Chinese · 1904–2005
Li Yaotang grew up in a large gentry compound in Chengdu with dozens of relatives and a grandfather whose word settled everything, and spent his life writing against it. He went to France in 1927, read anarchist writers, corresponded with the defence campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti, and took a pen name usually explained as syllables from Bakunin and Kropotkin. Family, published in 1933, made him the most read novelist in China among the young. After 1949 he stayed, held official literary posts, and was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution: denounced, put to hard labour, and his wife Xiao Shan refused treatment for cancer until it was too late. From 1978 he published Random Thoughts, five volumes of essays accusing himself of cowardice and demanding a museum of the Cultural Revolution so it could not be forgotten. He was still asking for it when he died at a hundred and one.