Wu Xun

Wu Xun (; 1838–1896) was a Chinese educational reformer who pioneered free popular education in the country and became a hero of Chinese liberalism.

Biography Wu was born Wu Qi as the seventh child among his siblings, at Wuzhuang, Tangyi county (堂邑县, a part of Guan county nowadays). His father died when he was a child, leaving him to fend for himself. Too poor to attend the local academy, Wu determined to promote universal free education, supposedly because he was swindled for his illiteracy. A wandering beggar, Wu educated himself and used his little money to develop business ventures. Eventually he achieved success as a businessman, but he continued to beg, using the money he got to fund the foundation of local academies in Shandong. In the last decade of his life, Wu was a successful money lender and landlord, and he used his earnings to found three charity traditional academies. It was initiated by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who loathed the "bourgeois reformism" epitomised by Wu. She persuaded Mao himself to write an article denouncing Wu as a promoter of "feudal" culture.

The backlash against the film led to an attempt to destroy the cult of Wu, continuing into the 1960s prior to the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards exhumed his corpse and carried it to a public square where it was subsequently given a trial and ordered burned. The Red Guards broke the body into pieces before setting light to it with gas. After Mao's death, Wu's reputation was restored. In 1985 the People's Daily stated that the criticisms of Wu "cannot be said to be even basically correct".