Zheng Yi

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the Chinese pirate, see Zheng Yi (pirate) .

Zheng Yi郑义 (born March 10, 1947 in Chongqing , Sichuan) is a Chinese author.

Since his father was a senior official in the Minsheng Shipping Company prior to 1949, Zheng Yi was discriminated against because of his "poor class background" in his youth during the Cultural Revolution . He attended a middle school belonging to Tsinghua University , which is where the Red Guard movement originated. Pupils with a “bad class background” were particularly discriminated against there. For example, he was brutally beaten once for 4 hours because, as a member of the Communist Youth League, he proposed that new members be admitted to the school according to their qualifications and not their class background. In 1966 he finished his middle school education. When the rebel faction of the Red Guards established itself, he joined them: "I wrote wall newspapers (dazibao), traveled to many different places and witnessed innumerable cruel clashes." After the end of the Red Guard movement, he was one of the first to who went to the countryside with great expectations (Taihang Shan, Shanxi Province ). Because he had made political statements in a letter and was subsequently denounced, he had to flee to northeast China, where he worked as a carpenter. In 1977 he passed the university entrance exam. In 1979 he wrote his first work Feng ( Red Maple ). In the 80s he wrote other short stories. In the late 1980s, he conducted research into cannibalism in Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution, which he published in Taiwan in 1993 . As an active member of the 1989 protests , he was blacklisted, after which he had to go into hiding in constantly changing locations for three years. Finally he managed to escape to Hong Kong , from where he left for the USA.

Other important works:

• Red maple (枫feng ), 1979
• A distant village (远 村yuancun ), 1983
• Old Well (老 井laojing ), 1985

Note: There is a well-known doctor of traditional Chinese medicine of the same name: Yi Zheng (* 1968).

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Zheng is the family name here, Yi is the first name.