Zhang Chengzhi
| Zhang Chengzhi (张承志) | |
|---|---|
| Born |
10 September 1948 Beijing, China |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | People's Republic of China |
| Period | 1978 – present |
| Notable works | History of the Soul (心靈史) |
Zhang Chengzhi (Xiao'erjing: ﺟْﺎ ﭼْﻊ جِ , born 10 September 1948) is a contemporary Hui Chinese author. Often named as the most influential Muslim writer in China, his historical narrative History of the Soul, about the rise of the Jahriyya (哲合忍耶) Sufi order, was the second-most popular book in China in 1994.
Zhang was born in Beijing in 1948 to Hui parents of Shandong origin. Despite his Muslim ancestry, he was raised as an atheist. He graduated from Tsinghua University Middle School in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. According to the People's Daily, Zhang was the first person to call himself a "Red Guard"; he used it as his pen name during his student days. Then on May 29, 1966, just two weeks after the People's Daily announced the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang convinced around ten other senior-level students to use the collective name "Mao Zedong's Red Guards" in addition to their individual signatures when signing a large-character poster denouncing their school officials; three days later, they issued another large-character poster under the same collective name, entitled "We Must Resolutely Carry Out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to its End", with over one hundred signatures. Soon, students from all over Beijing began to call themselves "Red Guards".
After his graduation, Zhang was "sent down" to Ujimqin Banner in Xilin Gol League, Inner Mongolia, where he lived for four years before returning to Beijing. Soon after his return, he entered the archaeology department of Peking University, graduating in 1975. He began his writing career in 1978, with the publication of a poem in Mongolian entitled "Son of the People" (做人民之子/Arad-un-huu) and a Chinese-language short story "Why does the rider sing?" (骑手为什么歌唱). That same year, he entered a master's program in history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences's Department of Minority Languages, from which he graduated in 1981. In 1983, he received funding to go to Japan as an international exchange scholar, where he conducted research at Tokyo's Tōyō Bunko, the largest Asian studies library in Japan. Aside from Chinese and Mongolian, Zhang also speaks Japanese, and once audited a class in Kazakh at the Central University for Nationalities.
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