Poverty of Ideas: Lu Xinyu’s Critique of Qin Hui—The Debate on China’s Not Distant Past and Its Immediate Future

China was at cross-roads when the Communist Party of China (CPC) was fighting the Kuomintang (KMT) before and after the Japanese invasion of China. At that crossroads, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established by the CPC took the revolutionary road of land reform in 1949 after the defeated KMT took the Republic of China government to Taiwan. For many of the intellectual elite and certainly the victorious CPC cadres and army officials, the road that the PRC took paved the way for a New China (xin zhongguo), so new that Hu Feng, a well-known intellectual elite at the time, reportedly said then that “time has just started” for China. Ironically and certainly tragically Hu Feng was persecuted only several years later as a chief Rightist in opposition to what Mao and his followers considered to be the spirit of the 1949 Revolutionary Road. The fate of Hu Feng serves in many ways as a symbol of China’s recurring situation at crossroads, evident once more about thirty years later, and resonating even more so in the 2020s. To put it simply, the CPC, which was established in 1921, has had to decide the road to be taken three times because the questions of what the Chinese Revolution is meant to do and what socialism means in China have remained an unresolved issue, not surprisingly.