Ding Ling (1904-1986), also spelled Ting Ling, was the pen name of Jiang Bingzhi, or Chiang Wei-chi, one of modern China’s most popular and controversial writers. Influenced by Western literature and anarchist and left-wing politics, Ding Ling wrote partly autobiographical short stories. In these stories, she created a new type of Chinese heroine. She portraying the lonely lives of unconventional, unfulfilled women who were nevertheless independent and passionate. By 1930, she had complete three collections of stories as well as a short novel.
Ding Ling was born in Changde, Yunan Province. She began writing in the 1920’s after moving to Shanghai. In 1931, Ding joined the Communist Party and was imprisoned in 1933 by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government for three years. She escaped in 1936 and joined the Communists in northern China. After the Communists took power in 1949, Ding held many cultural posts. Her novel The Sun Shines over the Shang-kan River won the 1951 Stalin Prize in the Soviet Union.
In 1957, Ding Ling was condemned for criticizing the Communists over women’s rights. She was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to a farm in northern China. China banned her work and held her in solitary confinement from 1970 to 1975. In 1979, the Chinese government lifted the ban on her work and restored her membership in the party. She died in Beijing, China, on March 4, 1986. Some of her later essays and fiction were collected in I Myself Am a Woman (published in 1989, after her death).
