Chinese · b. 1946
Lü Jiamin volunteered in 1967 to go from Beijing to the East Ujimqin Banner in Inner Mongolia, taking two cases of banned books with him, and stayed eleven years herding sheep on the grassland. He came back, taught political science at a Beijing university, took part in the 1989 democracy movement and spent about eighteen months in prison for it. He wrote Wolf Totem in secret over six years and published it in 2004 under a pen name, keeping his identity hidden until the book won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007. It sold more copies in China than anything since the Little Red Book, with pirated editions on top. He argues in it that the Han agricultural temperament is sheep-like and that China needs the wolf character of the steppe nomads, a thesis that has been read as ecological, nationalist and fascist by different critics, sometimes the same ones.