Early life and career
Cong was born on 7 April 1933 in Daiguantun,Anti-Rightist Campaign and laogai
During the Hundred Flowers Campaign, when the Communist government invited opinions and criticisms from intellectuals, Cong published the essay "A Few Questions Concerning Socialist Realism" in the April 1957 issue of the journal ''Beijing Literature and Art'', in which he questioned the need for the adjective "socialist" in socialist realism and argued that the term excessively emphasized politics and encouraged formulaic writing. His friend also wrote an essay criticizing socialist realism in the same journal. The Communist Party soon turned against intellectuals who criticized its policies and started the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. ''Beijing Literature and Art'' published an article calling Cong and Liu "poisonous weeds" who had been lured to "stick their heads out above ground". Cong was soon denounced as a "rightist" and a member of a "counterrevolutionary clique", together with Liu Shaotang, Wang Meng, and . The four writers were collectively known as the "Four Black Swans" () of Beijing. Cong's wife Zhang Hu (), 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). The couple were both arrested and sent to different laogai ("reform through labor") camps, leaving their infant son with Cong's mother. Cong and Zhang did not see each other for more than a year, until they were both sent to Qinghe Farm, a notorious labor camp outside of Tianjin. A kind prison guard arranged to have him stay overnight at her camp. Cong endured 20 years in a variety of laogai camps, even after his "rightist" label was removed. He worked in coal mines, quarried rocks, dug graves and transported manure.Post-laogai career and "High Wall Literature"
After the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Cong was released and rehabilitated in 1978. He eagerly resumed writing, using his laogai experience as an inspiration. In 1979, he published the novella ''The Blood-Stained Magnolias under the High Wall'' (), about a labor camp inmate being killed by the camp guard. The first Chinese novel about laogai camps, it initiated the "High Wall" genre of literature (大墙文学; "high wall" being a euphemism for prison), which reflects on the traumas suffered by political prisoners in the camps during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Writer Wang Meng, who served as China's Minister of Culture, called Cong the "Father of High Wall Literature". Cong subsequently wrote a number of works in the "High Wall" genre, including the novella ''Snow Falling Silently onto the Yellow River'' (), the long novel ''The Fugitive'' (), which consists of three novellas, and the novella ''Grave Stone for a Cat''. In 1988, he published the first two parts of his memoir ''Entering Chaos'' (). After conducting further research and revisiting the labor camps he had worked at, he published the third and fourth parts of the memoir to much acclaim. They attest to the "horror, cruelty, and absurdity" of the laogai system, which is often compared with the Gulag system of the Soviet Union. In 1982, Cong revised the novel ''Grass in the Northern Country'' (). He had begun writing the novel in 1955, but lost the manuscript during the Cultural Revolution. He was able to recover it after his release from laogai, and finally published the book in 1984. He received more than 1,000 letters from readers after its publication. The novel won four national and municipal literature prizes. He also published a collection of short stories ''Drinking Soul Going West'' () in 1990, and the autobiographical novel ''Naked Snow'' () in 1994. The latter, written from a child's perspective and set in the Republican era of Cong's childhood, is vastly different from his typical laogai fiction. Cong's works have been highly influential in post-Mao China. They have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese and Serbian. Although known for his works about the "Chinese Gulag", Cong did not want to be compared to the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and wrote the essay "I Am Not Solzhenitsyn". He criticized Solzhenitsyn for being too one-sided and negative, recalling his personal experience with a kind prison guard. Cong served as chief editor of the Writers Publishing House, but was forced to resign after theReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cong, Weixi 1933 births 2019 deaths Writers from Hebei People from Tangshan People's Republic of China journalists Chinese male novelists Victims of the Anti-Rightist Campaign 20th-century Chinese male writers 21st-century Chinese writers Chinese autobiographers Chinese essayists Chinese editors