The Voice of the People

Hu Jiwei, former editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China (CPC), died of a heart attack on September 16 in Beijing at the age of 96.

Since starting his first newspaper in 1936, Hu was a lifelong journalist. For nearly 80 years, he had advocated a “pro-people” stance amid politcal pressure to “strengthen the Party spirit” in official newspapers.

Although his name had somewhat faded from the political landscape since the 1990s, the words of his bold speeches still have the power to command respect, even after his death.

Just a Journalist

“Just call me ‘Old Hu, the newspaperman,’” Hu Jiwei often told people who called him by his official title. “Journalism always suited me best, because I was an avid reader of books in my youth, and because my weak constitution wasn’t fit for the battlefield,” he once explained in an interview with NewsChina.

Born in September 1916 in Sichuan Province, Hu grew up in a family with a strong revolutionary pedigree. Hu’s great uncle Hu Sumin, for example, participated in the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. His uncle Hu Liangfu, who also fought in the 1911 Revolution, was honored as a martyr after being killed by Qing forces. Today, a monument to Hu Liangfu still stands in his home- town.

Influenced by his revolutionary family, Hu Jiwei found faith in Sun Yat-sen’s “Three People’s Principles” (nationalism, democracy, the people’s livelihood) in his early youth, and majored in political economy at Sichuan University, hoping to use his knowledge to find a new path for China.

Hu’s first encounter with journalism was in 1936, one year before the break-out of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), when China’s very survival was at stake. Hu got to know several underground communist activists, and helped them launch a weekly magazine to promote resistance against the Japanese. At the end of 1937, the first year of the war, Hu joined the CPC and, with a group of others, launched Xingmang (Starlight) newspaper, devoted to spreading the ideas of saving the nation from destruction.

Generally written in short paragraphs with simple wording, Xingmang soon gained popularity among ordinary people, young students in particular, but its cavalier attitude towards exposing scandals within the ruling Kuomintang earned the group some powerful enemies. According to media reports, Xingmang was closed down by the Kuomintang authorities more than 10 times during its existence. However, Hu never gave up during this period, his concept of speaking for the people gradually took shape, an idea which was to manifest itself prominently in the years to come.

The People and the Party

When Hu later came to the CPC headquarters in Yan’an in 1939, he brought his populist ideas with him. He established Border Area Masses newspaper (later renamed The Masses), giving a voice to China’s grassroots.

At the same time, Hu advocated the “the Party spirit”embodied as he saw it by the Party newspapers. “At the time, the CPC was working for the founding of a new country for the people, in which the work of the Party would be based on the people’s interests. So, being the voice of the people actually corresponded with being the voice of the Party,” he explained.

In 1952, three years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he was appointed deputy editor-inchief of the People’s Daily, the CPC’s main media outlet.

In Hu’s eyes, the People’s Daily at the time was simply an imitation of Pravda, the Communist Party mouthpiece in the former Soviet Union, with a largely identical writing style and even similar page layouts. The only thing that he approved of was that Pravda had a column set aside for criticizing Party leaders and officials.

In 1956, taking advantage of a top-level call for the masses to “offer suggestions and opinions to the Party,” Hu and his boss Deng Tuo, editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, made significant modifications to the newspaper, trying to make it a more vivid publication, and bringing it closer to its readers. A new column was introduced “Essays and Comments” aiming to accommodate diversified voices, only to be attacked by Mao Zedong who harshly criticized Deng Tuo’s “management style.”

Deng Tuo had published a series of critical commentaries which had displeased Mao Zedong, who remarked that Deng Tuo, as the Party paper’s boss, had taken Mao’s solicitation of opinion too literally, without understanding his real intentions, according to a history program by news portal .

“I was present at the meeting in which Mao spoke with the top editors of the paper. At the meeting, I proposed that a member of the CPC Central Committee, who was given to independent thinking, be put in charge of the newspaper,” Hu recalled to NewsChina.

“I thought this person could help the paper better serve the people. How naive I was, looking back. Actu- ally the real problem of the Party paper is how to strike a ‘balance’ between the Party and the people,” he added.

People First

Hu’s re-think of the relationship between the Party and the people, according to his wife Di Sha, was in the period between the 1950s and 1970s during which violent anti-Rightist campaigns (1957-1958) and the catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) were launched. Many Party leaders and some of Hu’s colleagues wound up in jail. And Hu himself, who had tried every means possible to improve the country and the Party, was also imprisoned on charges of being a“capitalist roader.”

“Hu believes that if a Party newspaper can retain its independent thinking, it can avoid making the same mistakes as the Party did. He believes the Party paper can, should and must do so,” wrote Di Sha in an article celebrating Hu’s 90th birthday. “When the Party makes mistakes, the Party spirit is inconsistent with the interests of the people. The only way to reconcile the two is to make sure that the interests of the people remain the top priority.”

When Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang returned to power in the late 1970s, after the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 following Mao’s death that year, Hu Jiwei continued to advocate his liberal ideas as editorin-chief of the People’s Daily. Perhaps the paper’s boldest move was when Hu Jiwei, guided by Hu Yaobang, oversaw the publication of two articles aimed at clearing away the influence of the leftist mentality, and ending the cult of personality surrounding Mao Zedong.“It was tough to get articles like those published in the People’s Daily,” Hu recalled.

During Hu’s tenure as People’s Daily editor-in-chief, the paper’s circulation reportedly hit three million copies as a result of its critical reporting, some of which even targeted top leaders. For example, the paper criticized then vice-premier Chen Yonggui, who had “helicoptered” his way to the vice-premiership from the post of Party secretary of a tiny rural production brigade in the Mao years. The People’s Daily accused Chen of excessive rural construction, resulting in his removal. A better known case was the newspaper’s reporting of a maritime disaster in 1979 in which an offshore oil drilling platform collapsed and sank into the sea, killing 72 people. The People’s Daily sent reporters to investigate the accident and criticized the relevant officials for dereliction of duty. In the wake of the report, the minister for oil was dismissed from his post, and the vice-premier in charge of the oil industry was disciplined.

“At that time, people were glad to pay money for the newspaper. Farmers would follow what the paper told them, and would fight for their own interests,” wrote Ding Hong, a popular critic, in his eulogy for Hu. “In Hu’s time, the People’s Daily witnessed the most splendid phase in its history by sticking to the pro-people principle,” he added.

Free Press

“The Party spirit and the pro-people principle do not conflict with each other…the Party newspaper should be equipped with an independent brain, and ears to hear what the people have to say…that is the way to make the people the real masters of the country,” Hu said at a journalism forum in 1979.

Though approved by Hu Yaobang, his ideas were opposed by Hu Qiaomu, a top-level leader, then in charge of managing the Party’s public image. The debate between the two lasted a decade (1979-1989), with the latter vehemently advocating that the Party spirit and the pro-people principle were “one and the same.”

Hu Jiwei resigned from the People’s Daily in 1983, with rumors circulating that he was actually removed from his post. As a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), Hu then shifted his focus to promoting legislation on press freedom.

“I felt boxed in when talking about the Party spirit and the people-first principle within the scope of the Party paper…Actually the Party paper system should be reformed…the highest objective of any journalist is to run a paper which wholeheartedly serves the people,” he told NewsChina.

This belief explains why since the 1980s, Hu had been calling to lift the ban on private newspapers, and to put an end to censorship. According to Hu, in the absence of freedom of the press, a provision clearly guaranteed in the Constitution, the paper would be nothing but a tool of the Party.

Hu and his team began drafting the press law in 1983, and finally submitted their third draft to the NPC Standing Committee at the end of 1988 for final approval. However, Hu Jiwei was removed from all of his posts in 1989 after the Tian’anmen incident that year, and discussion of the press law, of course, was dropped.

Controversies

Hu was noted not only for his pioneering ideas but also for his sharp, critical speeches. In the 1930s, Hu directed his acerbic tongue directly at the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek for his “lukewarm attitude” towards fighting the Japanese, and his persecution of the CPC.

Now, facing increasingly fierce conflict between the interests of the people and the authorities, manifest in a widening income gap and worsening corruption, Hu, in his old age, had turned his fire on the Party.

Hu had published in Chinese Hong Kong and overseas a series of papers and books, strongly calling to “rehabilitate” Hu Yaobang, who, stepping down as Party general secretary at the end of 1986, vehemently supported democratic reform.

Hu’s pointed speeches have provoked a negative reaction from some in China, who claimed that Hu had turned into an “extreme rightist” blindly insisting on“radical liberalism and democracy.”

Hu Jiwei never responded directly to this criticism, but wrote in his biography: “I must keep speaking till my death…I will say anything I believe is beneficial to the country and the people.”