WANG RUOWANG: The invitation to Wang Ruowang, one of China's most famous dissident intellectuals, to return home came too late - just a week before he died, on December 19th aged 73 in exile. The message was from President Jiang Zemin, "a man of compassion", though it insisted that the veteran writer would only be allowed back if he promised not to criticise the government or meet fellow dissidents.
Wang Ruowang belonged to a small group of left-wing writers from the 1930s who supported the rural-based revolution against Kuomintang corruption, but refused to conform when it finally succeeded. He had the dubious honour of being jailed by the nationalists and the communists, as well as by the Japanese during the war. His book, Hunger Trilogy, describes the experiences in unvarnished detail; the communist jails do not do well in the comparison.
He was best known - or most notorious - to party hardliners for being expelled in 1987, when Deng Xiaoping cracked down on reformist ideas labelled "bourgeois liberalisation". The moves set in motion the events leading up to the 1989 Beijing massacre and have delayed for much longer the chances of internal political reform.
Wang Ruowang had suggested in an article that "the common people of China" should have the right to conduct "public discussion with the leaders of our country". Deng was outraged, telling party leaders that Wang Ruowang was "presumptuous and should have been expelled long ago".
Not intimidated, when the student demonstrations spread in 1989, Wang Ruowang sent a letter of support for them to Deng, and helped lead a march on Shanghai city hall. He was jailed for a year before being allowed to leave for exile - the party's favoured policy for dealing with troublesome voices.
He had joined the Communist Youth League in Shanghai back in 1933. After a period in a nationalist jail, he moved to the remote communist capital of Yanan and joined the party. He wrote one of the first biographical articles on Mao Zedong and edited cultural journals for the newly aroused peasants.
After the 1949 communist victory, Wang Ruowang returned to Shanghai, where he soon developed a reputation for fearless criticism. When the 1955 rural co-operatives movement led to a vogue for collectivising everything - including literary activities - he wrote a sharp critique. "Facts have shown that when both cattle and men are collectivised, the cattle become scrawny and so do the arts . . . This does not reveal the superiority of socialism: on the contrary, it reveals our blindness." He was accused of rejecting the party's leadership and expelled for the first time. During the years of the cultural revolution, from 1966 to 1976, he was imprisoned for four years. He emerged swearing to devote his remaining years to exposing the "false Marxists" who accused people unjustly. He regained his party membership in 1979 in a wave of post-Mao rehabilitation.
By 1985, however, his increasingly libertarian views had already led to renewed calls for expulsion. Writing for a popular youth magazine, he recommended a sense of optimism, humour and a willingness to express one's inner feelings. These characteristics, he argued, were far superior to the traditional virtues of sobriety and reticence. He praised President Ronald Reagan for having joked about a recent operation - something no Chinese leader would have dreamt of doing.
Wang Ruowang also asked why people felt obliged to ascribe credit for their achievements to "the party and government"; it was far preferable, he said, to behave like the footballer Maradona, who had acknowledged the support of his family and girlfriend. Displaying his own zest for life, he wrote an autobiographical essay entitled I Feel Good About Myself.
Criticised for behaving like "a trolley-bus without a line", Wang Ruowang retorted that Mao's trolley-bus line had led China straight into the Huangpu River, which flows through Shanghai. Such behaviour was clearly unacceptable to party bureaucrats, who would not recognise a joke if it leapt out of a bowl of soup and hit them. The Shanghai party complained that Wang Ruowang had "refused to mend his ways in spite of patient education".
Like many other Chinese exiles, Wang Ruowang lost much of his dynamism - which was the secret purpose of exile anyhow. He did not, however, lose his sense of humour. As he lay in a New York hospital bed, entertaining friends with a snatch of Beijing opera, he said of his approaching death: "This is to be expected."
Wang Ruowang is survived by his wife Yang Zi.
Wang Ruowang: born 1928; died, December 2001