Chen Cun

Yang Yihua (; born 1954), who writes under the pen name Chen Cun , is a Hui Chinese novelist known for his stories about the zhiqing experience during the Cultural Revolution. He is also one of the pioneers of electronic literature in China.

Biography Yang Yihua was born in Shanghai in 1954. His father, a Han Chinese factory worker, died a few months before the future writer was born. He was raised by his mother, at that time an active Hui Muslim, although she later abandoned the practice of Islam during the Cultural Revolution. The writer still identifies himself as a Hui, and a "half-Muslim," although he does not worship in any mosque either.

At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the intermediary school he was attending was closed and he was sent to work in a factory and then as an assistant barber. He had to walk with crutches and was assigned to work in a factory with other handicapped people. After the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai Normal University opened again in 1977, and he enrolled in a course of Political Education.

There are autobiographical references in I Have Lived There Before, as well as in The Past , a novel Chen Cun wrote in 1983 and published in 1985 about a young man who comes to understand that, for all its repressive and unpleasant features, being compelled to become a zhiqing helped him to come of age.

From 1999 to 2002, he worked as the chief artistic officer for literature website Under the Banyan Tree, and had Wang Anyi, Jia Pingwa, and Yu Hua serve as referees for the website's first original internet literature contest.

By the second decade of the 21st century he started being less optimistic about the Internet, and suggested that with the overload of information there the heydays of electronic literature may have passed.