Lu Xun

Lu Xun the Chinese writer and intellectual of the twentieth century (1881-1936), widely regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature. Through his fiction, essays and translations he attacked the traditions and complacencies of his society and helped to shape the language and the conscience of the Chinese renascence.

Early Life and Education

Lu Xun was the pen name of Zhou Shuren, born on 25 September 1881 in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, into a family of declining gentry. His father's illness and death, and the failure of traditional medicine to save him, left a deep impression on the boy and contributed to his lifelong suspicion of inherited authority. The family's fall from prosperity also gave him a lasting sympathy for the poor and the humiliated.

He studied at a naval college and then at a mining school in Nanjing, where he encountered Western science and the ideas of reform. In 1902 he went to Japan to study medicine, first in Tokyo and then at the medical school in Sendai, hoping to improve the health of his countrymen. It was in Japan that the decisive turn in his life occurred.

Watching a news film of the Russo-Japanese War, in which a Chinese man was executed while Chinese onlookers appeared indifferent, he concluded that healing the spirit was more urgent than healing the body. He abandoned medicine for literature, determined to use writing to awaken his countrymen, and returned to China in 1909 with a plan to found a journal of ideas.

Career and the Rise of Modern Fiction

After the 1911 revolution Lu Xun taught in schools and served in the Ministry of Education in Beijing, work that brought him into the centre of the intellectual life of the new republic. He read widely in foreign literature and became a leading voice in the New Culture movement, which called for a new literature in the vernacular language and for the rejection of the Confucian legacy.

In 1918 he published his short story A Madman's Diary, in the journal New Youth, a work that used the device of a deranged narrator to expose the moral cruelty concealed in traditional society. It was among the first important stories written in the spoken language and is often taken as the beginning of modern Chinese fiction.

His reputation was secured by the collection Call to Arms, published in 1923, which contained the story The True Story of Ah Q, a comic and bitter portrait of a peasant who converts every humiliation into a spiritual victory. Further collections, including Wandering, extended his exploration of the lives of ordinary people and of the intellectuals who failed them, and established the short story as a central form of modern Chinese writing.

Essays, Criticism and the Language of the Age

Lu Xun was as important as an essayist and polemicist as he was as a writer of fiction. His short, pointed essays, known as zawen, attacked superstition, corruption, hypocrisy and the intellectual fashions of the day. Written in a sharp and ironic prose, they made him the most formidable controversialist in China.

He was a central figure in the movement for a national language and for the reform of writing, arguing that the classical literary language, accessible only to the educated elite, should give way to the living speech of the people. He supported the adoption of a romanised writing system for the education of ordinary readers, a cause he pursued alongside his literary work.

He also laboured as a translator, introducing the writings of Russian, Eastern European and Japanese authors to Chinese readers. His translations were intended not merely as literature but as instruments of cultural criticism, and he defended the value of difficult and disturbing foreign works as a stimulus to thought and reform at home.

Later Years and Political Engagement

In the late 1920s Lu Xun moved from Beijing to the south, teaching in Xiamen and Guangzhou before settling in Shanghai in 1927. The experience of the revolution and its aftermath pushed him toward the left, and he became associated with the League of Left-Wing Writers, which he helped to lead, and with the cause of the Communist movement, though he never joined the party.

In Shanghai he produced some of his most trenchant essays, defending progressive writers, attacking censorship and rallying the young against the pressures of the government. He engaged in fierce literary quarrels with critics of many persuasions, and his willingness to make enemies made him a controversial and admired figure.

His later collections, including The Grave and Bad Luck and Other Stories, together with the memoir sketches of Old Tales Retold and Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, show a writer deepening his craft while turning his attention to memory, childhood and the meaning of the Chinese past. He continued to write until the end of his life, refusing to soften his criticism of an unjust society.

Influence and Legacy

Lu Xun died of tuberculosis on 19 October 1936 in Shanghai, and his funeral became a public demonstration of the regard in which he was held. He is remembered as the greatest writer of modern China, and his stories and essays are read in schools and studied by scholars throughout the country and abroad.

His fiction gave modern Chinese literature its founding works and its characteristic themes, the suffering of the poor, the corruption of tradition and the failure of the educated to act. His essays set a standard of moral seriousness and stylistic precision that later writers have measured themselves against, and his portraits of ordinary people entered the common language as types.

He stands as an example of the writer as critic of his own society, a figure who combined artistic independence with a deep engagement in the struggles of his time. His insistence that literature serve the awakening of the people and his refusal of easy comfort gave Chinese letters a moral centre that continues to command respect.

See also

• New Culture Movement
• The True Story of Ah Q
• May Fourth Movement
• Vernacular Chinese literature