Fan Changjiang, a media figure who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution (online photo)
In the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party’s Journalist Association established the “Fan Changjiang Journalism Award” named after Fan Changjiang, but he is still a very unfamiliar name to many Chinese. There was a joke posted on the Internet that a media person was hiring editorial staff one day, and one of the written questions was to write the identities of some famous people, including “Fan Changjiang”, and the answer was “Fan Changjiang is a sketch actor”. This should be quite embarrassing for Fan Changjiang, who was the first journalist to report on the Chinese Communist army and who became “famous” after the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime. But compared to his tragic life, such embarrassment was nothing.
Leaving Ta Kung Pao and joining the Chinese Communist Party
Dagong Bao was a famous private newspaper during the Republican era, which held an objective journalistic stance and criticized not only the corruption of the Kuomintang, but also the shamefulness of the Chinese Communist Party in the Battle of Changchun. It had many famous journalists under its banner, such as Zhu Qiping, Fan Changjiang, Xu Ying and Peng Zigang.
Born in Sichuan in 1909, Fan Changjiang studied at the Central Political School in Nanjing and the Department of Philosophy at Peking University, and wrote for the Morning Post and World Journal in Beiping, and Dagong and Yishi in Tianjin from 1933. His travel newsletters were serialized in Ta Kung Pao, which openly reported the so-called “Long March” of the Chinese Communist Army and the situation in the northwest, and caused a sensation in the National Unification Area, thus making Fan Changjiang famous. The aforementioned newsletter was later edited into a book titled China’s Northwest Corner.
In August 1936, Fan Changjiang went to the western part of Inner Mongolia to cover the situation, and the newsletters he wrote were published in a book titled “The Journey to the Seaside”. After the military mutiny in Xi’an in December of that year, he went to Yan’an to cover the story and was received by Mao and other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. After the outbreak of the war, he wrote a lot of war correspondence.
In March 1938, he and Yun Yiqun founded the China Young Journalists’ Association, which brought together many journalists with Red backgrounds and pro-Communist views, and in October he officially left Ta Kung Pao and joined the Communist Party in May 1939 under the introduction of Zhou Enlai.
In January 1969, a year before the end of his life, Fan Changjiang said in his “account” that he had a disagreement with Zhang Jiluan over an editorial on “The Party Question in the War”. In the article, Fan opposed Chiang’s idea of “one party, one doctrine, one leader” and advocated unity among all parties, while Zhang demanded that he abandon his pro-Communist ideology. The differences between the two sides eventually led to Fan’s departure.
However, in his article “The Tragedy of Fan Changjiang,” contemporary scholar Fu Guoyong argues that such a claim is only one side of the story and is not credible because the editorial that led to the dispute was written in January 1938 and published in other publications in July, while Chiang Kai-shek’s “Three Ones” were proposed in the fall. According to historical data, Fu Guoyong believes that the real reason for Fan Changjiang’s departure was not only political, but also personal temperament.
In February 1937, Fan Changjiang, who had gone to Yan’an for an interview, willingly fell at Mao’s feet after a night of long talks with him and asked to stay in Yan’an, but Mao thought it would be more useful for him to stay in Ta Kung Pao, which had a national influence. After following the teachings of the “leader”, Fan Changjiang returned to Shanghai and became a pro-Communist in his thinking, and soon published a commentary on “The Northwest Situation in Turmoil”, which was completely different from the KMT’s caliber. have seen, with deep gratitude. My brother Mao Zedong”.
Despite the difference in rhetoric from the national government, the Ta Kung Pao, which adhered to the principles of “civil newspaper,” “independent speech,” “objective reporting,” and “treating people with honesty,” was a newspaper with a strong sense of responsibility. “Fan Changjiang, who was left-leaning and even pro-Communist, did not receive any disciplinary action at Dagong Bao, but was especially valued and tolerated, as Fan himself admitted. He recalled, “From 1935 to 1938, except for the article “The Northwest Situation in Turmoil,” which Hu Zhengzhi asked me to write more obscurely and make some minor changes, I wrote whatever I wanted to write, and Dagong Bao published the original article as I wrote it, without ever censoring it. At least I didn’t find them censored. When Hu Zhengzhi told me about Chiang Kai-shek’s anger in Nanjing, he didn’t criticize me either.”
According to the recollections of his colleagues at Ta Kung Pao, the immediate cause of Fan’s departure was his unwillingness to “sell his health” as editor on duty and his conflict with Zhang Jiluan, who left Ta Kung Pao the day after the conflict.
Fan’s departure from Ta Kung Pao was a loss not only to the newspaper but also to the Chinese Communist Party, which had always valued practical interests. It is said that Zhou Enlai personally approached Xu Ying and Peng Zigang and asked them to stay at Dagong and to “make good use of this position of public opinion”.
According to Fu Guoyong, Fan Changjiang’s departure was a watershed in his journalistic career. Before he left Dagong Bao, he was a journalist with ideals, talent and high achievements, but afterwards he was just a tool of the Communist Party to fight for the world and lost his independent personality.
Dependence on the Communist Party and becoming its tool
Indeed, after he left Ta Kung Pao, Fan could only attach himself to the Communist Party, and under the command of the Communist Party, he used the “Qing Ji” and “Guoxin”, which were established to shout for the Communist Party and denigrate the Kuomintang. From then on, he never wrote another press release like “China’s Northwest Corner” or “The Journey to Seaside” because his mind had already been filled with the CCP’s rhetoric that “the Communist Party’s newspaper is the people’s newspaper” and that “the main task of the newspaper is to propagate the Party’s policy and implement it. “…… His founding of the Xinhua Daily (Central China edition) in the base areas of northern Jiangsu was a faithful practice of these party-oriented views on journalism.
After the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in October 1949, Fan Changjiang was really in the limelight for a while, serving successively as president of the Liberation Daily, deputy director of the General Administration of Information, and president of the People’s Daily. However, it seems that he never wrote any decent news again. Xia Yan once asked: “Fan Changjiang’s pen is very fast, but after the liberation, Fan Changjiang, a famous journalist, did not write articles, and there were very few articles. Why is this? ……”
Even so, the Party was not at ease with the intellectuals who defected from the “bourgeois camp”, and this was also the case with Fan Changjiang, who had made a great contribution to the press. In 1952, Fan left the press and became the deputy secretary general of the Cultural and Educational Commission of the State Council.
He chose to commit suicide after being attacked during the Cultural Revolution
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Fan Changjiang, who had made a great contribution to the Chinese Communist Party, was classified as a “counter-revolutionary” and was imprisoned for a long time in 1967, where he was tortured and brutalized. It is said that Fan Changjiang was not only supervised, but also assigned hard work during labor, and was not allowed to contact the outside world except for group activities, and could not move freely, or else he would be beaten or scolded, or held criticism sessions. Once, when he was carrying bricks, he was kicked to the ground by the supervisors because he moved a little slower; another time, when he was picking manure, two buckets of manure were splashed all over him because it was too heavy, and the smell of shit and urine almost made him pass out. But the supervisors still let him continue to pick the manure, and not even allowed to change clothes.
On October 23, 1970, at the age of 61, Fan committed suicide by jumping into a well in Changshan, Henan Province, and his body was “wrapped in plastic and carried to a gully in a mountain stream 700 to 800 meters away from the cadre school and hastily buried. The well was also filled in with soil by the villagers nearby.
Conclusion
In 1978, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Fan Changjiang was “rehabilitated” by the Chinese Communist Party, and ironically, in 1990, the Chinese Journalists Association established the Fan Changjiang Journalism Award. How would Fan Changjiang feel if he were to die? Perhaps Fan’s tragic life can serve as a warning to those pawns who are still being used by the Chinese Communist Party.
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