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The great romantic martyr of contemporary Chinese poetry, who killed himself at the age of 25 in 1989, Hai Zi is one of the most studied, recited, and well-known poets of the 20th century in China. Positioned alternately as the bard of the countryside or a "pure" poet, he is a figure believed to have been outside the hurly-burly of Chinese political life. Yet his unfinished epic work, The Seven Books of the Sun, which has little to no scholarship, problematizes that idea.