DING LING

born 1904, Changde, Hunan province, China died March 4, 1986, Peking WadeGiles romanization Ting Ling, pseudonym of Chiang Wei-chih one of China's most popular 20th-century authors. In her early career Ding Ling initially wrote highly successful short stories centring on young, unconventional Chinese women, and she began writing proletarian works in 1931. Born into a declining gentry family, Ding Ling was supported by her mother after her father's death in 1911. After formal education in Hunan provincial schools, she journeyed in 1921 to Shanghai and then to Nanking, more to observe the intellectual life there than to study. In that period she developed an interest in anarchism. After a stint at Shanghai University, she went to Peking, where she met and fell in love with the leftist would-be poet Hu Yeh-p'in (1925). With him she moved to the Western Hills outside Peking. Influenced by Flaubert's Madame Bovary and other European novels, Ding Ling began writing, partly autobiographic short stories in which she developed a new kind of Chinese heroinedaring, independent, and passionate, yet perplexed and emotionally unfulfilled in her search for the meaning of life. Ding Ling's chronicles of the aspirations and disappointments of modern Chinese women were an immediate success, but because Hu Yeh-p'in was making little progress in his literary career, the couple moved to Shanghai in 1928 to start a literary magazine as a vehicle to publish his work. The venture failed, and Hu Yeh-p'in turned his attention to politics, joining the League of Left-wing Writers. Ding Ling, however, devoted herself to writing, and by 1930 she had completed three collections of short stories and a novelette. Later that year she gave birth to a son. Hu Yeh-p'in joined the Chinese Communist Party and became even more involved in politics, only to be arrested by Nationalist authorities and executed in 1931. Ding Ling joined the Communist Party that same year and edited journals of the League of Left-wing Writers. Ding Ling's conversion to Marxism channeled her writing into a new and initially fruitful direction. Her proletarian-oriented Shui (1931; Flood) was acclaimed as a model of Socialist Realist fiction in China. She was abducted by agents of the Nationalist Party in 1933 and imprisoned until 1936, when, disguised as a soldier, she escaped and joined the Communists at Yenan. There she became friendly with Mao Zedong and was linked romantically with the general Peng Dehuai. She was not completely uncritical of the Communist movement, expressing her dissatisfactions openly through her stories and in journal articles, for which she was censured by Mao. Ding Ling's officially successful proletarian novel T'ai-yang chao tsai Sang-kan-ho shang (1948; The Sun Shines over the Sang-kan River) was the first Chinese novel to win the Soviet Union's Stalin Prize (1951). Yet despite her triumphs, she remained in political trouble for her open criticisms of the party, especially in regard to women's rights. She was officially censured and expelled from the party as a rightist in 1957 and was imprisoned for five years during the Cultural Revolution. In 1975 she was freed, and her membership in the Communist Party was restored in 1979. Her later publications include several critical essays, short stories, and longer fictional prose.