Ye Zi

Independent activity Marxism–Leninism 1910–1939.10.5. ○ Died of illness

Left-wing novelist of the Hunan countryside, whose father and sister were killed in the Horse Day Incident

Born Yu Zhaoming in Yiyang, Hunan. When the peasant movement rose in 1926 his father and two sisters joined the revolution and he entered the third branch of the Wuhan military school. After Xu Kexiang's Horse Day Incident of May 1927 killed his father and second sister he drifted along the middle and lower Yangtze and reached Shanghai. In 1932 he formed the Nameless Literature Society with Chen Qixia and others, editing its magazine from 1933, and joined the League of Left-Wing Writers. He is said to have joined the Communist Party in 1934. His stories are set in the peasant movement of the land revolution; his first collection, Harvest, appeared in 1935 in the Slaves' Series with a preface by Lu Xun. Poor and ill, he returned home after war broke out in 1937 and died of illness in Yiyang in 1939.

Also known as: Yu Zhaoming · Yu Helin