Wu Ningkun (Chinese: 巫宁坤; September 1920 – August 10, 2019)[2] was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of International Relations in Beijing, where he had taught since 1956.
His publications include the memoir, A Single Tear - A Family's Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China, written in collaboration with his wife, Li Yikai (李怡楷); scholarly essays in English and Chinese; and translations from English into Chinese and vice versa, among them a translation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 1951, while working on a dissertation about T. S. Eliot, he was invited to return to China and accept an academic position at Yenching University, Beijing, replacing an American professor who was forced to depart due to the Korean War.
[4]Not long after his return, however, Wu got his first taste of what "brain washing" could mean, in the form of enforced "thought reform" sessions.
This led to his formal denouncement as an "ultra-rightist" during the Anti-Rightist campaign of September 1957, and in the spring of 1958 he was sent to a state prison farm in Heilongjiang for "corrective education through hard labor".