The Life of Lu Xun: Writing on China at a Crossroads

As the Qing Dynasty collapsed, China underwent a creative explosion. The early 20th century saw Chinese students and writers chart new directions in literature. They veered away from the ancient Classical Chinese writings and toward vernacular languages. They reflected on their country’s new, more vulnerable place in the world, too.

The author Lu Xun came of age during this period. He wrote in a blunt, vernacular style, covering both fiction and nonfiction. To readers in our own time, his works may come across as intensely self-reflective, gloomy, and even pessimistic. But his influence on Chinese literature and political thought has long outlasted him.

Lu Xun was actually a pen name; the author grew up as Zhou Shuren. Zhou Shuren was born on September 25, 1881, into the influential Zhou family. His grandfather had actually passed the notoriously difficult, prestigious Confucian imperial exams and had gone to Beijing to work for the government. On paper, the Zhou family seemed secure — far removed from the majority of the population in Qing China.

Yet despite his family’s reputable past, Zhou Shuren’s formative years weren’t happy or easy. His renowned grandfather was arrested for bribing state officials, only being spared the death penalty by his family’s intervention. While the grandfather may have escaped execution, the Zhou family was disgraced, ostracized by the rest of their community. Barely a teenager at the time, young Zhou Shuren was disturbed by this backlash. The chaos had planted the first seeds of disgust and resentment in his mind.

Studying Medicine

The family’s social fortunes may have fallen, but Lu Xun still had financial standing that other Chinese people could only have dreamed of. He was well educated, and in 1904, he left for college in Sendai, Japan. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for elite Chinese families to send their sons to study abroad. Lu Xun intended to study medicine, hoping to become a doctor. Since his father had died without access to modern medicine, this seemed fitting.

Lu Xun’s time as a student in Sendai was not smooth, either. Chinese students in Japan faced a vicious assault of ethnic hatred from their Japanese counterparts. It was common in Japan at the time for people to view the Chinese as a superstitious, backwards nation. Lu Xun could not escape the xenophobic gaze of his Japanese classmates.

As a student, Lu Xun especially took notice of one of his anatomy professors, Fujino Genkuro. In a short essay, he recounted his interactions with the disheveled professor. Lu Xun frequently visited Fujino seeking corrections to his classwork. The professor held some of the common prejudices of the times, but he seemed to make a genuine effort to support his students.

20 years after his departure from Japan, Lu Xun reflected on his time in Professor Fujino’s class. “In my eyes and in my mind,” he wrote, “his character is a great one, even though his name isn’t known by many people” (Cheng and Denton, 2017). He kept Fujino’s corrected lecture notes but sadly lost them during a move to Beijing. The last memento Lu Xun retained of Fujino Genkuro was a photograph, kept above his writer’s desk.

Lu Xun’s turn to literature was the culmination of years of disillusionment with human conflict. The final straw, he would later allege, was a slideshow he viewed in class at Sendai. He was captivated by the new film technology, but that amazement quickly turned to horror. The subject of the slideshow? Footage from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

One slide especially haunted Lu Xun. The image showed a Japanese soldier preparing to execute a Chinese prisoner of war with a sword. The slideshow sickened Lu Xun, but one aspect of it disturbed him the most. He saw a crowd of Chinese bystanders at the execution, looking on with indifference as their countryman was put to death. This was, supposedly, enough to push the young medical student over the edge. We have no way of knowing if Lu Xun’s recollections were entirely accurate.

Lu Xun left Sendai in 1906, after only two years of study. He redirected his intellectual goals toward writing. In the young man’s view, Chinese people needed not only physical healing, but psychological healing, too. Could writing and reflection turn the tide for his beleaguered country?

Literary Techniques and Changes

Lu Xun set himself apart from previous Chinese writers through his use of language. For hundreds of years, Classical Chinese had been China’s literary standard. Yet it was a dead language; ordinary people could not read it and spoken Chinese languages had long since diverged from it. It was a vestige of the elitist worldview that Lu Xun so reviled.

What Lu Xun pioneered was a turn away from ancient styles toward vernacular speech (baihua in Chinese). The characters in his short stories spoke plainly, instead of bloviating in poetic fashion. That being said, he did infuse his stories with historical scope and significance.

He may have been a diligent student of history, but Lu Xun was even more so a cultural critic. He openly criticized major elements of Chinese culture, such as Confucian orthodoxy and the Chinese writing system. China’s fractious politics infuriated him most of all. In his mind, the inability of Chinese leaders to forge a solid government without resorting to infighting harmed China’s standing on the world stage.

Lu Xun’s nonfiction work focused on political and social criticism. His fiction work, similarly, contained a heavy dose of social commentary.

The 1910s and 1920s saw China establish a new, republican government. This government was never truly stable, but the change from imperial rule did allow varying currents of thought to flourish. One of the major political organizations to emerge was the Communist Party, founded in 1921.

As a cultural critic dissatisfied with China’s current direction, Lu Xun developed sympathies with socialism. After 1926, his commitment to the Marxist worldview strengthened. He lived in Shanghai during this period, writing and delivering lectures to sympathetic Chinese audiences. He was a major inspiration behind the creation of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930. However, he argued frequently with other left-wing intellectuals and left the League not long after its founding.

Lu Xun’s brand of Marxism was hard to categorize. In fact, the very idea of labeling his thoughts probably would have irritated Lu Xun. He deeply believed in the socialist cause, but he was somewhat nationalistic at the same time. His love-hate relationship with China itself was the defining feature of his thought and work.

Final Years and Thoughts on China

From 1926 onward, Lu Xun largely left fiction writing behind. He was afraid that fiction could not heal the Chinese spirit, and that his work up to that point in service of that goal had not been enough. He changed gears to creating essays defending his political worldview. Even as he immersed himself further in the socialist cause, however, he displayed aversion to hardcore ideologues. No records are believed to exist claiming Lu Xun’s membership of the Communist Party.

Lu Xun spent the final years of his life in sickness. His compulsive smoking probably made the situation worse. He died from tuberculosis on October 19, 1936 — only 55 years old. He could sense further tragedy for China, but he could not have imagined the staggering loss of life that lay ahead.

Lu Xun died young, creative as ever but pessimistic about his country’s future. Given the later developments of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, his pessimism was not entirely unwarranted. Still, he became a major name in Chinese literature almost immediately after his death, especially during the start of Communist Party rule.

Communist China under Mao Zedong had quite a contradictory relationship with Lu Xun and his work. Mao himself exalted Lu Xun as a great socialist and one of the intellectual fathers of the new Chinese order. But at the same time, the dictator feared and abhorred the late author’s critical attitude toward politics and society. Mao’s government worked tirelessly to clamp down on skepticism and opposition, no matter where it came from. This would have disturbed Lu Xun.

But even communist repression could not destroy Lu Xun’s legacy. His works are still widely read in Chinese schools (albeit censored) as well as on college campuses overseas. The great author survived his own death and inspired others in his home country.

Further Reading

Cheng, Eileen J., and Kirk A. Denton, eds. Jottings Under Lamplight. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.