Chinese Literary Icon And Renowned Anarchist Ba Jin Dies

Quite possibly the last survivor of last century's greatest writers, and quite remarkably a devoted anarchist (so much so that his pen name was chosen from the Chinese transliterations of the first syllable of the name Bakunin and of the last syllable of the name Kropotkin, two Russian anarchists that he liked), Ba Jin has died at the age of 101 due to a prolonged battle with cancer. Ba Jin was seen as a literary icon who symbolised the quest for identity by 20th Century Chinese intellectuals. His best known novels, published in the 1930s, described traditional pre-Communist family hierarchies. Hailed by the new government in 1949, he fell from favour during the Cultural Revolution but in his later years was rehabilitated and became famous. Ba Jin was born in 1904 in the western city of Chengdu. He became an anarchist and democracy campaigner and lived in Paris, returning to China in 1928. In 1931 he wrote his most famous novel, Family, describing the oppression of growing up in a feudal household. As an opponent of the old regime, he was praised by Chairman Mao Zedong's Communists. But in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution he suffered the same fate as many intellectuals, branded a counter-revolutionary, publicly humiliated and imprisoned. He was rehabilitated in 1977 and given several honorary posts such as chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association, which he held for more than 20 years. But despite Ba Jin's fame, the authorities never heeded his calls to build a museum memorialising the cultural revolution's atrocities. In his last years he was confined in a hospital in Shanghai, unable to speak or move.