To repay his debts, Hu accepted a teaching job at the provincial high school in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, in 1929.

Hu and Ding were forced to leave Jinan and returned to Shanghai, where they joined the League of Left-Wing Writers, which had just been established two months before.

[4] On 17 January 1931, while attending a secret CCP meeting at the Oriental Hotel in the Shanghai International Settlement, Hu was arrested along with other attendees by the British police.

A day later, Shen received confirmation that Hu had been arrested by the British police and extradited to the Kuomintang, and was imprisoned in Longhua, suburban Shanghai, where many Communists were held.

[3] Hu Yepin was one of the five members of the League executed on that day, along with Rou Shi, Li Weisen, Yin Fu, and Feng Keng.

However, most publications in China and Taiwan now agree that they were betrayed by members of a rival Communist faction, possibly Wang Ming and his close associates, Gu Shunzhang and Tang Yu.

[5] Hu Yepin's early writings, such as Where to Go (往何处去), were semi-autobiographical, reflecting his sense of despair over the widespread poverty and hopelessness that were prevalent in China during the 1920s.

In 1930, the year he joined the CCP, and shortly before his execution, he published the novella To Moscow (到莫斯科去) and the novel A Bright Future (光明在我们的前面).