Chinese · 1896–1981
Shen Yanbing worked as an editor at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, joined the Communist Party at its founding in 1921, and ran the Short Story Monthly, turning it into the main organ of the new literature. After the Nationalist purge of 1927 he went into hiding and started writing fiction under a pen name meaning contradiction, with a stroke added by an editor to disguise it. He wrote the most systematically researched novels of the Republican era, treating Shanghai's silk filatures, bond markets and strikes as material to be studied before it was dramatised. He was Minister of Culture from 1949 to 1965 and edited the journal Chinese Literature. He lost the ministry before the Cultural Revolution began and survived it in silence. He left his royalties to endow the Mao Dun Literature Prize, which remains the highest award for a novel in China.