Pin-chin Chiang

Pin-chin Chiang

Regarded as China's most popular female writer of the modern era, Pin-chin Chiang (1904–1986) used the pseudonym Ding Ling in many of her publications. Her best-known writings are the novels Miss Sophie's Diary and The Sun Shines over the Sangaan River (1951). Persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party for many years and extremely active in political causes, she remained devoted to the Party and produced more than 300 literary works over her lifetime.

Progressive Mother Instilled Feminist Ideals

Pin-chin Chiang was born on September 4, 1904, in Linli County, Hunan Province, China. Her family was wealthy and socially prominent but fell on hard times when her father, Chiang Yufeng (a highly regarded Confucian scholar), died when she was four years old. Pin-chin's mother, Yu Manzhen, was an early female political activist. Her untraditional and progressive views on the place of women in society influenced her headstrong young daughter. Another factor in Pin-chin's political and literary development was the 1919 May Fourth Movement, also known as the "Chinese Enlightenment." This was one of several antiforeign movements that intensified Chinese nationalism and caused some prominent intellectuals to begin studying Marxism as a way to end the foreign aggression that plagued the giant nation.

Pin-chin attended good-quality, progressive schools in Hunan while growing up and watched intently as China's rapid political changes whirled around her. In 1919 she attended school in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province; one of her classmates was Yang Kaihui, who would later become the wife of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. (Mao would command the country beginning in 1949.) She enjoyed reading the modern works of Western authors but was especially captivated by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which she was said to have read at least 10 times.

Pin-chin waged a pitched battle in 1920 with her paternal uncles after they announced their choice of a husband for her. In a move that must have been flabbergasting in its impropriety, Pin-chin told the men that her body was her own and she would do with it what she liked. Taking this stand caused a widening rift in the family, and Pin-chin finally set off on her own. (In fact, Pin-chin was lucky—if she had been born several decades earlier she might have been the victim of footbinding, a tradition in which the parents of wealthy girl children permanently crippled them to indicate that they had no need to work.)

Began True Education

Fleeing Hunan Province for the political and culture center of Shanghai, Pin-chin entered the Common Girls' School there later in 1920. She served as editor of the school's literary journal, the Women's Voice, until leaving the school in 1922. She also joined the Anarchist Party in 1920. Pin-chin studied at Shanghai University in 1922, working and writing with many of the people who would soon become the nation's top-ranking Communists, and then left for Beijing in 1923. There she audited classes by Lu Xun, who became her literary idol. Although she was never actually enrolled at the University of Beijing (whether because she did not pass the entrance exam or could not manage to complete the formal enrollment process is unclear), Pin-chin studied with many of the country's most prominent intellectuals at this epicenter of radical Chinese politics.

Meanwhile, in 1924 Pin-chin met a poet, Hu Yuepin, who was as committed as she was to literature and political reform. In 1927-1928, as the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek and the new Communist Party locked horns in a battle to the death for control of the country, Pin-chin and Hu lived a bohemian life of poverty in Shanghai. She drank excessively, distraught at her perceived lack of achievement so far, and was unfaithful to Hu at least once. However, her misery seems to have prompted her to start writing, because in 1928 she produced and published Miss Sofie's Diary.

Began Writing Career

Pin-chin's first work would also be her most famous. Shocking for its extensive use of eroticism, the long story was not strictly autobiographical. However, Pin-chin's readers believed it to be so, and came to see her as the notorious icon of the liberated modern Chinese woman.

Miss Sophie's Diary ignited in Pin-chin a passion for writing. In addition to working as editor of the literary journal Honghei Congshu in 1928, she churned out numerous collections of short fiction in which the dominant theme was the problems of Chinese women like her. In 1930 she had her first child, a son, with Hu, but sent the boy to live with her mother in Hunan. She continued her political and literary activities, joining the League of Left-Wing Writers and serving as editor of the communist magazine Beidou in 1931. Later that year, Hu and other radical writers were executed by the Nationalist Party, and in 1932 Pin-chin secretly joined the Communist Party—partly as an act of protest. (Her beloved brother, Wang Jianhong, also died at about this point.) The Party did have its appeals, though, since it treated women's issues with respect and gave them importance in the Party platform. Also, by this point, Pinchin knew many of the Party's leaders, having studied and worked with them earlier.

Pin-chin met and fell in love with a translator, Feng Da, but the couple's new life together was interrupted in 1933 when the Nationalists kidnapped them both and put them under house arrest in Nanjing. During this period, about which very few records exist, Pin-chin's books were banned. She gave birth to a daughter, who was also sent to her mother in Hunan. Despite these hardships, she kept writing, and secretly published Shui (Water) and Muqin (Mother) in 1933. Feng died of tuberculosis in 1935.

Pin-chin either escaped from her captors or was freed in 1937, when with the help of the Communist underground she fled to the Communist-controlled area of Yanan known as the Red Army Base. To help bolster the morale of the Party members during their struggle, she organized the Northwest Front Service Corps to provide traveling entertainment. She wrote a play for the troupe to perform, the 1938 Chongfeng (Reunion). Pin-chin resumed her writing, which gradually came to manifest her disenchantment with what she perceived as a widening split in the Party between practice and theory regarding women's rights and the Party's interest in women's issues. Her most famous work on this theme was the 1941 article "Thoughts on March 8."

Became Leading Figure in Communist
Party

By 1942 Pin-chin had become chief speaker for women's issues within the Communist Party and was held in high regard by many of the Party elite. She was also a popular professor at Communist-supported universities and literary editor of the Communist newspaper Jiefang ribao until 1942. However, Mao was increasingly losing patience with the writer and her disobedience of his directive (part of his 1942 Rectification Campaign) that all art must serve the Communist revolution in an obvious, direct manner.

Pin-chin came back to toe the Party line when she participated in the early days of the land reform movement in 1946 as the Communist Party began targeting landlords and wealthy peasants and returning their land to "the People." She wrote a critically acclaimed novel about the campaign, The Sun Shines over the Sangaan River, in 1948. Mao reportedly loved the book, and sent Pin-chin to serve as a spokesperson for the Party throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Pin-chin remained a fixture of the Party's literary and cultural circles throughout the 1940s and early 1950s and worked as editor of two Party publications, Wenyo bao and Renmin wenxue from 1950 to 1953. During this time, however, she had fallen out of favor with top Party officials for her continued questioning of its policies. Even her pro-Communist novel had been insufficient to win back their approval.

Expelled from Party and Exiled

In the mid-1950s, Pin-chin found herself becoming further estranged from the Party leadership. Two resolutions of the Writer's Union in 1955 and 1956 led to her being wrongly labeled a "rightist" (one who advocates maintenance of the political status quo, i.e., rule by the Nationalists) and because of this her books were banned from 1957 to 1978. Ultimately, Pin-chin was expelled from the Communist Party in 1958 and sent to live on a farm in the remote northeastern Heilongjiang Province in Manchuria with her husband, Chen Ming, a screenwriter whom she had met in 1942. They spent the majority of two decades there, and were assigned the work of taking care of animals.

Pin-chin's persecution continued into the Cultural Revolution, Mao's all-encompassing reform movement that he initiated in 1965 to eliminate counterrevolutionary elements in the country's institutions and leadership. Characterized by purges of intellectuals, political zealotry, and social and economic chaos, the movement terrified artists like Pin-chin and her husband. Despite her many services to the Communist Party, she was brought back to Beijing in 1970 and publicly humiliated before being put in solitary confinement for the next five years. The Party destroyed her manuscript of Miss Sophie's Diary. She later learned that Chen had been next door to her the entire time. Party authorities released Pin-chin from solitary confinement in 1975 only to send her back into exile. Permitted to leave with Chen, the couple were forced to live in Chanxi, a town in Shaanxi Province until 1978.

"Rehabilitated" and Permitted to Return
to Literary Life

Upon her return to Beijing in 1978 following the death of Mao and the ascent of reformist Deng Xiaoping, Pin-chin was "rehabilitated" (given back her social standing and good name) in 1979. Reinstated to the prestigious Writers' Union, she was allowed to give interviews to the foreign press and wrote several stories after her release. She traveled to the United States in 1981 to attend a writer's conference in Iowa, but was reportedly confused by the Western version of feminism that she learned about there.

At age 82, still devoted to the Communist Party and its principles—especially that art should support and glorify the Party—Pin-chin died of cancer in Beijing on March 4, 1986. Some historical records indicate that she had never married her early lovers because she believed marriage was a socially condoned form of prostitution.

Books

Commire, Anne, ed., Women in World History, Yorkin Publications, 2001.

Online

"Ding Ling," The Gale Group Biography Resource Center website, http://galenet.gale.com (January 16, 2004).

"Ding Ling (1904-1986)," eLibrary website, http://ask.elibrary.com (December 27, 2003).

"Ding Ling," The Chinese University of Hong Kong: A Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, http://www.renditions.org (December 27, 2003).

"Ding Ling," The College of Wooster, http://www.wooster.edu (December 27, 2003).

"Ding Ling," Indiana University, http://www.indiana.edu (December 27, 2003).

"Enduring the Revolution: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in Guomindang China," The Greenwood Publishing Group, http://info.greenwood.com (December 27, 2003).