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Significant and scared
A Review by Jonathan Mirsky

Ding Ling (1904-86) was China's most famous female writer but, after his initial enthusiasm for her early revolutionary spirit, Charles J. Alber, one of the leading Western experts on her life, became disillusioned with her. This is evident in the title of his second book on Ding Ling, Embracing the Lie. In it, Alber, Professor of Chinese and Chinese literature at the University of South Carolina, writes about Ding's life from 1949 to her death. Spanning most of the twentieth century, his two volumes (the first is called Enduring the Revolution: Ding Ling and the politics of literature in Guomindang China) show how perilous it was to be a writer in that period of transition and modernization, and how significant writers are in China -- significant in a way that their Western counterparts observe with amazement and dismay.

Ding Ling set Chinese letters on fire in the late 1920s with short stories such as "Meng Ke" and "The Diary of Miss Sophie". Today these stories read like Upton Sinclair's muckraking novels of the 20s, worthy but heavy-going. But in "Meng Ke" ("Mon Coeur"), Ding Ling's first story, published in 1927, a young woman discovers her sexuality in a tough city full of rich predatory men. The following year Ding Ling published "The Diary of Miss Sophie", which she had written in two weeks. Miss Sophie lives a dreary, self-pitying life in a boarding house. She is loved by a gentle, kind man but prefers her erotic fantasies about another. Her deepest feelings, possibly sexual, and also unsatisfactory, are for women. Ding Ling's own life, in which she took lovers, sometimes more than one at a time it seems, became notorious.

When she joined the Communists at Yanan, she landed in very hot water by writing essays criticizing Communist life, especially the exploitation of women. In her essay, "Thoughts on March 8", Women's Day, published in 1942, she exposed the gender inequalities at Mao's guerrilla headquarters. The leaders, she charged, "should talk less of meaningless theories and talk more of actual problems". This struck a raw nerve. The Party's leading figures, notably Mao, were much married, abandoning their wives easily and taking up with younger more glamorous women who had not endured the ordeals of underground life and the Long March. Badly frightened, however, by a purge of writers who dared to look behind the propaganda curtain, Ding Ling soon condemned Wang Shiwei, most outspoken of the Party's critics, declaring that he had sunk to the depths of a "latrine". This saved her from the execution inflicted on Wei. In 1952 she won the Stalin prize for her obediently loyal novel The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River. Like most of her writing it has a certain political interest, but does not stand alone as literature.

In the early 1950s she became a power in the literary bureaucracy, one of the most dangerous situations in Mao's China. Then came the inevitable hammering. For over twenty years Ding Ling was branded a Rightist, Nationalist spy, and traitor, enduring detention, hard labour, beatings, and public abuse. Although her status as a "Rightist" was finally reversed in the late 1970s, the "stain" darkened the rest of her life. At her funeral the Party refused to accord her high honours, despite the effort she made, during her final years, as Alber writes, "to safeguard her political credibility and reliability, reaffirm her loyalty as a Chinese Communist Party member, and maintain her reputation as an old-line revolutionary". This "Leftism" late in her life caused many intellectuals to distrust her. While she harmed many around her, "mostly", Alber observes, "Ding Ling was hurt by others".

Alber, who had admired Ding Ling's youthful panache and daring, ended by being disappointed in her. By the end of his books it is indeed hard to like her, although we can admire her courage when she was young and pity her long persecution. In summing her up, Alber writes:

"The tragedy of Ding Ling is that she traded her own integrity for legitimacy in the Party. Except for self-satisfaction, if indeed there was any, there was little reward: perhaps a high-rise apartment, a trip abroad to the United States, Canada or Australia , a short stay in Hong Kong or Paris, certainly not the undying gratitude of the Party and its leadership. No reward can compensate for the loss of one's integrity; there is no honor in embracing a lie."

Early in the first book, Enduring the Revolution, Alber shows how for decades China managed to secure the abject cooperation of its writers, with a few heroic exceptions, two of them connected to Ding Ling. He describes how in 1980, at an international conference in Paris he attended on modern Chinese literature, someone proposed sending a telegram to Ding Ling "congratulating her on her courage during the last few decades", after her long Maoist-inflicted agony. But although Mao had been dead since 1976, the Chinese delegates to the conference, who themselves had experienced variations of Ding Ling's travails, rejected the word "courage" because "such language would be offensive to the Party and the government of China". Later, Alber describes a series of unique interviews in 1980 and 1981 with Ding Ling. In them she denies much of the undeniable reality of her past. Alber writes that "my disillusion with Ding Ling was so profound I was no longer convinced that the writer deserved so much attention". Nonetheless, he decided (although the thought "had more than once crossed my mind that I am neither Chinese nor a woman") that he would soldier on, telling Ding Ling's "life story as objectively as possible but without covering up the facts". In order to do this he translated a lot of new material, much of it important detail from those who knew Ding Ling. Some of this testimony is too drawn out. Indeed, Embracing the Lie could have been cut judiciously. Editing could have dealt with the author's habit of heaping information into dense paragraphs which conceal important facts, such as when Ding Ling joined the Party (different dates in the two different books), when she died, or why the Party decided to do this or that to its writers. Nevertheless, Alber deals with two mighty themes. One is explicit; the other, more important, is intrinsic in Ding Ling's life, although not made plain by the author. The first theme, on which there are many books and articles, but can never be stated too often, is that in Communist societies writers are taken very seriously -- and often suffer. Throughout its history, the Chinese Communist Party has treated writers like "engineers of the soul". This was true long before it came to power in 1949, even when it was battling the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese, and accelerated in campaigns from the early 1950s almost to the present. An attack on a writer, an essay, or a novel, film, or play often kicked off a campaign which could then, as in the case of the Cultural Revolution -- in which the word "Cultural" is significant -engulf the entire country. The other theme is fear. In Legacies: A Chinese mosaic, Bette Bao Lord's memoir of her three years in Peking as the American ambassador's wife in the mid-1980s, she recalled that "all Chinese were in pain, and taking their pulse, reading their temperature, charting every change and finding the cure took all the effort they could muster". According to Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, long before the Cultural Revolution "many people had been reduced to a state where they did not dare even to think, in case their thoughts came out involuntarily".

This is what happened to Ding Ling, and led to her deadly embrace of the lie. Charles Alber, who probably knows more about her than any other Westerner, became so disappointed with Ding Ling, who was indeed badly flawed, that he underestimates her dilemma: that she spent much of her life scared out of her high-quality wits.

Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist specializing in Chinese affairs, holds a PhD in Tang history.