Ba Jin (formerly known as Li Yaotang) is a native of Chengdu, Sichuan, and his ancestral home is Jiaxing, Zhejiang. He holds an honorary doctorate in literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Chinese writer, social activist, and nonpartisan patriotic democrat. He is known as the "conscience of Chinese literature in the twentieth century." The core of his literary thoughts is truth and goodness, and his novels are highly subjective and lyrical. In his early years, he gradually became well-known to the public for his first novel "Destruction". In the following ten years, he worked hard on works such as "The Torrent Trilogy" and "Cold Night", which made him one of the world's seven cultural celebrities in the 1980s. He has won the International Dante Literary Award, the People's Writer, the French Legion of Honor and other honors.
