General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Life of Wu Xun (武训传)

The Life of Wu Xun (武训传) is a 1950 Chinese black-and-white biographical feature film, in two parts, written and directed by Sun Yu and starring Zhao Dan, about Wu Xun (1838–1896), a beggar of late Qing Shandong who spent nearly 40 years begging to fund free schools for poor children.¹^•² Praised widely after its release, the film became in May 1951 the target of a nationwide political criticism campaign launched through a People's Daily editorial written by Mao Zedong, and it is remembered as the first banned film of the People's Republic of China.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
English and Chinese titles	The Life of Wu Xun (武训传); also rendered Wu Xun Zhuan⁵
Credits	Written and directed by Sun Yu; starring Zhao Dan and Huang Zongying; cinematography by Han Zhongliang¹^•⁶
Production	Started 1948 by the China Film Studio, halted for lack of funds; completed by Kunlun Film Company in October 1950¹
Release	Premiered in Shanghai first-run cinemas on January 1, 1951; shown in Beijing the following month⁷^•⁸
Initial reception	More than 40 laudatory articles by late March 1951; named one of the ten best domestic films of 1950 by the magazine Dazhong Dianying²
The 1951 campaign	People's Daily editorial of May 20, 1951, written by Mao Zedong, opened a nationwide criticism movement of nearly half a year with close to 100 critical articles²^•⁹
Aftermath	The film was withdrawn and became the PRC's first banned film; a licensed DVD appeared in March 2012⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Shandong province, late Qing dynasty. Wu Xun is born into poverty so deep that school is a rumor, something for other people's children. Hired out as a laborer while still young, he cannot read the accounts his employer keeps, and the employer short-changes him because of it. When his friend Zhou Da stands up for him, Zhou Da is thrown in jail. Worse still, Xiaotao, the girl he loves, works as a maid for a landlord's family, and the employer sells her to another man like a piece of furniture ¹⁸.

Out of these blows Wu Xun forges a single conviction: the poor are cheated because they cannot read, so he will raise the money to build a free school. The method he chooses is self-annihilation. He becomes a professional beggar, not for bread but for capital. He wears rags, eats scraps, sleeps in the open, and banks every copper toward a fund no one believes will amount to anything. In market squares he performs tricks and begs to be kicked and hit, turning his own humiliation into a spectacle that earns coins, crying out that it is all "for the poor children, for establishing the Charity School" ¹⁹.

The scene the film is remembered for is the kneel: Wu Xun, after decades of saving, kneels and pleads for three days outside the gate of the respected Scholar Yang, begging the gentry to lend their name and backing to the school he has paid for with his knees. It is staged as pure endurance, the camera holding on the stooped, grinning, unyielding figure while the household and the neighborhood pass judgment around him. Zhao Dan plays it as humiliation worn like armor: the smile never drops, and neither does the man. At last the scholar yields. In the fourteenth year of the Guangxu reign, the Chongxian Charity School opens its doors, and poor children file in to study for free ¹⁹.

The film does not end at the triumph. It follows Wu Xun into late-life recognition, honored by officials and gentry who once ignored him, still in rags, still hoarding coins for more schools, through his death and the continuation of what he built. Then comes a deliberately uneasy final note: a skeptical voice asks whether one beggar's charity, however heroic, changes the system that made his begging necessary. Whether Wu Xun's humility before the powerful was a triumph of the spirit or a capitulation to it is left open on screen.

Characters

Wu Xun (Zhao Dan) is the beggar-schoolmaster, played across an entire life from beaten child laborer to old man with a hoard and a mission. Zhao Dan builds the performance on the shambling walk, the reflexive bow, and the smile used as a shield against the men who cheat him, one of the celebrated performances of early Chinese sound cinema.

Xiaotao (Wang Bei) is the maid Wu Xun loves, sold away by her employer's family, one of the wounds that hardens his resolve.

Zhou Da is Wu Xun's friend, jailed for defending him, the man who fights back where Wu Xun chooses to endure.

Scholar Yang is the respected gentry figure whose gate Wu Xun kneels at, and whose eventual patronage makes the charity school possible.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's afterlife is its own drama. On release, Chinese responses were mostly positive, praising its moral lessons ²⁰, and Zhou Enlai and Zhu De attended a screening on the evening of February 21, 1951 ²¹. One year later, a nationwide criticism campaign erupted against it, launched at the highest political level, condemning Wu Xun's individualist, reformist path as inferior to collective struggle. The film was withdrawn and banned, the first banned film of the People's Republic ²². Critics attacked Wu Xun the man rather than the film's aesthetics; one, Qing Yi, accused him of "distorting the struggle of the Chinese people" ²⁰.

The campaign chilled Chinese filmmaking for years. The industry made 29 domestic features in 1950 but only 1 in 1951, and 16 total from 1951 to April 1954 ²³. Not until September 1985 did Hu Qiaomu admit the criticisms were "incredibly one-sided, extreme, and aggressive," after which the film's reputation was gradually restored ²⁰. Modern viewers often note that the film's own skeptical ending seems to anticipate the exact critique that destroyed it.

The film and its subject

The film dramatizes the life of Wu Xun, originally named Wu Qi, a poor man from Tangyi County in Shandong (near today's Liaocheng) who, unable to read himself, resolved that poor children should not be shut out of schooling. He sang and begged for decades to accumulate money and founded free schools (yixue), private schools financed by donations, earning a reputation in his lifetime as an extraordinary figure of self-sacrifice.²^•⁶ The film follows his suffering as a boy and his decades of "begging to establish schools," ending with the fame he won as a "singular figure of bitter virtue."⁶

Sun Yu's script had a long prehistory. In the summer of 1944, the educator Tao Xingzhi gave Sun Yu a copy of the Wu Xun Picture Biography in Chongqing, and the story moved Sun Yu to adapt it into a screenplay.¹⁰ In July 1949, at the first National Congress of Literary and Art Workers, Sun Yu consulted Premier Zhou Enlai about the project and then made major revisions to the script, so that Wu Xun's school-founding ends in tragedy.¹¹

Production history

A film made across the 1949 divide. Shooting began in July 1948 at the China Film Studio, then controlled by the Nationalist government, but the production stopped after part of the film was shot when funds ran out.¹^•¹² Around the founding of the People's Republic, the studio sold the script, the exposed footage, and the production rights to the private Shanghai company Kunlun Film Company, which resumed shooting in November 1949 with Zhao Dan in the lead and Han Zhongliang as cinematographer.¹^•¹²

In February 1950 Sun Yu took an exterior unit, including Zhao Dan, the child actor Sun Dongguang, cinematographer Han Zhongliang, art director Ding Chen, and production manager Meng Junmou, to Wu Xun's home village of Wuzhuang near Liulin town in Tangyi County, where they stayed at the local Wu Xun Normal School next to Wu Xun's tomb; before shooting Sun Yu held discussions with elderly farmers who recalled details of Wu Xun's begging and school-founding.¹³ As production neared completion in September 1950, Kunlun asked Sun Yu to expand the film into two parts, and he wrote additional scenes, including a dream sequence in which Wu Xun, beaten after being cheated because of his illiteracy, envisions the landlord Zhang Juren as a red-capped devil casting him and other illiterates into icy and fiery hells.¹^•¹³ The film was completed in October 1950.¹

Release and acclaim

The film opened in Shanghai first-run cinemas on January 1, 1951, as a New Year presentation, and was shown in Beijing in February.⁷^•⁸ It then played for months in large cities including Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin.² Reception was overwhelmingly favorable: by late March 1951, more than 40 articles in papers and magazines including Ta Kung Pao, Wenhui Bao, Guangming Daily, and Dazhong Dianying praised the film, and Dazhong Dianying named it one of the ten best domestic films of 1950.² The film had been shot, censored, and first shown in Shanghai, and the wave of praise began there.¹⁴

The 1951 criticism campaign

From praise to nationwide criticism. Critical articles began appearing in Wenyi Bao in the spring of 1951, including Jia Ji's "Wu Xun Is No Model" and Yang Er's piece questioning Tao Xingzhi's praise of the "Wu Xun spirit"; on May 16, 1951, People's Daily reprinted these articles with an editor's note declaring praise for Wu Xun erroneous.² On May 20, 1951, People's Daily published the editorial "Why We Should Attach Importance to the Discussion of the Film The Life of Wu Xun", personally written and revised by Mao Zedong, which charged that the film "does not touch a single hair of the feudal economic base and its superstructure, but instead feverishly propagates feudal culture" and "slanders the peasant revolutionary struggle, slanders Chinese history, and slanders the Chinese nation."²^•¹⁵ The same issue carried a Party Life column calling on every Communist Party member to join the criticism.²

The campaign quickly became national in scale. Party committees in Shanghai and Tianjin issued directives, education and film authorities ordered subordinate units to hold discussions, and professors such as Feng Youlan, Fei Xiaotong, Jin Yuelin, and Zheng Tianting published critical or declaratory articles.² The movement lasted nearly half a year and produced close to 100 critical articles, accusing the film of distorting revolutionary history and branding Wu Xun himself a "big landlord, big debtor, and big hooligan."⁹ In July 1951, People's Daily serialized the Wu Xun Historical Investigation Report, directed by Jiang Qing, which concluded that Wu Xun had used school-founding as a means to serve the landlord class and the reactionary government.² Zhou Yang, the party's senior cultural official, published a long critique in People's Daily on August 8, 1951, framing the dispute as a choice between the road of revolution and the road of reformism and capitulationism.¹⁶

Self-criticisms. Under this pressure, the film's makers and backers publicly recanted. Sun Yu's self-criticism, "My Preliminary Understanding of the Mistakes Made in The Life of Wu Xun", appeared in People's Daily on May 26, 1951, and the editorial board of Dazhong Dianying published its own self-criticism the same day.²^•⁷ Zhou Enlai, Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, and Guo Moruo also made self-criticisms, and others connected with the film were affected to varying degrees.¹⁷

Significance and later history

The campaign is regarded as the first nationwide political criticism of a cultural work in the history of the People's Republic, and it opened the thought-reform movement among intellectuals.⁶ Scholars have argued that it set a pattern for later ideological and political criticism campaigns, strengthened Mao Zedong's authority in cultural matters, and paved the way for the reappraisal of Tao Xingzhi.¹⁷ The film itself was withdrawn from circulation and became known as the new China's first banned film.³

Rediscovery. After 1953, when Kunlun and seven other private companies were merged into the Shanghai Film Studio, the whereabouts of the prints and the ownership of the rights became unclear; the China Film Archive still holds copies, and by 2012 the film, completed in September 1950, had passed into the public domain under China's 50-year film copyright term.⁴ In late 2005, at a retrospective in Shanghai marking the 90th anniversary of Zhao Dan's birth, the film was screened in full for the first time in more than half a century.¹³ In March 2012 a restored DVD was released commercially and sold through Amazon China, Taobao, and the Beijing Book Building, an event widely reported as the film's return to public view after some six decades.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026