Ba Jin

Ba Jin the Chinese novelist and essayist (1904-2005) whose passionate early novels about youth in revolt against the traditional family made him one of the most widely read authors of twentieth-century China. His autobiographical writings and his long public career as a witness to his age gave him the moral authority of a conscience of Chinese letters.

Early Life and Anarchist Youth

Ba Jin was born Li Yaotang on 25 November 1904 in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, into a large and wealthy official family. The complex hierarchy of the household, with its servants, concubines and elaborate rituals of respect, gave him both the setting of his greatest novel and a lifelong hatred of the feudal family system. As a boy he was deeply affected by the deaths of servants he loved, victims of illness and neglect within the household, and these losses turned him against the autocratic structure of the extended family.

Reading widely in modern and foreign literature, he was drawn in the 1920s to the anarchist writings of Kropotkin and Bakunin and to the ideal of a society without oppression. He took his pen name in part from the anarchist Bakunin, and he travelled to France in 1927, where he wrote his first novel in a lonely lodging in Paris. At the heart of his work from the beginning was the theme of the young person breaking free from family and custom in the name of a better world.

The Torrent Trilogy and Fame

The Torrent trilogy, published between 1931 and 1933, established Ba Jin as a major novelist. It tells the story of the Gao family, in which three brothers seek different escapes from a decaying patriarchal household: one accepts responsibility, one rebels and one takes his own life. The novel became a rallying cry for a generation of Chinese youths. Its treatment of arranged marriage, of the subjection of women and of the suffocating authority of elders struck a chord with readers who were themselves struggling to free themselves from the old order.

Written with youthful intensity and direct emotion, it sold in huge numbers and was adapted for stage and screen. He followed it with a stream of novels and stories, including The Family's successors Spring and Autumn, and with the Love trilogy and other works of social protest. He also wrote the novella Cold Nights, a bleak and later much-praised study of life under wartime pressure, and by the late 1930s he was among the most popular writers in China.

War, Revolution and Public Life

During the war against Japan Ba Jin worked in the interior as an editor and writer, running literary journals and supporting the resistance through his publications. He refused to turn his fiction into propaganda, maintaining that a writer's duty was to tell the truth about human feeling, and he continued to write essays and fiction throughout the conflict. After the founding of the People's Republic he accepted a position in the literary establishment and served on many official bodies, travelling abroad as a cultural representative.

His writing in the 1950s was marked by a new and sometimes reluctant emphasis on public themes, and he later spoke of the difficulty of reconciling his own conscience with the demands of the time. He was subjected to criticism during the Cultural Revolution and his works were banned, and his wife, Xiao Shan, died in 1972 amid the hardship of those years. His grief for her and his reflection on his own conduct became central to the writing of his old age.

The Quiet Conscience

After the Cultural Revolution Ba Jin emerged, despite his age, as the conscience of Chinese writers. At a major conference in the late 1970s he called for an end to the damage done by political interference in literature and urged writers to speak honestly, and his words encouraged a generation that was finding its voice. His ideas were published in a collection entitled Thoughts, in which he examined with painful candour his own compromises and the silence of intellectuals under pressure.

He urged the establishment of a museum of the Cultural Revolution so that its lessons would not be forgotten, and in his late essays he returned again and again to the themes of memory, guilt and responsibility. He supported younger writers, lent his name to many causes for freedom of expression, and was nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize. In his final years, ill and confined to hospital, he remained a moral reference point for readers far beyond the literary world.

Legacy

Ba Jin died in Shanghai on 17 October 2005 at the age of one hundred. His long life spanned the fall of the empire, the rise of the republic, war, revolution and reform, and he wrote through all of them with a consistent faith in the dignity of the individual and the possibility of social justice. The Family and the works that followed it remain among the most widely read Chinese novels, and they are credited with shaping the attitudes of generations toward the old family system.

His essays of the 1980s are studied as models of moral reflection and of clear, honest prose. Thousands of readers wrote to him in his last years to thank him for the courage of those essays. His influence rests not only on his fiction but on the example of a writer who kept faith with his early ideals across a century of upheaval. He is remembered as one of the most sincere and generous figures in modern Chinese literature, admired as much for his character as for his books.

See also

• The Family
• Chinese anarchism in literature
• Cold Nights
• Thoughts