Ai Qing

Independent activity Marxism–Leninism 1910–1996 ○ Natural causes

Poet of “Snow Falls on China’s Land” who defended Ding Ling, was labelled a rightist and spent twenty years in the borderlands

Born Jiang Zhenghan in Jinhua, Zhejiang, he studied art and poetry in Paris in 1929–1932, joined the Left-Wing Artists’ League on his return and was held by the Kuomintang for three years, writing “Dayanhe, My Wet Nurse” in prison. Known in the war against Japan for “Snow Falls on China’s Land”, he went to Yan’an in 1941 and joined the Communist Party the next year. After 1949 he was associate editor of People’s Literature. During the Hundred Flowers he wrote the fable “Dream of the Flower Grower”; in 1957, accused of rightism for defending Ding Ling, he was sent to the Great Northern Wilderness in 1958 and to Xinjiang in 1959, and in the Cultural Revolution cleaned his village’s latrines for five years. Rehabilitated in 1979, he became vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He was the father of the artist Ai Weiwei.

Also known as: Ai Ch'ing · Jiang Zhenghan