Emotion and Action, Intellect and Labor: Ding Ling’s 1930s Literary Transformation

The prominent Chinese female writer Ding Ling's significant transition towards the left in the early 1930s represents a complex and pivotal shift in the realm of modern Chinese literary history, reflecting deep intellectual and historical currents in the Chinese revolution. This paper examines Ding Ling's literary output during this transformative period, including works such as Bodhisattva Wei Tuo, Shanghai in the Spring of 1930, One Day, and Water, alongside her biographical narratives and the writings of her contemporaries Hu Yepin, Qu Qiubai, Feng Xuefeng, and Shen Congwen. These works are instrumental in tracing the transformation of Ding Ling’s political consciousness from embracing the individualistic ethos of the May Fourth intellectual Movement to critiquing its hollow modernity promised by the movement and finally culminating in a commitment to collective societal action. The paper examines the trajectory of Ding Ling’s literary creation, initially propelled by personal emotions and enthusiasm, then under the influence of his mother and the Chinese anarchist thought of social institution leaning towards a deeper engagement with the collective and the societal, and finally centering on the representation of the lived experiences of workers and peasants. The analysis further argues that Ding Ling’s left-turn was also resulted from her dialogues with her fellow writers regarding the literary expression of labor experiences, bridging the mental and the manual, the personal and collective. Highlighting the efforts of these intellectual writers to represent manual labor and to re-define their mental work of writing, this paper brings new insights to the classic case of Ding Ling’s subjective transformation in twentieth-century Chinese literary history.