Ah Cheng

Zhong Acheng (born 1949), often known by his pseudonym Ah Cheng, is a Chinese author and screenwriter.

Life
Ah Cheng's father, Zhong Dianfei, was in charge of the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Bureau. In 1956, as part of the Hundred Flowers campaign, he wrote an article criticizing political interference in films and was sent to the countryside. Ah Cheng had to sell his father's books to support the family, and read these Chinese and western classics before doing so. During the Cultural Revolution, Ah Cheng was also sent to the countryside, working in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan, where he became a popular storyteller.

In 1976, he returned to Beijing on leave and witnessed the Tiananmen Square protests against Zhou Enlai. His sketch of Zhou was published in the first issue of Jintian, an unofficial literary magazine founded by Bei Dao and others.

In 1979, Ah Cheng and his wife moved to Beijing. Together with He Dong, Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, Huang Rui, Li Shuang, Qu Leilei and Ai Weiwei, Ah Cheng founded the Stars Group (XingXing), an assembly of untrained, experimental artists who challenged the strict tenets of Chinese politics. As a political and artistic group, they staged exhibitions around Beijing, making way for avant-garde art in China.

Ah Cheng also began writing stories about his life in Yunnan. One of these, "The Chess Master", was published in Shanghai Literature in July 1984. It was praised in Wen yi bao, the journal of the China Writers Association, that October, and won an award in December. "The King of Trees" was published in Chinese Writers in January 1985, and "The King of Children" later that year in People's Literature. Collections of his work were published in Hong Kong and Beijing that year, and in Taipei in 1986.

Chen Kaige, another contributor to Jintian, adapted "The King of Children" into his third film, King of the Children (1988), and Ah Cheng began working as a screenwriter.

Ah Cheng won the 1992 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Screenplays

 * Yue Yue (1986)
 * Hibiscus Town (1986)
 * Painted Skin (1992)
 * Springtime in a Small Town (2002)
 * The Go Master (2006)
 * The Assassin (2015)

Novels and novellas

 * "The Chess Master", also translated as "The King of Chess" (1984)
 * "The King of Children" (1985)
 * "The King of Trees" (1985)
 * Unfilled Graves

Collections

 * Three Kings: Three Stories from Today's China (trans. by Bonnie McDougall), published 1990 by Collins-Harvill (London).
 * The King of Trees (omnibus of "King of Trees", "The King of Chess", and "The King of Children") (trans. by Bonnie McDougall), published by New Directions Publishing in 2010.