Ba Jin

Born Li Yaotang into a large wealthy gentry household in Chengdu (the same suffocating patriarchal world he later dismantled in fiction), he embraced anarchism as a teenager and took the pen name Ba Jin by splicing syllables from Bakunin and Kropotkin. He studied in France in the 1920s before returning to write.

Family, the first novel of his Turbulent Stream trilogy, turned his own household's tyranny into a rallying cry for young readers to break with arranged marriage and Confucian hierarchy, and made him one of the most widely read novelists of the May Fourth generation.

After 1949 he became a celebrated cultural official, then a target during the Cultural Revolution, when his wife died after being denied timely medical treatment. In old age he wrote Random Thoughts, unflinching essays confronting his own and his country's complicity in that decade, and called for a museum memorializing it. He died in 2005, three months after turning one hundred.