Title: Introduction to Chinese Cultural History / The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature / 17 Feminism and Revolution: The Work and Life of Ding Ling

Front: Ding Ling is a pen name, what's her other name?
Back: Jiang Bingzhi 蒋冰之 (1904–1986)

Front: Why do some critics say Ding Ling betrayed feminism?
Back: - "Ding Ling is known especially as a feminist and a revolutionary.
- [...] critics, especially Western feminists, believe that after Mao’s “Yan’an Talks” in 1942 she betrayed feminism in favor of the socialist struggle.
- Indeed, when she emerged again in the early 1980s after [...] her denunciation as a rightist in 1957,
  - she decried Western feminism and
  - showed remarkable faith in the future of socialism."
- or maybe her feminism became less individualistic:
  - "She came to think of Western feminism as self-indulgent and
  - to believe that the best interest of women (as of all people) lay in socialism, not in liberal individualism"
  - "For her, a woman’s fate is always linked to that of her nation. In this sense, Ding Ling remained committed to the cause of revolution and feminism, a path on which she traveled and suffered, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, for more than sixty years, insisting to the end that in comparison with her cause, her personal sufferings were insignificant.

Front: What was Ding Ling's mother like?
Back: - "unconventional and rebellious"
- "widowed when Ding Ling was three years old,
- earned a degree in education and made her own living by teaching at newly reformed schools."
- "virtually unthinkable for a gentry-class widow at that time"

Front: Ding Link wrote a book in 1933 thought to be drawn from the model of her own mother, describe it.
Back: "Ding Ling’s unfinished “Mother” (1933)
- recounts the story of a mother and her sworn sisters who
- unbind their feet,
- abandon their gentry-class life,
- take part in a movement for social reform,
- and learn to put the nation’s interest before their own."

Front: How did Ding Ling come to move to the big city?
Back: She fled to defy an arrange marriage and pursued a writing career there.

Front: What was Ding Lings first published essay?
Back: - "she published her first essay in the local newspaper,
- exposing the unsavory deeds of her maternal uncle, a local despot, and
- denouncing the social system to which he belonged.
- To avoid her prearranged betrothal to this man’s son, she fled with the help of her mother to Shanghai."

Front: After moving to Shanghai, what was Ding Ling's education?
Back: - "women’s college set up by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao" (2 of the CCP founders)
- "Chinese Literature at Shanghai University"
- private painting lessons in Beijing

Front: What's Ding Ling's first published short story?
Back: Mengke 梦珂 (1927)

Front: What's Ding Ling's second story?
Back: Miss Sophie's Diary "became an instant success"

Front: What were many of Ding Ling's early works about?
Back: - "“modern girls”—educated youngurban women—
- and their desires, frustrations, aspirations, and hopes"

Front: What set Ding Ling's writing about love apart from the portrayal by other May Fourth writers like Bing Xin, Lu Yin and Su Xuelin, Feng Yuanjun?
Back: - "she was perhaps the first to portray female sexual desire"
- "psychological complexity and sexuality of her female characters"
- "Sophie’s tortured self-scrutiny",
- the diary form,
- platonic love more dominent in writings of other May Fourth writers.

Front: What are some examples of foreign names in Ding Ling's early works?
Back: - Mon Coeur in "Mengke"
- Sophie in "Miss Sophie's Diary"
- Wendy in "A Woman and a Man"
- Mary in "Shanghai, Spring 1930"

Front: What is a shift in Ding Ling's writing that starts in the 1930s?
Back: "from expressing the subjective life of her characters toward portraying their social milieu."

Front: Did Ding Ling ever have an editor job?
Back: She was editor-in-chief at Big Dipper (organ of League of Left-Wing Writers).

Front: What was an important life event for Ding Ling in 1931?
Back: "In early 1931, Ding Ling’s husband, Hu Yepin, and four other young league writers were captured and executed by the Guomindang"

Front: How did Ding Ling come to Yan'an?
Back: She was kidnapped and put under house arrest in 1933 and escaped imprisonment in Nanjing 1936 to Yan'an.

Front: What did Ding Ling do in Yan'an?
Back: - "she taught Chinese literature at the Red Army Academy and was given responsibilities for political training"
- and criticized treatment of women, e.g. in stories:
  - When I Was in Xia Village
  - In the Hospital
- essay: Thoughts on March Eighth
  - "Ding Ling uses the official Communist policy that men and women are equal partners in the revolutionary cause to criticize the practice in Yan’an where women were subordinate to men in revolutionary organizations and were assigned social status according to the status of their husbands."

Front: What are some of the main points of the Yan'an talks?
Back: - "literature and art should be subordinate to politics,
- writers should overcome their remaining petit-bourgeois subjectivism and
- write about and for the “masses” (workers, peasants, and soldiers)
- in order to mobilize them in the struggle against the Japanese, and
- writers should make use of Chinese national forms and folk traditions."

Front: After Mao's redefinition of the role of writer in the Yan'an Talks, what kind of culture did Ding Ling produce?
Back: - "Ding Ling joined a reporters’ group
- and later a propaganda team and
- went to the battlefront in the war against Japan.
- She wrote plays and performed on stage for soldiers and villagers.
- To communicate with the illiterate masses, the cultural workers utilized popular traditional forms such as
  - drum songs,
  - clapper talk,
  - two-person acts,
  - and comic cross talk."
- "her fiction begins to paint a broad picture of a village or other collectives"

Front: For which work did Ding Ling receive the Stalin Prize for literature?
Back: The Sun Shines over Sanggan River (1948)

Front: On what experiences is the plot of The Sun Shines over Sanggan River based?
Back: Ding Ling's socialist realist novel The Sun Shines over Sanggan River was "based on material collected when she took part in village land reform".

Front: What did Ding Ling do in the early PRC?
Back: - She was a leading intellectual and wrote pro-socialist essays, literary critcism and stories.
- She was persecuted anyway as a "chief member of two antiparty cliques" and sent to a Northeast China for 12 years,
- imprisoned 5 years in Cultural Revolution, rehabilitated 1976 and started writing again.

Front: Are there any works focused on individual women in Ding Ling's later work?
Back: There was a novella "Du Wenxiang" written 1966 and revised 1978, focusing on one woman. The woman is a model socialist woman.

Front: What are some virtues of the model socialist women in Ding Ling's Du Wanxiang?
Back: - "an ordinary farmer who wins the respect of others by leading a humble yet glorious life full of traditional womanly virtues:
- she is hardworking, selfless, considerate, accommodating, and unassuming.
- Here the rebellious, restless, and inquisitive modern girl in Ding Ling’s early fiction has completely given way to the traditional feminine virtues that the socialist system reaffirmed."

Front: What was Ding Ling's position on "spiritual pollution"?
Back: The supported the campaign against it. "spiritual pollution" was a political catchphrase for Western cultural influence in the post-Mao period.