Yang Jiang. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.The passing of the great Chinese writer, translator and intellectual Yang Jiang at the age of 104 on 26 May 2016 brings to an end one of the very last links with an era of Chinese history that predated the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Perhaps the only other figure of similar importance from this period is Zhou Youguang, whose claim to fame rests largely on the creation of the Pinyin national transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese (and who is still, remarkably, alive at the age of 110). By comparison, Yang's achievements are broader and deeper. Even in her marriage for almost seven decades to the great Qian Zhongshu, she occupies a place at the heart of modern Chinese intellectual history – and of its tragic developments and challenges – throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.
Yang belonged to a generation of Chinese global intellectuals for whom optimism was real, searing, brief, and then buried by two calamities – the epic Sino-Japanese war, which she experienced from 1937 partly in China and partly while studying in Europe, and the series of campaigns visited on people of her class after the communists came to power in 1949. While the former had a deep, brutal and visceral impact and shaped the worldview of people of her age, the second was to craft out perhaps an even more profound, harrowing and unresolved set of issues. Yang and her husband were, after all, the archetypal "enemies within" as identitifed by Mao Zedong from the early 1950s, when he sponsored the early mass-mobilisation campaigns.
