Ba Jin
Chinese anarchist writer (1904–2005)
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He was born as Li Yaotang, with alternate name Li Feigan or Li Pei Kan (in Wade–Giles). The first word of his pen name may have been taken from Ba Embo, his classmate who committed suicide in Paris, which was admitted by himself, or from the first syllable of the surname of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; and the last character of which is the Chinese equivalent of the last syllable of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (克鲁泡特金, Ke-lu-pao-te-jin).
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Biography
On November 25, 1904, Li Yaotang was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, into a wealthy Li family. The family's wealth came mainly from the land acquired by his grandfather and father when they were officials, and Li Yaotang sometimes described his family as a "typical landlord's family". In 1919, Ba read Kropotkin's An Appeal to the Young and converted to anarchism.
Ba Jin left Chengdu to attend school in eastern China in 1923, and then traveled to France to study in 1927. It was partly owing to boredom that Ba Jin began to write his first novel, Miewang 灭亡 ("Destruction"). In France, Ba Jin continued his anarchist activism, translating many anarchist works, including Kropotkin's Ethics, into Chinese, which was mailed back to Shanghai's anarchist magazines for publication.
During the Cultural Revolution, Ba Jin was heavily persecuted as a counter-revolutionary. In his memoir, Ba Jin also wrote about his own participation in the persecution of friends and acquaintances. He asked that a Cultural Revolution Museum be set up in 1981. Ba Jin stated that such museums could include "concrete and real objects" and reconstruct "striking scenes" of the Cultural Revolution in order to engrave the upheaval of the period in Chinese national memory. In his view, passing on to later generations memories of this "catastrophic era" would help avoid history repeating itself. Ba Jin did not attempt to implement his proposal for a Cultural Revolution museum.
The Shantou Cultural Revolution Museum referenced the influence of Ba Jin on its establishment through displaying a depiction of his at the entrance as well as a quote of his, "Every town in China should establish a museum about the Cultural Revolution."
Some critics of Ba Jin noted that his vision of a Cultural Revolution did not deviate much from the official judgment on the period contained in the 1981 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China and that he did not propose how to treat the actions and figure of Mao Zedong in such a museum. Other critics contended that Ba Jin's vision privileged the suffering of elites during the Cultural Revolution and ignored the experience of the poor, many of whom remembered the Mao era as when they first received job security and health care, or who may remember the period as a time of simple virtue and close communities.
Ba Jin contributed calligraphy to photographer Yang Kelin's 1995 two volume work, The Cultural Revolution Museum.
Ba Jin's works were heavily influenced by foreign writers, including Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, Anton Chekhov, and Emma Goldman.
His married wife since 1944, Xiao Shan, died of cancer in 1972.
Ba Jin suffered from Parkinson's disease beginning in 1983. The illness confined him to Huadong Hospital in Shanghai from 1998. He died in 2005, aged 100.