeared in the People's Daily on July 11, 1951. Ho is an opportunist and had negotiated the peaceful surrender of Peiping to the Reds. But now he also became nervous, because years ago, when he was Commissioner of Education in Shantung under the governorship of General Han Fu-chu, he had paid public tribute to the beggar-educator. He acknowledged, in his essay of self-abuse, that he had helped General Han Fu-chu to consolidate his iron grips on the people of Shantung by holding before them the example of Wu Hsun for them to follow, and that if Wu Hsun was an accomplice of "reactionary forces" then he himself was an accomplice of the accomplice. By extorting these self-incriminating confessions from cringing slaves like Ho, the Reds would be in a position to condemn them on their own evidence at any time in the future and liquidate them without stirring a finger.
Secondly, the Communists have staged the farce of liquidating a dead beggar because they want to sweep away all traditional Chinese morality and culture as embodied in Wu Hsun's life-work and the schools he had founded. The Reds are more interested in the destruction of all moral values of the traditional type than in kicking at a lifeless corpse. As they have no love for the Confucian virtues and wish to see their early extinction in the hearts of the Chinese people, they have been using one pretext or another to discredit them before the public. And the case of Wu Hsun just happened to be one of the many instances that came rather handy for the purpose.