Career
Liu was a leader of the Southern Society (Nanshe), founded in 1909 in Suzhou, Jiangsu, just south of Shanghai. During the last years of the Qing dynasty Liu and his associates advocated use of their southern dialect, the Wu dialect, rather than Mandarin Chinese and wrote poetry in classical forms using Classical Chinese. They supported the Tongmenghui Partyof Sun Yat-sen and opposed the Manchu government.
After the Revolution of 1911, Liu became a committed journalist and activist in opposition to Yuan Shikai.
The Southern Society, whose national members numbered in the thousands, with Liu as its head continued its activities during the anti-traditional New Culture Movement. The Society broke up in the early 1920s as Liu came to support the position of Hu Shi that literature should be written in the vernacular language.
Liu went to Canton in 1923 to join the Guomindang Party (GMD) in 1923, but soon became resentful of the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and in 1927 fled to Japan to escape repression. In 1932, however, he was re-elected to the GMD Central Supervisory Committee and was appointed to a position in the Shanghai City Government.
In the 1930s Liu continued to be a prolific writer and poet, still preferring the classical forms.
After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Liu initially remained in Shanghai, but fled first to Hong Kong, then in 1941 to Guilin, and for the last years of the war to China"s wartime capital, Chongqing. Liu had met Mao Zedong in Canton in the 1920s and discussed their preference for traditional strict classical forms. When Mao arrived in Chongqing to begin direct negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek, he presented Liu with one of his most well-known poems, "Snow," for Liu to publish.
Mao later wrote poems, "Foreign Mr.
Liu Yazi," dated 1949 and October 1950. After the war Shanghai did not seem safe, so Liu fled once again to Hong Kong, where he continued his anti-GMD activities.
In 1949 he moved to Beijing. He was buried the in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.
