Bing Xin

Bingxin (Xie Wanying)
Bing Xin in the 1920s.
Born	(1900-10-05)5 October 1900 Fuzhou, Fujian, Qing china
Died	28 February 1999(1999-02-28) (aged 98)
Alma mater	Yenching University
Spouse(s)	Wu Wenzao
Children	Wu Qing
Parent(s)	Xie Baozhang () Yang Fuci (楊福慈)
Awards	1998 Lu Xun Literary Prize

Xie Wanying (October 5, 1900 – February 28, 1999), better known by her pen name Bingxin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese writers of the 20th Century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bingxin (literally "Ice Heart") carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang Dynasty poem by Wang Changling.

Bingxin was born in Fuzhou, Fujian, but moved to Shanghai with her family when she was seven months old, and later moved yet again to the coastal port city of Yantai, Shandong, when she was four. Such a move had a crucial influence on Bingxin's personality and philosophy of love and beauty, as the vastness and beauty of the sea greatly expanded and refined young Bingxin's mind and heart. It was also in Yantai Bingxin first began to read the classics of Chinese literature, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, when she was just seven.

In 1913, Bingxin moved to Beijing. The May Fourth Movement in 1919 inspired and elevated Bingxin's patriotism to new high levels, starting her writing career as she wrote for a school newspaper at Yanjing University where she was enrolled as a student and published her first novel. Bingxin graduated from Yanjing University in 1923 with a bachelor's degree, and went to the United States to study at Wellesley College, earning a master's degree at Wellesley in literature in 1926. She then returned to Yanjing University to teach until 1936.

In 1929, she married Wu Wenzao, an anthropologist and her good friend when they were studying in the United States. Together, Bingxin and her husband visited different intellectual circles around the world, communicating with other intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf.