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Ding Ling

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Born: October 11 1904

Died: 0303 03 19861986

Ding Ling , formerly romanized as Ting Ling, was the pen name of Jiang Bingzhi , also known as Bin Zhi , one of the most celebrated 20th-century Chinese authors. She was awarded the Soviet Union's Stalin second prize for Literature in 1951.

Active in the Communist revolutionary cause, she was placed under house arrest in Shanghai by the Guomindang for a three-year period from 1933 to 1936. She escaped, and made her way to the Communist base of Yan'an. There she became one of the most influential figures in Yan'an cultural circles, serving as director of the Chinese Literature and Arts Association and editing a newspaper literary supplement.

Ding Ling struggled with the idea that revolutionary needs, defined by the party, should come before art. She objected to the gender standards at work in Yan'an. In 1942 she wrote an article in a party newspaper questioning the party's commitment to change popular attitudes towards women. She satirized male double standards concerning women, saying they were ridiculed if they focused on household duties, but also became the target of gossip and rumors if they remained unmarried and worked in the public sphere. She also criticized male cadres use of divorce provisions to rid themselves of unwanted wives. Her article was condemned by Mao Zedong and the party leadership, and she was forced to retract her views and undergo a public self-confession.

Her main work in these years was the novel The Sun Shines Over Sanggan River, which she completed in 1948. It followed the complex results of land reform on a rural village. It was awarded the Stalin prize for Literature in 1951, and is considered one of the best examples of socialist-realist fiction. It did not, however, address gender issues.

Always a political activist, in 1957 she was denounced as a "rightist", purged from the party, and her fiction and essays were banned. She spent five years in jail during the Cultural Revolution and was sentenced to do manual labor on a farm for twelve years before being "rehabilitated" in 1978.

A few years before her death, she was allowed to travel to the United States where she was a guest at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. She died in Beijing in 1986.
She authored more than three hundred works. After her "rehabilitation" many of her previously banned books such as her novel The Sun Shines Over The Sanggan River were republished and translated into numerous languages. Some of her short works, spanning a fifty-year period, are collected in I Myself Am A Woman: Selected Writings Of Ding Ling.

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Ding Ling

Ding Ling

Books from Ding Ling

Other Voices, Other Vistas: Short Stories from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America

Miss Sophie's Diary and Other Stories

The Power of Weakness: Four Stories of the Chinese Revolution

El diario de la señorita Sofía / En el hospital

When I Was in Xia Village

Tre donne cinesi

Sužnjevo srce : moderne kitajske novele

Päike Sangani jõe kohal

Selected Stories And Prose By Bing Xin (Eng Chin Ed.)

Il sole splende sul fiume Sangkan