Jiang Rong is the pen name of Lu Jiamin, who was born in Beijing in 1946 to parents who had both served in the army in the war against Japan. Lu’s mother died of cancer when he was eleven. While still a teenager, Lu came under suspicion from the Beijing government, both because his father, a bureau chief in the Ministry of Health, was identified as a subversive “capitalist roader” and because Lu himself had written an essay that was regarded as counterrevolutionary. Lu tried to assume a more acceptable political stance by joining the Red Guards but was appalled by the organization’s practice of book burning. Although sometimes taking part in book burnings, Lu frequently hid books that had been targeted for destruction and added them to his personal collection. His decision in 1967 to accept a post in the remote region of East Ujimqin Banner in Inner Mongolia was spurred in large part by the fact that his library was less likely to be confiscated there. During his eleven years in Mongolia, Lu became deeply familiar with the works of western authors like Balzac, Tolstoy, and Jack London, and he lived the experiences that inspired him to write Wolf Totem.

A courageous critic of the injustices of the Chinese government, Lu went on to edit the dissident journal Beijing Spring and was detained without trial for more than a year following his participation in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising. After working on the project for more than thirty years, Lu at last released Wolf Totem under the name of Jiang Rong in 2004. Enormously popular in China, the book has been honored with the first Man Asian Literary Prize. Lu is married to fellow novelist Zhang Kangkang.

Books by Jiang Rong

Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong