Lu Xun

Lu Xun was born Zhou Shuren on September 25, 1881, in Shaoxing, a canal town in Zhejiang province known for its rice wine and its long tradition of producing scholars and government clerks ^[1]. The Zhou family belonged to the local gentry, and his grandfather Zhou Fuqing had passed the highest imperial examinations and held office in Beijing. The boy grew up in a household that expected classical learning, and he was drilled in the Confucian canon from an early age while privately preferring illustrated books of ghosts, myths, and popular tales ^[2].

The family's fortunes collapsed during his adolescence. In 1893 his grandfather was arrested for attempting to bribe an examination official, a capital offense that drained the family's savings in efforts to spare his life. Soon afterward Lu Xun's father fell chronically ill, and the teenage boy made regular trips to the pawnshop and the herbalist, exchanging family possessions for traditional remedies that never worked. His father died in 1896, and Lu Xun later wrote that the experience left him with a lasting suspicion of traditional Chinese medicine and, by extension, of inherited tradition itself ^[1].

With the family unable to fund a conventional scholarly path, he enrolled in 1898 at the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing, a tuition-free school teaching Western subjects, and later transferred to the School of Railways and Mines. There he encountered translated Western thought, including Yan Fu's rendering of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, which introduced him to social Darwinist ideas then sweeping reformist circles in China ^[2].

In 1902 Lu Xun won a Qing government scholarship to study in Japan, joining thousands of Chinese students who saw Meiji Japan as a model of successful modernization. After preparatory language study in Tokyo, he entered Sendai Medical Academy in 1904, intending to become a doctor and heal patients as Western medicine had failed to heal his father ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Lu Xun before he became a writer finds the answer here: a medical student in provincial Japan, one of very few Chinese at his school.

At Sendai an incident changed the direction of his life. According to his own later account, he was shown a lantern slide from the Russo-Japanese War in which a Chinese man accused of spying for Russia was about to be beheaded while a crowd of Chinese onlookers watched passively. Lu Xun concluded that curing bodies was pointless if the national spirit remained numb, and that literature, not medicine, was the instrument for changing how people thought ^[3]. He left Sendai in 1906, returned to Tokyo, and devoted himself to literary projects, translating European fiction and writing essays on science and culture, though these early ventures found almost no readers ^[1].

He returned to China in 1909 and spent a discouraging decade teaching school in Hangzhou and Shaoxing and then working as a section chief in the Ministry of Education after the 1911 revolution toppled the Qing dynasty. In Beijing he passed his evenings copying ancient stone inscriptions, a retreat into antiquarianism that he later described as a way of deadening disappointment with the failed republic ^[2]. The turning point came in 1918, when the reformist journal New Youth persuaded him to contribute. He published Diary of a Madman under the pen name Lu Xun, the first major short story written in vernacular Chinese, in which the narrator becomes convinced that his society's entire history conceals a culture of cannibalism ^[4].

Among Lu Xun achievements, the transformation of Chinese fiction ranks first. Diary of a Madman demonstrated that baihua, the spoken language, could carry serious literary weight, breaking the monopoly of classical Chinese that had defined elite writing for two millennia ^[4]. Between 1918 and 1925 he produced the stories collected in Call to Arms (1923) and Wandering (1926), a body of work small in volume but enormous in effect. Stories such as Kong Yiji, Medicine, and The New Year's Sacrifice portrayed failed scholars, superstitious villagers, and discarded widows with a compression and irony new to Chinese letters ^[5].

His longest piece of fiction, The True Story of Ah Q, serialized in 1921 and 1922, created the most famous character in modern Chinese literature. Ah Q is a village laborer who converts every humiliation into an imaginary victory, a habit Lu Xun offered as a portrait of national self-deception in the era of foreign encroachment. The term Ah Q spirit entered the Chinese language as shorthand for rationalized defeat ^[4]. The story has been translated into dozens of languages and adapted repeatedly for stage and film.

Fiction was only part of his output. Lu Xun perfected the zawen, a short, barbed topical essay, and wrote hundreds of them attacking warlord politics, censorship, cultural conservatism, and what he saw as the hypocrisies of both traditionalists and fashionable progressives ^[5]. He was also a pioneering scholar, producing A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1923–1924), the first systematic study of its subject, and a prolific translator who rendered Russian and Eastern European literature into Chinese, sometimes working through Japanese and German intermediary versions. He supported Esperanto as a vehicle for international exchange and championed the modern woodcut movement, mentoring young printmakers and organizing exhibitions of European graphic art ^[6].

In 1906, during his student years in Japan, Lu Xun was summoned home to Shaoxing for an arranged marriage to Zhu An, a woman chosen by his mother from a local gentry family. He went through the ceremony out of filial duty but never lived with her as a husband; Zhu An remained in his mother's household for the rest of her life, supported financially by Lu Xun but effectively abandoned ^[2]. The marriage is often cited by biographers as a private instance of the traditional social arrangements he attacked in print.

His lasting companionship came later. Xu Guangping, a student activist he met while lecturing at Beijing Women's Normal College, began corresponding with him in 1925, and the two became partners after he left Beijing in 1926. They settled together in Shanghai in 1927 and had one son, Zhou Haiying, born in 1929 ^[3]. Their published correspondence, Letters Between Two, offers an unusually candid record of the writer's daily anxieties and dry humor.

Lu Xun's family also shaped literary history in another way: his younger brother Zhou Zuoren became a leading essayist and scholar in his own right. The brothers collaborated closely on translations until a bitter and never fully explained rupture in 1923 ended all contact between them ^[1].

Political violence pushed Lu Xun out of Beijing. After the March 18 Massacre of 1926, in which government troops fired on student demonstrators, killing several of his own students, he faced threats and left the capital, teaching briefly at Xiamen University and then at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou ^[3]. Chiang Kai-shek's purge of Communists in April 1927 appalled him, and he resigned his Guangzhou post. That autumn he moved to Shanghai, where he lived for his final nine years, largely in the foreign concessions that offered some shelter from Nationalist censorship.

In Shanghai he wrote almost no new fiction apart from Old Tales Retold (1936), a set of satirical reworkings of Chinese myths, and concentrated on essays, translation, and cultural organizing. He moved steadily leftward, studying Marxist literary theory and becoming the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers at its founding in 1930, though he never joined the Communist Party and quarreled sharply with party literary functionaries over questions of slogans and artistic independence ^[5]. The Nationalist government banned many of his books, and he published under dozens of pseudonyms to evade censors ^[6].

Tuberculosis wore him down through the mid 1930s. He kept writing from his sickbed, completing essays within days of the end. Lu Xun died in Shanghai on October 19, 1936, at the age of 55. Thousands of mourners followed his coffin, which was draped with a banner reading soul of the nation, and the funeral became a public demonstration in a tense political season ^[3].

Few modern writers anywhere have been posthumously canonized as thoroughly as Lu Xun. Mao Zedong praised him in 1940 as the greatest figure of China's cultural revolution before the Communist victory, and after 1949 the state built museums in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shaoxing, placed his stories in every school curriculum, and issued his complete works in repeated editions ^[4]. The irony noted by many scholars is that a writer who resisted orthodoxy of every kind became the centerpiece of an official orthodoxy, his most corrosive doubts smoothed into approved lessons.

Outside official channels his influence has proved harder to domesticate. Generations of Chinese writers, from the reportage authors of the 1940s to post-Mao novelists, have measured themselves against his skeptical voice, and phrases from his essays circulate online as coded commentary on contemporary events. His reputation extends across East Asia: Japanese readers have studied him since the 1930s, and Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel laureate, called him one of the greatest writers Asia produced in the twentieth century ^[6].

Any Lu Xun biography ultimately returns to the paradox he embodied: a man steeped in classical learning who did more than anyone to end its authority, a pessimist who kept writing as if words could still wake the sleepers he described. The basic Lu Xun facts, two slim volumes of stories, a mountain of essays, a career of barely two decades at full strength, seem out of scale with his standing. That standing rests on the precision of his diagnosis. Readers keep finding that the ailments he described did not die with him ^[5].