Zhang Xianliang Biography and List of Works

Chinese novelist and poet, who wrote about his politically, motivated imprisonments in China's labour camps. Zhang Xianliang's semi-autobiographical protagonist is Zhang Yonglin, whose emotional and intellectual development the author has charted in such novels as Mimosa (1985) and Half of Man Is Woman (1985), a controversial novel about a man's life in the camps and his sexual difficulties after his release.

"The great majority of contemporary Chinese literary works neglect a most important law of artistry in the use of language: economy. Thus, our language lacks ambiguity, subtle nuances, and multiple meanings. It is short on understatement and humour. Because we try to write everything that is on our mind, we often fail to set readers off on associated lines of thought of their own. This makes it hard for readers to bring their own creativity into play when they enjoy a piece of writing."
(Zhang Xianliang in Modern Chinese Writers, ed. by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, 1992)

Zhang Xianliang was born in Nanjing into a middle-class family. His father was a Kuomingtang official and industrialist, who managed a number of large enterprises including a shipping company. At the age of thirteen Zhang Xianliang began to write poems, and had his work published. His literary and artistic education during the 1940s and early 1950s provided the foundation, which did not collapse during the year he later spent in the camps. Zhang's familiarity with the classics of literature from China and Europe is seen in the many references to them throughout his oeuvre.

In 1952 Zhang Xianliang's father was arrested and accused of spying. He died in a Maoist prison. Zhang Xianliang moved to Beijing, where he attended a middle school. He joined a group called "Qi Xiondi" (seven Brothers), and was expelled from the school in 1954. He then moved to the northwestern region of Ningxia, where was a farm worker. In 1956 he was assigned to teach at the Cadres's Culture School. Zhang Xianliang's poem "Da Feng Ge" (Song of the Great Wind) was published in 1957 and gained huge success. When Mao Zedong started his anti-rightist campaign, Zhang's poem was attacked by bureaucrats. He was accused of being rightist and sent to a labour camp for reform at the age of twenty-one.

Between 1958 and 1979 Zhang was imprisoned several times. He was held in labour camps, state farms, and prisons. In 1961 he was released for a time before being sent then to jail for three more years. During the Cultural Revolution he was labelled an "antirevolutionary-revisionist" and he spent the tumultuous years in a Ningxia reform camp and working on a State Farm. These experiences he later described in Half of Man is Woman. In 1972 he was set free as an aftermath of the Lin Biao Affair - a plan to assassinate Mao. It was not until 1979 that he was formally rehabilitated.

Zhang Xianliang started to write again in the late 1970s and joined the editorial staff of the literary magazine called Shuofang. It printed his first story "Ling Yu Rou" (Soul and Body), later known as "Mu Ma Ren" (A Herdsman's Story), which was made into a movie.

Mimosa portrayed Zhang Yonglin's struggle during the early 1960s. He becomes engaged to a resourceful but illiterate woman, who helps him recover a semblance of normalcy, but is thrown back into the camps before he can marry her.

NANREN DE YIBAN SHI NÜREN (Half of Man is Woman) is set in the 1970s and engendered much debate because of its sexual themes. In this and other works Zhang Xianliang examines how sexual behaviour was repressed by the puritanical policies of the Communist authorities. In the novel Zhang Xianliang wonders if China's entire intellectual community has not been emasculated. The protagonist, older and more sardonic Zhang Yonglin, spends some twenty years in reform camps. While he is working in a rural commune, he sees a beautiful woman, Huang Xiangjiu, bathing nude in the river. He meets the woman eight years later, they marry, but the romantic picture of the woman turns sour. Zhang suffers from impotence, which is political rather than marital in origin - the party secretary has cuckolded him.

Getting Used to Dying, which appeared in 1989, is a series of abrupt juxtapositions of encounters with death and suffering in the Chinese camps on the one hand, and a spate of speaking engagements and sexual relationships in the West on the other. Grass Soup (1992) - title taken from the prisoners' habitual evening meal - and My Bodhi Tree (1994) are diary passages from the 1960s with commentaries, when Zhang Xianliang was still in a reform camp, and could not write freely.

In 1983 Zhang Xianliang became a committee member of the People's Consultative Conference and in 1986 a member of China's Writers' Association. In 1985 the Communist party reaffirmed that its guarantee of creative freedom for writers was a firm and unshakable one. From 1986 Zhang Xianliang held a chair at Ningxia Federation of Literary and Art Circles. On 12 August 1993, the Shanghai Municipal Re-education Through Labour Management Committee sentenced Zhang Xianliang to three years of "re-education through labour". Also Yan Huili and Zhang Bing, his wife and daughter, suffered from persecution as a result of the author's political activities. Behind the sentence was Zhang Xianliang's attempt to commemorate the Chinese army crackdown that crushed the 1989 Tiananmen protest. Zhang Xianliang was released in June 1996.

For further reading: Literature of the Hundred Flowers, ed. by Hualing Nieh (1981); Tuibian yu xin chao by Lei Da (1987); Rewriting Chinese by Edward Gunn (1991); World Authors 1980-1985, ed. by Vineta Colby (1991); Cycles of Repression and Relaxation by He Yuhuai (1992); Modern Chinese Writers, ed. by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey C. Kinkley (1992); Dalu xin shhiqi xiaoshio lun by Zhang Fang (1992); Words from the West, ed. by Lloyd Haft (1993); Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State, eds. by Gilmartin et al. (1994); 'Post revolutionary Leftovers: Zhang Xianliang and Ah Cheng by Gang Yue', in The Mouth that Begs (1999); 'Chinese Labour Camp Fiction as Conversion Literature by Jeff Kinkley, in The Chinese Labour Camp: Theory, Actuality, and Fictional Representation (2000)

LING YU ROU, (1981)