Bei Dao

Bei Dao is the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai, a Chinese-American writer born on August 2, 1949. He is widely considered one of the most celebrated Chinese-language poets of his generation and is frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. Beyond poetry, he has written short fiction, essays, and a memoir. Often labeled a dissident, he is a key figure in a poetic movement Western critics call "Misty" or "Obscure" Poetry.

He was born in Beijing, before the People's Republic of China was established, and as a teenager joined the Red Guards. But the Cultural Revolution left him disillusioned, leading him to take part in the 1976 Tiananmen Incident and co-found the literary journal *Jintian* (Today), which was later banned in China. His poetry and activism inspired the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, after which he was barred from China and spent years in exile across the West, teaching in several countries before settling in the United States. Since 2006, he has been permitted to return to mainland China but has only done so for short visits. In 2007, he began teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in 2009, he became a U.S. citizen.

Critics note that Bei Dao helped forge a new style in Chinese poetry, one that reacted against the artistic controls of the Mao era. His work is marked by linguistic experimentation and a embrace of complexity and paradox, especially when exploring individuality.

He now lives in Hong Kong, where he serves as an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Born in Beijing on August 2, 1949, Bei Dao was the oldest of three children. His father, Zhao Jinian (who died in 2003), worked as an insurance executive, and his mother, Zhao Mei Li (née Sun), was a doctor. His family background is notable. On his father’s side, he traces his ancestry to the Kangxi Emperor’s reign, when an ancestor, Zhao Bingyan, served as Hunan’s provincial governor and deputy minister of justice. During the Taiping Rebellion, his great-great-grandfather Zhao Jingxian became famous for holding the city of Huzhou against a rebel siege for over two years. After his death, the Xianfeng Emperor issued a decree praising him, ordered reparations for the family, set up an ancestral hall in Huzhou, and recorded his life in the Official Archive of National History. Bei Dao’s great-grandfather was director of the Guangdong Manufacturing Bureau and later retired as director of the Shanghai Manufacturing Bureau. But war and internal conflict in China diminished the family’s wealth, and his paternal grandfather made a modest living selling paintings and scrolls before dying when Bei Dao’s father was still a child.

While his father’s side had supported the Qing Dynasty, his mother’s side helped bring it down. His maternal grandfather, Sun Haixia, belonged to Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui society, which eventually made Sun Yat-sen provisional president of post-imperial China. During the Wuchang Uprising, Sun Haixia was hailed as a hero for capturing a key telegraph station. He founded a secondary school in Hubei, later directed the telecommunications bureau in Chengdu, and then in Shanghai. After the People’s Republic was established, one of Bei Dao’s maternal aunts became personal nurse to Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. Among his uncles, one was a deputy mayor of Wuhan, and another was vice chairman of the China Zhi Gong Party, one of the eight officially permitted political parties in China.

Bei Dao’s father was self-taught and passed a test to get a bank job. He later co-founded the People’s Insurance Company of China and served as a deputy secretary for propaganda for the China Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD), a political party. His parents married in Shanghai and moved to Beijing the year before he was born. They lived in Xicheng District, near the Forbidden City, an area known for middle- and upper-class residents. Bei Dao grew up on Sanbulao (“Three Never Old”) Hutong, a street named after its most famous resident, Admiral Zheng He.

Despite his parents’ professional standing, his childhood was not easy. Due to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” policies, which redirected resources toward building a socialist society, his father was assigned to manage academic affairs at the newly founded Central Institute of Socialism, and the family endured the Great Chinese Famine. In his memoir *City Gate, Open Up*, Bei Dao recalls that period: “Hunger gradually devoured our lives. Dropsy became commonplace. Everyone’s usual greeting to each other changed from ‘Have you eaten yet’ to ‘Have you gotten dropsy yet,’ then the pant legs were pulled up and each used their fingers to test the other’s degree of illness.”

Like many Chinese youth, he joined the Young Pioneers. He attended Beijing Middle School No. 13, where teachers praised his writing, and then tested into the elite Beijing No. 4 High School. But he never graduated: in 1966, when he was sixteen, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which shut down the school. (In 2011, when Brown University gave him an honorary doctorate, Bei Dao noted it was the first degree he had ever received.)

During the Cultural Revolution, not being selected for the People’s Liberation Army, Bei Dao spent the first two years of the movement deeply engaged in reading and writing.