THE DEATH of the writer Ba Jin severs the last remaining direct link with the great age of Chinese literature of the 1920s and 1930s, when novelists, essayists, poets and polemicists probed the ills of their country and its people with devastating candour and literary skill.

His novel, Family (1931), the first in a trilogy, captured the spirit of the age, which was one of youthful rebellion and revolutionary iconoclasm as a new generation sought to shrug off the burden of a past that was as long as it was oppressive.

Liberty was real but brief: the intellectual flowering of China was interrupted by civil war and Communist revolution. There was little place for intellectual probing, literary or otherwise, in Mao Zedong’s new order; and after 1949, Ba Jin wrote little until he had emerged from a decade of mistreatment during the Chairman’s Cultural Revolution.

He then produced scores of essays, calling for, among other things, the creation of a museum of the cultural revolution to ensure that such horrors could not happen again. He failed, though, to produce anything to match his accomplishments in the pre-Communist era. Instead, he became a literary trophy of a government that continues to insist that artists and intellectuals accept Communist Party leadership and draw inspiration from “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought”. For the most part, the consequences for Chinese literature have been dire.

Ba Jin was the pen name of Li Yaotang, later known as Li Feigan. He was born into a large, rich family in Chengdu, southwestern China. Ba Jin received a traditional education at the hands of private tutors in an extended household full of servants. The feudal tyranny he experienced at first hand infuriated him and informed much of his early writing. He said that leaving his family home for Shanghai at the age of 20 was “just like getting rid of a terrible shadow”.

Shanghai in the mid-1920s was a very different world. Intellectual life was still in what is loosely described as the May Fourth era, a period of cultural renaissance named after the student protests in Peking of 1919 against foreign aggression. Artists and intellectuals enjoyed unprecedented freedom. They made good use of it, contributing to the heady, revolutionary atmosphere that soon engulfed much of the country.

One reasons it was able to do so was the weakness of authority in almost every sense of the term. The Qing, the last imperial dynasty, had collapsed in 1911 and successive republican governments failed to impose their will in Beijing, let alone further afield. The world of ideas was in flux, too. Confucianism had given way to a host of ideologies in which anarchism and Marxism were to the fore. Revolutionaries were at work among the peasants and workers, tapping resentment over harsh conditions to organise anti-foreign protests and violent attacks on rapacious landlords.

Ba Jin’s ideological and literary allegiance was at first to anarchism. His pen name was drawn from the first syllable of the name of Bakunin (Mikhail Bakunin, 1814-76) and the last syllable of Kropotkin (Peter Kropotkin, 1842-1921). In 1927 he travelled to Paris, where he wrote his first novel, Destruction (1929), which dealt with a depressed young anarchist.

On his return to China Ba Jin settled in Shanghai, where he published Family. It portrays the disintegration of a large feudal family around the turn of the century, and is a semi-autobiographical work containing allusions to the suicide of the author’s elder brother. Described as the “bible of modern Chinese youth”, it deals with the suppression of the younger generation by the old. The three Gao brothers of Family are typical of the young intelligentsia of the May Fourth generation in rebellion against feudal society. Spring, the second in the trilogy, was published in 1938; Autumn followed in 1940.

Family established Ba Jin as a novelist of great passion rather than as a literary craftsman. He described himself as a writer driven by emotion: “Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.”

Ba Jin quickly became an important figure in the Shanghai literary scene, whose leading lights in the 1930s were Lu Xun and Mao Dun. Politics and literature had become inseparable, and ideological rivalry between writers often acquired nasty personal overtones that would lead to bitter score-settling during the Cultural Revolution 30 years later.

The literary revolution that marked the start of the May Fourth period had by the 1930s turned into revolutionary literature. One of its champions was the League of Left-Wing Writers, a front organisation for the Communist Party. When the League was dissolved in 1936, Ba Jin joined Lu Xun in signing the Declaration of Literary Workers, calling on writers to unite for the purposes of national salvation in the face of Japanese aggression.

This appeal proved much less important for the future of Chinese literature, and thus for Ba Jin’s own creativity, than did Chairman Mao’s “Speech at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art”, delivered in 1942 in the communists’ wartime capital. In his address, the Chairman derided and denied the independent status of artists and intellectuals. “Art for art’s sake which transcends class or party . . . does not exist,” declared Mao. “Since art is subordinate to class and party . . . it must undoubtedly follow the political demands of those classes and parties.”