Following his release in 1978, he published China's first novel on laogai and founded the "High Wall Literature" genre that depicts the traumas suffered by political prisoners in the labor camps.
[2] His grandfather held a xiucai degree during the late Qing dynasty, and his father worked as an aeronautical engineer in Chongqing.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, he enrolled at Beijing Normal School in 1950 and published his first essay, "Going to the Battle", about patriotic youths fighting in the Korean War.
Beijing Literature and Art published an article calling Cong and Liu "poisonous weeds" who had been lured to "stick their heads out above ground".
[3] Cong was soon denounced as a "rightist" and a member of a "counterrevolutionary clique", together with Liu Shaotang, Wang Meng, and Deng Youmei [zh].
[4] Cong's wife Zhang Hu (张沪), who was also a reporter at Beijing Daily, was condemned as a rightist at the same time for criticizing excessive formalism and bureaucracy at her employer.
Writer Wang Meng, who served as China's Minister of Culture, called Cong the "Father of High Wall Literature".
The latter, written from a child's perspective and set in the Republican era of Cong's childhood, is vastly different from his typical laogai fiction.
[3] Cong served as chief editor of the Writers Publishing House, but was forced to resign after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.