Beijing Spring
Lü began thinking about and writing up the ideas behind "Wolf Totem" as early as 1971, while still in Inner Mongolia, but did not yet begin to write anything down. He returned to Beijing in 1978, where he participated in the Beijing Spring movement, becoming editor-in-chief of the eponymous literary journal "Beijing Spring". A year later, he entered the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. After his graduation, he became an associate professor at the China Labor College. He was arrested for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, but was released in January 1991 without ever having been tried, along with Liu Suli, He Dong and Chen Po, as well as student leaders Xiong Yan and Zhou Suofen. He finally produced a complete first draft of "Wolf Totem" 1997, and only submitted the final draft to his publisher at the end of 2003. His hardest work on the novel was done in the final six years; his wife, herself a famous novelist, described how he "locked himself in his office every day and refused to tell me what he was doing".