Background
She was born into what is described by the Communists as a ''feudal landlord family.” Her father died while she was a small child.
She was born into what is described by the Communists as a ''feudal landlord family.” Her father died while she was a small child.
Her mother, a militant feminist who is said to have been influenced by the revolutionary ideas of the late Ch'eng period and who joined the CCP in 1927, took the young girl to the city of Ch’ang-te where Ting received her primary schooling. She also attended the Second Provincial Girls' Normal School in Tao-yuan hsien, Hunan, and then went to Shanghai, where from about 1920 to 1923 she studied at the P'ing-min Girls School, which had been organized by one of the CCP founders, Ch’en Tu-hsiu. Her commitment to Communism probably received its greatest impetus when from about 1923 to 1924 she studied literature at Shanghai University, an institute founded under joint KMT-CCP auspices but which was heavily dominated by the Communists (see under Ch'u Ch'u-pai).
In 1924 Ting went to Peking to prepare for the entrance examinations to Peking University, and although it appears that she was not admitted, she attended classes there until 1927. She became acquainted with important Chinese writers like the novelist Shen Ts'ung-wen and writer Hu Yeh-p'in, whom she lived with and ultimately married. During these years Ting began to write short stories and novels, some of this material appearing in Hsiao-shuo yueh-pao (Short story monthly). Returning to Shanghai in 1927 with Hu and Shen, they collaborated in editing a short-lived publication known as Hung- hei yueh-k'an (Red and black monthly).
Toward the close of 1936 Ting left Nanking for Sian and then made her way in 1937 to the Communist-controlled portions of north Shensi where, in Yenan, she was personally greeted by Mao Tse-tung, whose former wife had been a schoolmate of Ting’s. Well known for her work in promoting women’s rights, Ting was asked to establish, in cooperation with Teng Ying-ch’ao (Mme. Chou En-Iai), a women's league in the northwest,which was known as the Women’s National Salvation Association. While in Yenan Ting taught at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (K’ang-ta) and served as a deputy director in a regimental political department. When war with Japan broke out in mid-1937, she led a service corps to the front lines in Shansi where she and her troupe entertained Red Army soldiers. Ting's activities in this period have been chronicled at length in Agnes Smedley China Fights Back. Returning to Yenan, Ting edited the literary page of Chieh- fang jih-pao (Liberation daily), the official Party paper that was established in 1941 under the editorship of Ch’in Pang-hsien. During these years Ting was one of the leaders in the active cultural life in Yenan, a life that attracted a large number of young, leftist-inclined students to Communist-held territories in those years. She made an outstanding name for herself in Yenan, not so much for her creative work, which fell off considerably, but for her propaganda and organizational activities. Authoress Nym Wales, who met her at this time, described Ting as a person of natural command and leadership.
In the postwar period Ting was assigned to Manchuria, where she engaged in propaganda work. Her observations of the land reform work at that time provided the basis for her best and most famous book, The Sun Shines over Sangkan River, a work for which she won the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951, the first Chinese novel so honored. It was the first major work to reflect the complex picture of land reform then going on in the countryside, and as such it stood in contrast to the much-simplified portrayal of agrarian reform presented by the regular CCP propaganda organs. The high standards of the book can be judged from the characters in the novel, who are portrayed in three-dimensional terms. Through her depiction of representative types of landlords, rich peasants, poor peasants, and cadres, Ting described the class relationships in the villages, the peasant struggles against the landlords, and the redistribution of the land. Though this novel was obviously meant to tell the Party the “truth” about land reform, there are episodes where her characters present other than those of the Party. For example, she has one of the landlords call the CCP a new dynasty and a village teacher describe the cadres as fools who give orders without even knowing how to read. When the landlords lose their authority in the village, she shows them to be as fearful of persecution as their peasant counterparts once were. In fact, she paints this feeling of fear as pervading all classes of the village at the beginning of the land reform movement.
Though Ting’s most important work in 1949 was concerned with the literary movement, she was also engaged in other activities. In April she was elected a member of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women’s Executive Committee, and in that same month she attended the Communist-dominated World Peace Congress in Prague. In September, representing the ACFLAC, she attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC, and when this organization brought the new government into existence in October, she was appointed a member of the Culture and Education Committee under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). Also in October she was appointed a member of the Executive Board and the National Committee, respectively, of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association and the China Peace Committee, two of the most active “mass” organizations in the early PRC years.
In the latter part of October 1949, Ting left Peking for Moscow as head of a delegation sent to the Soviet capital to participate in the October Revolution celebrations, and while in Moscow she also attended a meeting of the WIDF. Toward the end of 1950 she was named to head the Central Literary Research Institute, which was formally established in January 1951 under the
Ministry of Culture. A year later, in March 1952, Ting was presented with the above-mentioned Stalin Prize when she was in Moscow as a delegate to the centenary celebrations of Gogols death. She was back in Moscow in December 1954 as a member of the Chinese writers delegation to the Second National Congress of Soviet Writers. Earlier that year she was named to Board membership in the Chinese People’s Association for the Promotion of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (May) and she was also elected as a Shantung deputy to the First NPC, which opened in September.
In 1930 in Shanghai Ting joined the CCP, whose members lived a precarious existence resulting from continual suppressive measures taken by the KMT. In the same year she joined the newly formed League of Left-Wing Writers, the most important of the leftist literary organizations of that period. The leftist but non-Communist writer Lu Hsun, the premier literary figure of the time, was the star attraction of the league, but it was dominated organizationally first by Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai and later by Chou Yang, both Communists. In February 1931 ting’s husband Hu Yeh-p’in and four other writers were executed by the Nationalists, an episode treated at length by literary historian T. A. Hsia.
In 1931 Ting began to edit an organ of the League of Left-Wing Writers known as the Pei- tou yueh-k'an (The great dipper), but this was suppressed by the Nationalists in the following year. In 1933 she was apprehended by the KMT in Shanghai’s International Settlement and taken to Nanking where she was imprisoned until 1935, after which she was released but kept under surveillance.
As a member of the delegation led by Ts’ai Ch'ang, Ting attended the Second Congress of the Communist-dominated Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Budapest in December 1948 and was elected to alternate membership on the WIDF Board of Directors. Returning home, she went to Peking (now in Communist hands) and immediately began to take part in preparations for the convocation of the All-China Congress of Literary and Art Workers, held in July 1949 with some 800 delegates in attendance. She served on the Standing Committee of the Presidium (steering committee) and at the close of the Congress was elected to membership on the Standing Committee of the newly established All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (ACFLAC). Then, immediately after the Congress adjourned, she was elected a vice-chairman of one of the ACFLAC5s subordinate organizations, the AllChina Association of Literary Workers (known as the Union of Chinese Writers after 1953), and she was also made director of the ACFLAC Editorial Department. Most important, Ting became editor of Wen-i pao (Literary gazette), the journal of the ACFLAC and the principal organ for relaying the Party's cultural policies.