 Ding Ling (pseud. of Jiang Bingzhi, 1904-86) was born on October 12, 1904 in Linli county, Hunan Province. Her father died when she was four, raised by her independent and strong-minded mother. At 17, she went to Shanghai and studied in a girls school run by the communists and then entered Shanghai University. She went to Beijing in 1923 but when unable to attend the lectures in Peking University as she originally had planned, she had to educate herself and was often reduced to living from hand to mouth. In 1924 she met and married Hu Yeping, a young writer; and in 1927 she published “Miss Sophie’s Diary” which brought her fame. In 1930, she and herhusband went to Shanghai where she joined the League of Left-Wing Writers and in 1932 the Communist Party, In May 1933 she was imprisoned by the Nationalist government, but she escaped in 1936 and joined the Communist literary circles in Yanan. Her novel “The Sun shines over the Sanggan River” about Chinese land reform in 1947, won the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951. In 1957 she was labeled a “rightist” and expelled from the party, sent down to labor in Heilongjiang Province. During the Cultural Revolution she was persecuted again, taken back to Beijing where she was imprisoned for five years. She died on March 4, 1986, loyal to the communist party and disinclined to question its wisdom. |