Spent 20 Years in Internal Exile : Ding Ling, Noted Chinese Author, Dies

Ding Ling, China’s controversial and prolific author whose 300 works spanned a turbulent career of nearly 60 years, died Tuesday in Peking, the New China News Agency reported. She was 82.

The news agency said Ding Ling “died of illness,” but gave no details.

State-run television said dozens of senior Chinese officials were gathering here to pay their respects to China’s best-known woman author, who spent more than 20 years in internal exile after being branded a “rightist” in 1957 by Chairman Mao Tse-tung with whom she reportedly once had a romantic liaison.

But she was “rehabilitated” with an apology from the government in 1979 and at the time of her death was vice chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Assn. and a ranking member of the government advisory body, the People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Ding Ling, a member of the Communist Party since 1932, tried in her novels, short stories, plays and essays to reveal the human struggles behind the Communist Party’s revolutionary victory, even daring to portray fictional Communist Party members as sometimes confused and flawed.

Her most famous novels include “Miss Shafei’s Diary” and “Mother,” both about the harsh lot of women in the traditional semifeudal, semicolonial China; and “The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River,” about land reform under the Communist Party in northern China.

“The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River,” published in 1948, won the Stalin Literature Prize in 1951 and has been translated into English, Russian, French, German and Japanese.

A six-volume “Collected Works of Ding Ling” was published in 1984.

Ding Ling first saw the inside of a prison in 1933 when she was jailed as a subversive by the Chinese Nationalists. Upon her release in 1936, she went to Mao’s communist base at Yanan in northern Shaanxi Province and became chief editor of the literary supplement of the party newspaper, Liberation Daily.

During the same period, she served as editor-in-chief of the “Dipper,” a monthly publication run by the Left-Wing Writers’ League.

After the founding of Mao’s People’s Republic in 1949, she edited the “Literary and Art Gazette” and “People’s Literature,” both published by the Chinese Writers’ Assn.

In 1955, Ding Ling--who said in a 1981 interview with the Los Angeles Times that despite her writings she always considered herself a loyal communist--was forced to resign from the writers’ association after she was accused of following a “rightist” literary policy. She was considered too independent for the party leadership, too critical of its shortcomings.

(In her youth she had married a leftist poet and led what in China was considered a Bohemian life in the literary circles of Peking and Shanghai.)

Two years later, she was one of the main targets of the so-called “Hundred Flowers Campaign” against “rightist deviationists” and was dismissed from all her official posts.

She spent most of the next two decades with her second husband tending chickens and pigs on a farm in northeast China and then was imprisoned outside Peking for five years during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. There, she told The Times: “I got fried eggs, stewed pork or other meat. This was wonderful compared to food on the farm, where they wanted to starve us to death.”

In 1981, two years after her rehabilitation, she wrote the following manifesto for Chinese literature:

“No matter what we write, we must proceed from life and describe it in depth, warm-heartedly and in a detailed and bold fashion. No matter how much we shock or anger the readers, in the end we must give them strength, leaving them with a picture of the future. Our literature must be thought-provoking and encourage people to march forward.”