On 12 October 1904, Ding Ling (née Jiang Bingzhi) was born into a gentry family in Linli, in the Hunan province during the late Qing Dynasty. Her relatively prosperous background meant that she was able to attend school, and it was there that she began her politicization. At the Hunan Second Normal School for Girls, she came into contact with the anti-imperialism and national awakening of the May Fourth Movement. She eventually ended up in Shanghai to attend a People’s Girls’ School run by the young Communist Party of China (CPC), which had been formed a year earlier in that same city in 1921.
In the 1920s, Ding Ling, surrounded by communist writers such as Qu Qiubai, began her literary career. She published Miss Sophie’s Diary in 1928, one of her most celebrated works. This short story provided a provocative and rare glimpse into the daily life and internal world of a modern urban woman in China, focusing on her personal struggles, romantic affairs, and sexual desires. At the time, many writers of the New Culture Movement looked towards Western social and political frameworks to chart a path of liberation for the Chinese nation from the clutches of imperialism and economic backwardness. National liberation was also intimately intertwined with the liberation of the Chinese woman. Sophie, in pursuing her individual liberties, represented a break from the patriarchal and feudal family traditions of Old China, but was far from the liberated woman envisioned in socialist New China.
Each historical period demands its own kind of protagonists, and its own kind of writers. Ding Ling was one of those writers who continued to reinvent herself, being fully aware of the challenges. Looking back at her character Sophie two decades later, Ding Ling recognized that with the fundamental changes in the revolutionary process, “the spiritual world of the people had also fundamentally changed” and characters that she was familiar with, like Sophie, had already become outdated. It was necessary to “write entirely new people.” How to write these new people, and how to write them well was not a straightforward path.
In the early 1930s, she had become a prominent leftist and dove into politics, but these were dark years both politically and personally. In 1930, Hu Yepin, her husband and fellow writer, was arrested and killed—the same year that their son was born. In 1931, Ding Ling herself was arrested and detained for over two years by the Nationalists, all the while writing a series of short stories and novels and deepening her political commitment. She joined the CPC and took on the task of editing the prominent Beidou publication of the League of Left-Wing Writers. In November 1936, after the historic Long March that established a new communist base in Yan’an, Ding Ling arrived in northern Shaanxi and asked, directly to Mao Zedong, to join the Red Army. Later, on the frontlines of eastern Gansu province, Ding Ling received a telegram from Mao with a poem dedicated to her. In it he wrote, “Yesterday’s literary lady, today’s military general.”
In January 1937, Ding Ling arrived in the revolutionary base of Yan’an, appointed to different political positions. She was among the estimated 40,000 intellectuals who would make their way to Yan’an by 1943. Often coming from families of landlords, aristocrats, small business owners, and rich peasants, many of these intellectuals left relative urban comforts to traverse hundreds or thousands of kilometers in wind, sand, rain, and snow. Amid such enthusiasm, each one of these intellectuals also brought their own ideas for the direction of creative work and the communist cause. Ding Ling, then as the editor of the Party paper, Liberation Daily, was amongst a group of writers who criticized the lack of access to reading materials in the base area, unconducive conditions for artistic creation, special status of CPC leaders, and subjugation of women. At the heart of the essays was the question of artistic independence and the perceived restrictions set by the Party on artistic production. Was the role of art and literature to “praise the bright”—to glorify the deeds of the Party and the people—or to ‘expose the dark’ and point to the problems in Chinese society and the communist movement?
In May 1942, the three-week Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art set to clarify this fundamental relationship between cultural and political work. To a crowd of over 100 of the country’s top writers, artists, Party leaders, and military generals, Mao said, “The purpose of our meeting today is precisely to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy.”
To achieve this goal, Mao laid out five artistic and literary ‘problems’ to be addressed: position, attitude, audience, work, and study. The outcomes of this forum were published as Talks at Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942), becoming the essential text to guide the theory and practice of cultural work of the Chinese revolution.
On the first point, Mao argued that cultural workers should take a “class stand”, one that is firmly positioned alongside the people, in which artists also see themselves as workers in the struggle. For this, intellectuals need to go through their own “remolding” from one class to another. Meanwhile, the form and content of cultural works also had to go through a process of reinvention. Just as traditional forms of culture were given new revolutionary content, the “old bottles” of traditional intellectuals were being transformed into “new” intellectuals that served the people. Few writers embodied this process more than Ding Ling. When Ding left cosmopolitan Shanghai for the dusty fields of Yan’an, she was already an established writer, celebrated for novels like Miss Sophia’s Diary that spoke to the conditions of the modern, urban Chinese woman. Upon arriving in Yan’an, however, she struggled to write authentic descriptions of peasant life, which she was still unfamiliar with at the time, and to overcome her own prejudices, individualism, and alienation from the people.
In her own reflections, she said, “I’ve thought about it a lot, but it’s really difficult to write. I can’t portray people’s ideals as too high, so high that they no longer resemble a peasant farmer. But I also can’t depict them as too low; otherwise, how could they inspire people?” The difficulties that Ding and other writers had in portraying peasants in the context of class struggle was not based on their shortcomings alone, but also because the historical conditions had not yet created a revolutionary consciousness and the literacy levels among the people. Ding’s short stories and novels are a testament to this transformative and dialectical process, and to the years of unlearning and relearning, to become intellectually and politically integrated with the masses, which in turn deepens class consciousness.
The path traversed by Ding reflects the process of popular “integration” that Mao identified in Talks: “Intellectuals who want to integrate themselves with the masses, who want to serve the masses, must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well.” Nearly a decade after arriving in Yan’an, Ding wrote her first novel about the revolutionary movement and land reform, entitled The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1948). This work emerged from the years she spent living and working with women, peasants, workers, veterans, and cadres in some of the country’s most remote rural districts.
For this novel, Ding Ling was awarded a second-degree State Stalin Prize for literature. That same year, Zhou Li Bo was awarded the third-degree prize for Hurricane. Both novels about the land reform processes in countryside during the 1940s Yan’an period were representative works guided by Mao’s Talks, but they did not find their international audiences until after the PRC was established. Winning the Stalin Prize also propelled these works into the imaginary internationalist community created by Soviet literary and translation efforts, with Zhou’s novel translated into eight languages and Ding’s Sun Shines made available in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Eastern Germany, Albania, and Mongolia shortly after winning the prizes. In 1956, Sun Shines arrived in Latin America, published in Brazil’s Coleção Romances do Povo (People’s Novels Collection), a book series by Editora Vitória, a publisher affiliated with the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), and coordinated by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado.
The founding of the PRC marked a new era in Ding Ling’s life, as writer and as political cadre. Literature, and in particular, “new people’s literature” took on a central role in the construction of the new people’s state. On an international level, literary and cultural exchange became central in the strategy of “people’s diplomacy” to overcome the diplomatic and economic sanctions placed on the new communist country. In her role as the vice president of the Chinese Writers Association, Ding Ling often received international writers on their visits, with Jorge Amado and his wife and writer Zélia Gattai amongst them.
On their first trip to China in 1952, Ding Ling accompanied them on touristic visits and meetings with high-level writers and leaders, including dinner with Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, a meeting with Zhou Enlai at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and tea at Song Qingling’s home. In her memoirs, Gattai noted how Amado and Ding Ling were both celebrated in all their encounters, and this trip convinced Amado to republish Sun Shines in Brazil upon their return. In addition to shared moments of enjoyment and exchange, this visit made a big impact on the Latin American writers who were finally able to experience the construction of the new socialist country first hand. In her articles, “Três viagens à China” (“Three trips to China”), Gattai recalls, “From this joyful and fruitful trip, we and our comrades returned with light hearts and full of hope. We envisioned a future of peace and prosperity for China, an example of what socialism should be, moving from theories and paper to practice and reality.”
On their second visit in 1957, this time with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his wife Matilde Urrutia, Ding Ling once again was responsible for heading the committee to host them. Despite the pleasant time catching up between friends, this trip occurred on the eve of the anti-rightist struggle, and Ding Ling was amongst the most well-known authors to be labeled rightist counterrevolutionaries. In his memoirs, Navegação de cabotagem (“Coasting”), Amado describes his exchange with Ding Ling, after learning about her “rightist” labeling back in 1957, foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution to come: “When I told her about the doubts that were crushing my heart, she replied: Do you doubt just because you see injustices or mistakes? Ding Ling did not doubt. Or did she not admit to doubting? She said to me: If I step in the mud, I clean my feet and continue onwards.”
Like many intellectuals, Ding Ling indeed suffered greatly during the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). She was sent to the countryside, cut off from their literary work and international exchanges. However, Ding Ling eventually did find her way to “clean her feet and continue onwards.” A year after being rehabilitated in 1979, when she resumed her writing career and international travels, Ding delivered the speech, “A writer is a politicized person” at a symposium on art and literary theory in 1980. In it she said, “It was hard, and I suffered, but I also gained a lot… I can’t write about generals because I don’t have that kind of experience. But I can write about peasants, about workers, about ordinary people, for I know them well.”
The tumultuous twentieth century tells many stories; it is a story of awakening and resistance, of suffering and setbacks, and of personal transformation and political commitment. It is a story of overcoming and change. Ding Ling’s life and work is a testament to all of that. As a society was being radically transformed, the changes in the relations of production required a change in consciousness, and a new socialist culture and literature was necessary for that transformation. This task was tall, the transformations were many and complex, but Ding Ling continued to carry on the task of trying to produce a new literature and a new culture for, by, and in the name of the people. In that speech in 1980, she said, “Creation itself is a political action, and a writer is a politicized person,” affirming her continued commitment as a writer and as a revolutionary till the end of her life. She passed away in Beijing in 1986 at the age of 81 years.
Tings Chak is the art director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought, and a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
