The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River
태양은 쌍간허를 비춘다
A novel Ding Ling finished in June 1948 from her experience on a land-reform work team in 1946. It follows the villagers of Nuanshuitun by the Sanggan River as they bring down the cunning landlord Qian Wengui. It won a second-class Stalin Prize in 1951.
In depth
What is the story?
In summer 1946 the well-off middle peasant Gu Yong comes home to Nuanshuitun from a neighbouring village with a rubber-tyred cart that his in-laws have asked him to hide. With it comes the rumour that land reform is on its way. The novel starts from this uneasy scene and looks in turn at each villager's mind before the storm.
The most feared man in the village is the landlord Qian Wengui, and he is shrewd: before the reform he has enlisted his son in the Eighth Route Army, planted his son-in-law as a cadre, and sent his niece Heini to unsettle Cheng Ren, head of the peasant association. Cheng Ren loves her and cannot draw his sword. The party member Zhang Yumin fears the consequences if Qian is not brought down. He spreads superstition and rumour to shift the target, and the peasants are slow to speak.
A work team comes in, people gradually begin to speak, Cheng Ren breaks with his private feelings, and at last Qian is hauled onto the platform. He first tries to quell the peasants with a "dignified" glare, and then gives way.
Why is it worth reading?
It is a land-reform novel, yet not a simple battle of good and evil. The villagers are tangled in marriage, debt and grudge: Gu Yong has married one daughter into a rich peasant family and another child into Qian's, while another son is in the Liberation Army. Its heroes hesitate, fear and are swayed by private feeling. It also takes in the work team, such as the bookish Wen Cai with his six-hour meeting. Zhou Yang said the character was meant for him, as Ding Ling's husband Chen Ming recalled.
How close is it to real experience?
On 4 May 1946 the party shifted to confiscating landlords' land and dividing it among peasants. Ding Ling volunteered for a work team and entered Wenquantun in Zhuolu county, Hebei, in early August, learning the village by gossiping with old women on the same heated brick bed. Zhang Yumin was modelled on her host there, the village party secretary Cao Yongming.
The book is not the whole of what was planned. Of three projected parts (struggle, land division, enlistment) only the first was written. Gu Yong at the opening is later wrongly classed as a rich peasant, and the author had meant to show this error by the work team but changed her plan.
What became of the book?
The 1951 Stalin Prize made Ding Ling known worldwide. Simone de Beauvoir quoted the novel at length in The Long March, her 1957 book on China, as evidence of the peasants' condition. But at the end of 1955 Ding Ling was branded a leader of an "anti-party clique"; in 1957 she became a rightist and was expelled from the party, and in June 1958 she was sent to the Great Northern Wilderness. Party critics praise the novel's realism while faulting, for instance, the thin drawing of Heini.