Jiang Rong

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Jiang Rong is the pen name of Lü Jiamin, a Chinese writer born in 1946 in Jiangsu. He is best known for his 2004 novel Wolf Totem, which he published under the name Jiang Rong. He is married to fellow writer Zhang Kangkang.

His parents came from Jiading near Shanghai. They joined the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s, and both served in the army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the war, his mother worked in education and his father became a bureau chief in the Ministry of Health. His mother died of cancer when Lü was 11.

Lü attracted trouble with the authorities as a student in 1964, being denounced as "counter-revolutionary" for an essay. He joined the Red Guards, even though his father had been targeted by them as a capitalist roader. When they began burning books, Lü secretly saved many and kept them in his private collection.

In 1967, at age 21, he volunteered to go to East Ujimqin Banner in Inner Mongolia as a sent-down youth, where he stayed for 11 years. He chose Inner Mongolia to keep his books with him and avoid army life in Heilongjiang. He began thinking about Wolf Totem as early as 1971 while in Inner Mongolia, but did not start writing it down then.

Lü returned to Beijing in 1978 and joined the Beijing Spring literary movement, becoming editor-in-chief of the Beijing Spring journal. He studied at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1979 and later became an associate professor at the China Labor College. He was arrested for taking part in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and released in January 1991.

He finished the first complete draft of Wolf Totem in 1997 and submitted the final draft to his publisher at the end of 2003. He worked intensely on the novel for the last six years, often locking himself in his office. For years he kept his real identity secret; only a handful of people knew who he really was, and his name only became widely known after he won the Man Asian Literary Prize in November 2007. He could not obtain a passport to attend the awards ceremony.

Lü describes himself as a “critical left-wing thinker” who supports democracy and individualism. In a 2005 interview, he warned that China could become like Nazi Germany without further democratization. He has expressed admiration for Li Yuchun, a Chinese pop singer who won Super Girl in 2005. His stated literary influences include Balzac, Tolstoy, Jack London, and Jane Austen.