Cong Weixi

Chinese novelist (1933–2019)

Cong Weixi (; 7 April 1933 – 29 October 2019), who also used the pen names Bi Zheng (碧征) and Cong Ying (从缨), was a Chinese novelist. Condemned as a "rightist" during the Anti Rightist Campaign in 1957, he spent 20 years in the laogai ("reform through labor") camps. Following his release in 1978, he published China's first novel on laogai and founded the "High Wall Literature" genre that depicts the traumas suffered by political prisoners in the labor camps. Highly influential in the post Cultural Revolution literary scene, his works have been translated into many languages.

Cong was born on 7 April 1933 in Daiguantun, Zunhua County (now part of Yutian County) in Hebei, Republic of China. His grandfather held a xiucai degree during the late Qing dynasty, and his father worked as an aeronautical engineer in Chongqing. In 1937, his father died in prison after being arrested by the Kuomintang government for attempting to defect to the Communist Party. His mother, an illiterate woman with bound feet, brought the four year old Cong to live with her parents. They moved to Beijing in 1946 where Cong attended school. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, he enrolled at Beijing Normal School in 1950 and published his first essay, "Going to the Battle", about patriotic youths fighting in the Korean War. Cong's wife Zhang Hu (张沪), who was also a reporter at Beijing Daily, was condemned as a rightist at the same time for criticizing excessive formalism and bureaucracy at her employer. After being publicly humiliated, she attempted to kill herself by taking sleeping pills, but was saved (she later attempted suicide for a second time during the Cultural Revolution and was saved again). He criticized Solzhenitsyn for being too one sided and negative, recalling his personal experience with a kind prison guard.