Ding Ling (1904 - 1986)

Wed Oct 12, 1904

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Ding Ling, born on this day in 1904, was a prominent Chinese Marxist and feminist author. Despite being a member of the Communist Party, she was imprisoned and sentenced to manual labor during the Cultural Revolution.

In her early career, Ding Ling wrote highly successful short stories centering on young, unconventional Chinese women. Around 1930, she became a major literary figure of the leftist literature.

In 1931, her husband, communist poet Hu Yepin, was executed in Shanghai by the right-wing Kuomintang government for his association with the Communists. Shortly thereafter, Ding joined the Chinese Communist Party and her work reflected communist values.

According to authors Glenn Kucha and Jennifer Llewellyn, in 1957 Ding was denounced as a “rightist”, purged from the party, imprisoned, and her fiction and essays were banned.

Ding and her husband were then sent to the countryside and compelled to do manual labor for more than a decade. She was rehabilitated sometime in the years following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

“Happiness is to take up the struggle in the midst of the raging storm and not to pluck the lute in the moonlight or recite poetry among the blossoms.”

- Ding Ling