Ding Ling

Born Jiang Bingzhi in Hunan to a widowed, progressive mother who insisted on her education, Ding Ling entered Shanghai's radical literary circles in the late 1920s; her lover and fellow writer Hu Yepin was executed by the Nationalist government in 1931, hardening her politics. Miss Sophie's Diary, written just before, had already shocked readers with a young woman's frank confession of sexual longing.

She made her way to the Communist base at Yan'an and joined the Party, but her 1942 essay 'Thoughts on March 8,' criticizing the movement's own treatment of women, drew Mao's direct rebuke. Her novel The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, about land reform, won the Soviet Union's Stalin Prize in 1951.

Denounced as a 'Rightist' in 1957, she spent more than a decade in labor camps and internal exile before being rehabilitated after Mao's death. She died in Beijing in 1986.