Ba Jin

Ba Jin (Li Yaotang, 1904-2005) was a Chinese novelist, translator and anarchist activist, and one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Chinese literature. His pen name, built from the surnames of two Russian anarchists, although its origin is debated, stayed with him throughout his career. His work captures the clash between family tradition and modern ideas in China.

He was born in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, into a wealthy landowning family that he would later reject. Around 1919 he became an anarchist after reading Kropotkin. He studied in eastern China and in 1927 went to France, where he wrote his first novel, Destruction, and translated anarchist works for magazines in Shanghai.

Back in China in 1929, he settled in Shanghai, where he published the novels he is best known for. The Love trilogy and the Torrent trilogy, whose first part, Family, has a strong autobiographical element, brought him fame. His prose is direct and emotional rather than polished, but its central theme, young people rebelling against patriarchal authority, reached a wide readership. He also supported the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist revolutionaries and ran a publishing house that issued translations on anarchism and the Spanish Civil War.

After 1949 he remained involved with literary magazines. During the Cultural Revolution he was branded a counter-revolutionary and persecuted. He was rehabilitated in 1977 and later held public posts, including the honorary presidency of the Chinese Writers' Association. Parkinson's disease affected him from 1983, and he died in Shanghai in 2005, aged one hundred.

His legacy is chiefly literary, for giving voice to a generation of young Chinese against family authority, but also a memorial one, through his critical view of the Cultural Revolution, which he urged be remembered in a museum.