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| Legendary Chinese Writer Ba Jin Dies in Shanghai |
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China’s most renowned literary icon, Ba Jin, died this month at the age of 100, after a six-year battle against malignant mesolithium cell tumor. He passed away in Shanghai’s Huadong Hospital on the evening of October 17. Media in both Mainland and Taiwan reported that Ba Jin also suffered from Parkinson’s disease, chronic tracheitis, and irregular blood pressure. He had previously been hospitalized in 1999 for flu and fever. “Ba Jin” was born as Li Yaotang on November 25, 1904, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. He studied at Chengdu Foreign Language School in 1921, before traveling to France in 1927 to continue his studies. He later became a famous author and translator in Mainland China. Ba Jin’s creative years were largely before 1947. In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took over China, he was banned from writing. In 1966, he was branded a “counter-revolutionary” during the Party’s Great Cultural Revolution. Like many intellectuals, Ba Jin was publicly humiliated and imprisoned. Liu Xiaobo, independent commentator and president of the Independence Chinese PEN center (ICPC), said that Ba Jin’s literature creation can be divided as before 1949 and after 1949. He said, “Before 1949, he wrote the Turbulent Stream trilogy, particularly [the first novel] The Family, with its strong emotions of love and hatred, which had a profound ideological impact on the younger generation of his time.” After 1949, the CCP established political power, and Ba Jin joined them on the political stage. He was the representative of the first, second, third, and fourth sessions of the National People’s Congress, a standing committee member of the fifth session of the National People’s Congress, and the vice president of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth sessions of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. However, during the Cultural Revolution, Ba Jin was brutally persecuted. Liu commented that Ba Jin was no longer a true artist after 1949. He functioned as a targeted icon of the authority’s “united front” campaign. Liu said, “After 1949, Ba Jin functioned more like a political vase, a decoration. Ba Jin, the literary man, died after 1949.” Contributing over half a century of literary work, Ba Jin is known to the world as China’s most revered writer of our times. His most famous work, the Turbulent Stream trilogy, consisting of the three books The Family, Spring and Autumn, was honored as the classic of Chinese near-modern literature in the 1930s, when he wrote it. Ba Jin was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. The Ba Jin International Academic Forum, held every two years since 1989, continues to attract sinologists from all over the world. Source: www.theepochtimes.com Oct 24, 05 |
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