China honors writer and war martyr

Chinese government announced its first batch of 300 heroes and martyrs during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 2014, and Yu Dafu was the only writer among them. [Photo/Xinhua]

Wars are fought as much on wits as weapons, and Chinese writer Yu Dafu used his to great effect when his country was under threat from Japanese invaders.

Yu's poems, novels, and essays brought hope and encouragement during one of the darkest periods in China's history, and his secret work under the nose of Japanese occupiers has won him an eternal place in the hearts of his countrymen.

Born in 1896 to a family of medical doctors, Yu spent his childhood in Fuyang County, Zhejiang province.

At the age of 15, he began writing poems, showing an early talent for literature, and within a few years he went to study Economics at Tokyo Imperial University.

In 1921, Yu published his first short-novel collection, "Getting Lost", which catapulted him to fame. By the time he returned to China a year later, he was a literary hero.

But his writings took on patriotic themes after Japan's invasion of his country. At the end of 1937, his mother starved to death in a mountain cave because she refused to flee from her hometown or surrender to the invaders. As Yu's grandson, Yu Junfeng explains, this goaded the writer.

"When Yu Dafu knew his mother died because she refused to be a conquered slave, he wrote a couplet saying‘No mother to rely on, this hatred has to be avenged.’So all this came together in my grandfather's heart," said Yu Junfeng. Yu became an ardent participant in societies of writers and artists fighting against fascism, bringing reports from the frontline into his essays.

From 1938 to 1942, he worked as a literary editor in Singapore, but fled to Sumatra in 1942, when the Japanese army invaded. Under a different name, he began a brewery business, which he used as a cover to help China's war effort, but he was arrested in 1945 when his true identity was discovered and executed shortly after Japan's surrender.

In September 2014, the Chinese government announced its first batch of 300 heroes and martyrs during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and Yu Dafu was the only writer among them. His name is forever etched into China's monument to commemorate victory against fascism.