Users of the Chinese messenger WeChat accused writer Ma Yuan of the death of her son. He died on June 1, 2022 at the age of 13. The father refused to give his son proper medical treatment. It has been reported China Project.
Ma, who has a public account on social networks, himself reported the death of a teenager on the social network, but did not specify the cause of death. In March 2023, the prose writer told Renwu Magazine that the boy had suffered from Marfan syndrome since childhood. To delay or prevent complications, Ma was persuaded by his wife and relatives to allow his son to take medicine, but the author accepted only traditional Chinese medicine.
At the same time, relatives secretly arranged a medical consultation for the teenager, where the doctors advised him to undergo surgery. “Medical procedures should be done away from the brain and heart. These two parts of the body must remain intact,” Ma said at the time.
The prose writer also refused his wife’s offer to move to another place where she could get medical services more quickly. He also claimed that living in the mountains due to the high altitude hurt his son.
Revealed details of Ma Yuan’s life and the death of her child caused a wave of anger on Chinese social networks: the most popular post criticized has been viewed nearly 100 million times. Some users describe the author as a “killer”, while others proclaim his “patriarchal attitude towards women and family”.
Ma Yuan is best known as a leading figure in the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1980s. His name stands next to writers like Yu Hua and Nobel laureate Mo Yan. Earlier, Ma had also claimed to have cured the lung cancer he had diagnosed by refusing medical treatment.