Gao Ertai 1935-

He was labelled a Rightist in the Anti-Rightist movement in 1957 and sent to work in an extremely harsh labour camp. His crime was expressing views in an article on aesthetics which ran counter to those of the authorities. Between 1962 and the onslaught of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he had a brief reprieve, during which time he worked at the Research Institute of Cultural Relics in Dunhuang. The Cultural Revolution brought renewed hardships to Gao. After the Cultural Revolution he taught at universities in Lanzhou and Nanjing. Gao was arrested after the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 and imprisoned for 138 days. He fled the country upon his release, and is now a visiting scholar at the University of Nevada. His works on aesthetics, including Lun mei [On aesthetics], were very influential in the 1980s, while his literary essays Xunzhao jiayuan [In search of my homeland] and Tiechuang bairi [A hundred days behind bars], both written in exile, have gained him a wide readership among Chinese intellectuals.

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