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10 of the most famous Chinese authors

Chinese literature is one of the major literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years, dating back at least to the 14th century BCE. The introduction of widespread woodblock printing during the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the invention of movable type printing by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song dynasty (960–1279) rapidly spread written knowledge throughout China.

The precession of the Chinese language results in perfectly realized images, whether in poetry or prose. Here are the 10 most famous Chinese authors who have captured the world with their writings;

1. Lu Xun

Lu Xun – Wikipedia

Lu Xun was the pen name of Zhou Shuren, he was a Chinese short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and designer. He is considered China’s greatest modern writer for most of the 20th century because he was the first serious author to write using modern colloquial language.  

Zhou Shuren is best known for his short stories where, through vivid analogies and exaggerated characters, he presented his personal vision of Chinese society.

In addition to writing, he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in the 1930s. The League of Left-Wing Writers was an organization of writers formed in Shanghai, China, on 2 March 1930 whose purpose was to promote socialist realism in support of the Communist Revolution.

2. Qu Yuan

Qu Yuan – Wikipedia

Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet and politician in the State of Chu during the Warring States period who is regarded as one of the most prominent figures of Romanticism in Chinese literature. He is famous for initiating the style of Sao, abandoning the classic four-character verses and using verses with varying lengths to give his poems a more flowing rhythm and greater latitude of expression.

Li Sao, The Lament or On Encountering Trouble when translated, is one of his most famous poems. It is a poem of search, sorrow and disillusionment of an exiled minister of state. It is part of the collection known as Chu Ci. the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, and has about 2,400 words in 372 lines, divided into 15 sections.

3. Laozi

Statue of Laozi – Flickr

Laozi is also commonly referred to as Lao Tzu. He was an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer who is the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching, the founder of philosophical Taoism, and a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religions. He is usually portrayed as a 6th-century BC contemporary of Confucius in the Spring and Autumn period.

His work has been embraced by both various anti-authoritarian movements and Chinese Legalism. The Tao Te Chingis one of the most significant treatises in Chinese cosmogony. It explains Laozi’s ideas by way of paradox, analogy, appropriation of ancient sayings, repetition, symmetry, rhyme, and rhythm.

4. Eileen Chang

Zhang Ailing & Li Xianglan – Wikimedia Commons

Eileen Chang went by various names including Chang Ai-Ling, Zhang Ailing or Liang Jing. She was a Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter who was a well-known feminist in Chinese history.

Zhang’s a must-read is, The Golden Cangue, that illustrates the decadence of the idle rich. Set in Shanghai, the novelette unfolds the degeneration of the heroine, Qi Qiao, and her family. The golden cangue symbolizes the destructiveness of the protagonist.

5. Lin Yutang

Chinese typewriter – Wikipedia

Lin Yutang was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.

In the 1930s he founded several Chinese magazines specializing in social satire and Western-style journalism. Lin published the first of his many English-language books, My Country and My People, in 1935 which was regarded as a standard text on China.

Lin Yutang is credited with inventing the Chinese typewriter, which is character-based rather than an alphabet-based.

6. Lao She

Lao She – Wikimedia

Shu Qingchun, popularly known by his pen name Lao She, was a Chinese novelist and dramatist whose works are known especially for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect. He created a unique humorous and ironic writing style; his writing is simple but really deep.

He is best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy, which describes the tragic life of a rickshaw-puller in Beijing of the 1920s, and revealed the tragedy of lower classes at that time through the narration of the rickshaw boy’s story. Xiangzi is a stereotype of a social phenomenon: a peasant coming to the city and then turning to an urban tramp, experiencing spiritual crises of all kinds.

7. Zhang Henshui

Statue and tomb of Zhang Henshui – Wikipedia

Zhang Henshui was the pen name of Zhang Xinyuan, a popular and prolific Chinese novelist. His work took the form of the classical Chinese novel, written in colloquial Chinese and using classical Chinese poetry as chapter headings.

One of his most successful novels was A Family of Distinction that tells the story between Leng Qingqiu, a girl from a regular family, and Jin Yanxi, son of Premier Jin Rong during the Northern government, from their romantic relationship, the marriage and divorce, and eventually Leng’s abandoning the family. From the fate of a rich family’s deserted wife, the book tells the fall of a novel family as well as the changes of the entire society.

8. Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian – Wikipedia

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese émigré novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator. His drama is considered to be fundamentally absurdist in nature and avant-garde in his native China.

In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.” Despite being celebrated internationally for his work, the Chinese authorities banned Gao’s works and declared him persona non grata. In 1987, he settled in France as a political refugee and subsequently became a French citizen.

His most notable work, Soul Mountain, is a part-autobiographical, part-fictional novel based on a ten-month journey he embarked on along the Yangtze River. The novel, centred on the journey to seek out the elusive Lingshan (Soul Mountain), acts in part as a travellogue.

9. Ba Jin

Ba Jin, 1938 – Wikipedia

Ba Jin was the pen name of Li Yaotang he was a Chinese anarchist writer whose novels and short stories achieved widespread popularity in the 1930s and ’40s. He signed his work with the pen name Ba Jin, the last character of which is the Chinese equivalent of the last syllables of Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist whom he admired.

His well-known work Family (1931), is a novel, based on his childhood in a rich household in Sichuan province, shed light on the dark, repressed cavities of the feudal Chinese extended family.

10. Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin – Wikipedia

Liu Cixin is a prominent Chinese science fiction writer. He was labeled the first cyberpunk Chinese author after his novel, China 2185, was published in 1989. Liu’s fiction focuses primarily on problems such as social inequality, scientific development and ecological limitations that impacts humanity.

He is a nine-time winner of China’s Galaxy Award and has also received the 2015 Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem as well as the 2017 Locus Award for Death’s End. He is also a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award.

Liu’s most famous work, The Three-Body Problem, is the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy that portrays a future where Earth is awaiting an invasion from the closest star system, which, in this universe, consists of three solar-type stars orbiting each other in an unstable three-body system. Within the system, its single Earth-like planet is being unhappily passed among them and suffers from extremes of heat and cold, as well as the repeated destruction of its intelligent civilizations.