Ting Ling

(pseudonym of Chiang Ping-chih). Born 1907 in Hunan Province. Chinese writer. Member of the Chinese Communist Party since 1932. In 1931-32, Ting Ling edited Pei Tou (Ursa Major), the journal of the League of Left-wing Writers of China. She was vice-chairman of the Writers’ Union of China. In her early stories Meng-k’o (1927), Sofia’s Diary (1928), The Little House in Tsingyunli (1929), and Shanghai in the Spring of 1930 and in the novel Wei Hu (1930), Ting Ling realistically depicted the position of the Chinese woman in the feudal-patriarchal tradition and discussed paths to revolution for the intelligentsia. An important milestone in her work was the novella Flood (1931), which depicted the historical causes of the Chinese peasantry’s tragic fate. Ting Ling took part in carrying out the land reform in 1946-47, to which she dedicated her most significant novel, The Sun Shines Over the Sangkan River (1948; Russian translation, 1949; State Prize of the USSR, 1952). The writer’s creative style combined the leisurely exposition typical of the Chinese traditional novel with a many-sided portrayal of life and enthusiasm for struggle derived from Russian and Soviet prose.

Accused in 1957 of “right-wing” bourgeois deviationism, Ting Ling was banished to remote regions of the country for “reeducation,” and her subsequent fate is unknown.