Author of The True Story of Ah Q, father of modern Chinese literature who carried May Fourth’s critical spirit into the left-wing league
Author who opened vernacular Chinese fiction with Diary of a Madman in 1918, who traded medicine for literature, and who carried the New Culture Movement's critical spirit into the leftist literary cause.
Born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, he abandoned medical studies in Japan to “cure the spirit” of his people through literature. “Diary of a Madman”, published in New Youth in 1918, was the first vernacular short story; “The True Story of Ah Q” anatomised the spiritual servitude of the old society. After 1927 he translated Marxist literary theory in Shanghai and in 1930 became the guiding figure of the League of Left-Wing Writers, though never a party member. He died of tuberculosis in 1936; Mao later called him the “chief commander of China’s cultural revolution”.
Career timeline
- 1920–1926Lecturer at Peking University
- 1930–1936Leading figure of the League of Left-Wing Writers
From Miss Sophia’s Diary to The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, a writer who lived through Yan’an and the anti-rightist purge
Born in Linli, Hunan on 12 October 1904, she made her name with Miss Sophia’s Diary in 1928, was expelled from the party in 1958 during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and died in Beijing on 4 March 1986.
From Hunan, she made her name in 1928 with Miss Sophia’s Diary, a portrait of the modern woman’s inner life, and joined the party after the Nationalists executed her husband Hu Yepin in 1931. She reached the Red Army area in northern Shaanxi in 1936 and was welcomed by Mao, but her 1942 essay “Thoughts on March 8” on sexism at Yan’an drew criticism in the rectification movement. Her land-reform novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River won a Stalin Prize in 1951; in the 1957 anti-rightist campaign she was labelled a rightist and spent more than twenty years labouring on a farm in the Great Northern Wilderness. She was rehabilitated in 1979.
Career timeline
- 1949–1957Vice-chair of the Chinese Writers’ Association
The writer whose “Wild Lilies” criticised privilege at Yan’an and made him the rectification movement’s first victim
A Party member who in 1942 attacked Yan’an’s privileges in “Wild Lilies”, he was expelled, imprisoned and secretly executed in 1947; Dai Qing called his case the movement’s key measure of repression.
A translator and writer from Henan, he went to Yan’an in 1937 and translated Marxist classics. In March 1942 his essay “Wild Lilies” in Liberation Daily pointed to graded rations and clothing for cadres and to the disillusionment of the young; in the rectification movement he was branded a “Trotskyist” and became the target of mass criticism meetings. Arrested in 1943, he was executed at Xing County, Shanxi, in 1947 during the retreat from Yan’an before the Nationalist offensive. In 1991 the Ministry of Public Security formally withdrew the Trotskyist charge.
Career timeline
- 1937–1942Translator at the Marx–Lenin Institute, Yan’an
