Liang Baibo

Liang Baibo (; 1911 – ) was a Chinese manhua artist and painter, best known for her short-lived comic strip, Miss Bee, published in 1935. She and Yu Feng were China's first female cartoonists. Born in Shanghai, she worked in Singapore and the Philippines, and was a member of the avant-garde . She had a three-year extramarital relationship with the artist Ye Qianyu, but left him to marry an air force pilot. She moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Revolution, and later died by suicide.

Early life and career Liang was born in 1911 into a middle-class family in Shanghai, with her ancestral home in Zhongshan, Guangdong. She studied at Hangzhou National College of Art (now China Academy of Art) and then at the Western Art Department of Shanghai Xinhua Art College, where she focused on oil painting.

She was a friend of the revolutionary poet Yin Fu (Bai Mang). In 1930, she drew nine illustrations for his poem collection Children Tower (孩儿塔). However, the book was not published at the time as Yin Fu was executed by the Kuomintang in early 1931 along with four others, together known as the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers.

Liang was a member of the avant-garde Storm Society, founded in 1931 by Pang Xunqin and Ni Yide. The strip was only published for 25 days, however, before Ye's wife Luo Caiyun and her father tracked him down and forced him to return to Shanghai. Luo refused Ye's request for divorce, but the couple became legally separated. Liang was the only female member of the corps. In 1938, Liang met Chen Enjie (陈恩杰), a pilot of the Republic of China Air Force, and fell in love with him on the spot. She terminated her three-year affair with Ye and later married Chen.

Later life and death After the surrender of Japan, Liang returned to Shanghai in 1946 and travelled to Xinjiang to paint. When the Communist Party took over mainland China, she moved to Taiwan with her husband, and had a son. In Taiwan, she reconnected with Liao Molin (廖末林), another former member of the National Salvation Cartoon Propaganda Corps, and worked at a kiln Liao opened in Tainan. She later met the writer Lin Haiyin, who introduced her to work as an illustrator for the newspaper United Daily News. However, she did not find career success in Taiwan and suffered from schizophrenia. She died by suicide in Taiwan, circa 1970.

Legacy Liang is known as China's first female cartoonist, although Yu Feng was her contemporary and possible predecessor. Her known works are few but are praised for their high quality. Her short-lived comic strip, Miss Bee, is described by a critic as "very lovely; the lines were soft and beautiful, and the themes were very interesting. It drew much attention from other cartoonists and was welcomed by readers from the beginning." In Ye Qianyu's memoir, he recalled his three years spent with Liang fondly, and described her as a "talented painter". He said that she had a "poet's temperament" and that he drew much inspiration from her when creating his own works such as the comic strip Mr. Wang.