Chinese literary legend Ba Jin dies at 100 in Shanghai

Ba Jin (巴金), one of China's most revered communist-era writers, who attacked the evils of the pre-revolutionary era in novels, short stories and essays, died yesterday in Shanghai after a six-year battle with cancer, Xinhua reported. He was 100.

Best known for his 1931 novel Family, the story of a disintegrating feudal household, Ba Jin also translated the Russian writers Ivan Turgenev and Peter Kropotkin.

He worked well into his later years writing essays and compiling anthologies of his work.

He was part of the young intelligentsia in the early 20th century that looked to Western philosophies -- Marxism, anarchism and liberalism -- for solutions to China's backwardness and social inequality.

Born Li Yaotang (李堯棠) on Nov. 25, 1904, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, he later changed his name to Ba Jin, taking the first syllable in Chinese of the surname of Mikhail Bakunin and the last syllable of Kropotkin, both anarchists from Russia.

Ba Jin has said that he wrote "to expose enemies. They include all the old traditional concepts, the irrational systems that obstruct progress, all the forces that destroy human nature."

Ba Jin was branded a counterrevolutionary and purged during the 1966 to 1976 "Cultural Revolution," during which many writers and artists were persecuted and art was completely subordinated to politics. He did not reappear until 1977.

No information on survivors or funeral plans were immediately available.