League of Left-Wing Writers
Zhang was born in Nanjing in 1906. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War, he worked as a teacher, journalist and minor official. His prolific literary career started out in the 1920s. By the early 1930s Zhang had joined both the League of Left-Wing Writers and Mao's Chinese Communist Party. During the war and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, he continued to write and held various official posts, including the editorship of the literary journal "Renmin Wenxue" ("People's Literature").