Nobody exactly knows how many artists in China were killed or tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 till 1976. Feng Zhe was one of those victims. He was a superstar in Shanghai in the 1940s. He moved to Hong Kong along with many other Shanghai filmmakers during the civil war in China between the Communists led by Mao and the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1951, in order to devote himself to the film industry in the New China, he gave up his already established superstar status and high pay in Hong Kong and returned to Shanghai, working at the government-run Shanghai Film Studio. He acted in many communist propaganda movies, playing heroes, Party leaders and Communist secret agents.During the 1960s, he became the target of revolution by many of his counterparts in the film industry who were jealous of him. He was forced to leave Shanghai to join Emei Film Studio in Western China's impoverished Sichuan province, simply because he stalked a beautiful woman on the street in Shanghai, who happened to be a policewoman in plain clothes. In Sichuan, because he acted in the movie--The Peach Flower Fan, based on the Ming dynasty's classical Chinese tragedy, which was categorized as a counterrevolutionary movie for being suggestive of the Communist Party overthrowing the Nationalist government, he was insulated, tortured all day and all night till he was found dead. It was believed that he was murdered, but the people who tortured him faked a suicidal setting.
Churchill once said that he would lose India rather than Shakespeare. In the history of many great countries, either Britain, or France, or Russia, or USA, or ancient China, the Golden Ages of these countries were all the golden ages for the artists, when not only the economy was booming, but also art, literature and science were flourising. The future of a nation is largely decided by its cultural strength. I hope that China will treat its artists better with more freedom and rights.
