Jiang Guangci

Jiang Guangci

Accursed poet and novelist, and one of the most prominent authors of Chinese letters, Jiang Guangci (1901-1931) was the son of a salt merchant from Anhui Province. He studied in Moscow, joining the newly founded Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Back in his country, he dedicated himself to promoting proletarian and revolutionary literature in Shanghai. In the early turbulent years of the ROC, new literature was destined to play an essential role in the transformation of the country. From his first collection of poems New Dreams (1925) and his short novel El joven de la vida errante (1926), through the controversial Las Penas de Lisa (1929) or his influential essay On the Literature of the Revolution (1928), to his Jiang Guangci's latest work, The Land that Roars (1930), in which a communist-led peasant uprising is described for the first time, laid the pillars of 20th-century revolutionary literature in China. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1930, impoverished and isolated by his former traveling companions, and with increasingly deteriorating mental health, he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty.