Ding Ling

Ding Ling a Chinese novelist and short-story writer (1904-1986), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature and one of the most influential women writers of the twentieth century. Her early stories of women's inner lives scandalised and thrilled readers, and her long career spanned revolution, war and the political storms of the People's Republic.

Youth, Shanghai and Early Stories

Ding Ling was born on 12 October 1904 in Linli, Hunan province, into a gentry family that had fallen on hard times. Her father died when she was very young, and she was raised by her independent-minded mother, who ensured that her daughter received an education unusual for a girl of her time. She studied in Changsha and later in Shanghai and Beijing, moving in the radical student circles of the early 1920s.

In Beijing she met the young writer Hu Yepin, with whom she fell in love and began to write. She also became associated with the Communist movement and, for a time, with the writer Shen Congwen and others in the literary demimonde of the capital. Her first stories, published in the late 1920s, took as their subject the emotional and sexual predicaments of modern young women.

Her early work was daring for its time. The story Miss Sophie's Diary, published in 1928, describes with startling candour a young woman's infatuation with a foreign man and the loneliness and self-mockery that accompany it. It was a sensation and established Ding Ling as a bold new voice in Chinese fiction, one who wrote frankly about female desire and introspection.

Revolution, Imprisonment and the Left

In 1930 Ding Ling joined the League of Left-Wing Writers and threw herself into political activity. Her husband Hu Yepin was executed by the Nationalist authorities in 1931, and his death altered the course of her life, turning her toward a more committed and public form of writing. She edited literary journals and became a leading figure in the left-wing cultural movement centred on Shanghai.

Her fiction of the early 1930s, including the story The Flood and the novel Mother, turned toward the lives of peasants and workers and toward the themes of collective struggle that the left demanded. She continued to write about women, but now increasingly as part of a wider social question, and she explored the ways in which poverty and oppression shaped the fate of women in the countryside.

In 1933 she was arrested and imprisoned by the Nationalists in Nanjing. She escaped in 1936 and made her way to the Communist base area in the north, where she was welcomed as a celebrated writer who had chosen the revolutionary cause. Her flight and her arrival in Yanan became a famous episode in the cultural history of the period.

Yanan, The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River

In the Communist base at Yanan, Ding Ling became an important literary organiser and wrote work in service of the revolution. She also produced one of her most celebrated stories, When I Was in Xia Village, a complex and disturbing account of a woman who survives rape and imprisonment by the enemy only to be rejected by her own community, a story that some critics read as a critical comment on the treatment of women in wartime.

Her major novel, The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River, was completed in 1947-1948 and published in 1948. It describes the land reform movement in a north China village, tracing the struggles among peasants as they divide the property of landlords. It was praised as a model of socialist realism and won a major literary prize in the Soviet Union, and it secured her standing as a canonical writer of the revolutionary tradition.

She held prominent positions in the cultural bureaucracy after 1949, serving in the writers association and editing literary journals. Her energy and her commitment made her one of the most visible women in Chinese cultural life, and she worked to promote the writing of younger authors and the position of women in the new society.

Persecution and Late Career

Ding Ling's later life was marked by political suffering. During the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 she was denounced and removed from her posts, and during the Cultural Revolution she was persecuted, imprisoned and sent to the countryside for labour. For more than two decades her work was suppressed and her name erased from the record, and she was separated from her husband, the writer Chen Ming.

After the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of reform in the late 1970s, she was rehabilitated and returned to public life. She resumed writing and publishing, producing memoirs, essays and reflection on her long experience of revolutionary and literary life. Despite her age and her years of hardship she remained independent and outspoken, and she defended the rights of writers and of women.

She was noted in her final years for her courage in speaking about the damage done by political campaigns and for her insistence on the integrity of the writer. Documents and memoirs published later added to the understanding of her ordeal and of the moral questions it raised about loyalty, art and survival.

Achievement and Legacy

Ding Ling occupies a central place in the history of modern Chinese literature. Her early stories broke new ground in the treatment of women's inner lives and desires, and she is often described as the first major Chinese writer to give serious literary attention to female subjectivity. Her work of the revolutionary period, by contrast, became a model of politically engaged fiction.

She was awarded the Stalin Prize for literature for The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River, an unusual honour for a Chinese writer, and she was a founding figure in the institutions of socialist literature. Her career thus embodies the whole arc of twentieth-century Chinese writing, from the experimental individualism of the 1920s to the collective and political modes of the revolutionary era and the reckonings of later years.

Her complicated position, both celebrated and persecuted by the movement she served, has made her a subject of continuing scholarly attention. She is remembered as a gifted storyteller, a fearless advocate for women, and a witness to the century whose contradictions she lived through. Her best work retains its power to surprise and disturb.

See also

• Miss Sophie's Diary
• The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River
• Lu Xun
• Left-wing League of Writers