Ba Jin, acclaimed Chinese novelist

BEIJING – One of China’s most acclaimed novelists, whose writing career spanned warlords, Nationalists, Communists and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, died in Shanghai on Monday.

He was 100. Ba Jin, the sole survivor of the first generation of writers to use the vernacular rather than formal Chinese, died in hospital after a career which spanned more than 70 years.Symbolising the tortuous quest for identity of Chinese intellectuals in the 20th century, Ba Jin’s works were translated into more than 30 foreign languages.”We have lost one of the most sensitive hearts of our time and one of the most important and widely read Chinese writers of the 20th century,” the China Daily quoted Chen Sihe, dean of Chinese literature at Shanghai’s Fudan University, as saying.Ba Jin was the pen name of Li Feigan, who was born into a family of well-to-do officials in the southwestern city of Chengdu in 1904.The name Ba Jin was made up of the Chinese rendition of the first and last syllables of the Russian anarchists, Bakunin and Kropotkin, reflecting the impressionable young man’s fascination with the themes of universal love and revolution.In 1923, he moved to Shanghai and plunged into the iconoclastic cultural movement following the ‘May Fourth Incident’, a mass protest against the Treaty of Versailles marking the end of the World War I which Chinese regarded as unfair.He lived in Paris from 1927-28, but distanced himself from leftist Chinese students and remained apolitical.A prolific writer, Ba Jin had a dozen novels and four collections of short stories to his credit by 1937.His autobiographic trilogy – ‘Family’ in 1937, ‘Spring’ in 1938 and ‘Autumn’ in 1940 – became classics for their moving descriptions of the tribulations of young members of a large family who struggled to break away from their elders, only to court stubborn opposition and tragic outcomes.He stayed on in China after Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power in 1949 because he scorned widespread corruption under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.Ba Jin sang the praises Mao’s New China, but that did not shield him from humiliation and attacks by ultra-leftist Red Guards during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.After the decade-long political maelstrom, Ba Jin’s career entered a new phase as he spoke his mind fearlessly in a long memoir serialised in a Hong Kong newspaper between 1978 and 1986.He reminded his readers of the cataclysm, while asking them not to lose hope for the future.Ba Jin was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, but continued writing into his 90s.He has bequeathed his library of 8 000 volumes and more than an estimated N$2,3 million from proceeds of literary awards to the Museum of Chinese Modern Literature in Beijing.- Nampa-ReutersBa Jin, the sole survivor of the first generation of writers to use the vernacular rather than formal Chinese, died in hospital after a career which spanned more than 70 years.Symbolising the tortuous quest for identity of Chinese intellectuals in the 20th century, Ba Jin’s works were translated into more than 30 foreign languages.”We have lost one of the most sensitive hearts of our time and one of the most important and widely read Chinese writers of the 20th century,” the China Daily quoted Chen Sihe, dean of Chinese literature at Shanghai’s Fudan University, as saying.Ba Jin was the pen name of Li Feigan, who was born into a family of well-to-do officials in the southwestern city of Chengdu in 1904.The name Ba Jin was made up of the Chinese rendition of the first and last syllables of the Russian anarchists, Bakunin and Kropotkin, reflecting the impressionable young man’s fascination with the themes of universal love and revolution.In 1923, he moved to Shanghai and plunged into the iconoclastic cultural movement following the ‘May Fourth Incident’, a mass protest against the Treaty of Versailles marking the end of the World War I which Chinese regarded as unfair.He lived in Paris from 1927-28, but distanced himself from leftist Chinese students and remained apolitical.A prolific writer, Ba Jin had a dozen novels and four collections of short stories to his credit by 1937.His autobiographic trilogy – ‘Family’ in 1937, ‘Spring’ in 1938 and ‘Autumn’ in 1940 – became classics for their moving descriptions of the tribulations of young members of a large family who struggled to break away from their elders, only to court stubborn opposition and tragic outcomes.He stayed on in China after Mao Zedong’s Communists seized power in 1949 because he scorned widespread corruption under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.Ba Jin sang the praises Mao’s New China, but that did not shield him from humiliation and attacks by ultra-leftist Red Guards during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.After the decade-long political maelstrom, Ba Jin’s career entered a new phase as he spoke his mind fearlessly in a long memoir serialised in a Hong Kong newspaper between 1978 and 1986.He reminded his readers of the cataclysm, while asking them not to lose hope for the future.Ba Jin was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, but continued writing into his 90s.He has bequeathed his library of 8 000 volumes and more than an estimated N$2,3 million from proceeds of literary awards to the Museum of Chinese Modern Literature in Beijing.- Nampa-Reuters