Lu Xun

Lu Xun was the pen name of Zhou Shuren, born Zhou Zhangshou, in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, on 25 September 1881. He became one of the leading figures of modern Chinese literature, writing in both vernacular and literary Chinese as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, poet, translator, and political commentator. His work was known for a sharp, satirical style and for critical reflections on Chinese history and culture. He lived through a period in which older paths to status, such as the imperial examinations, met new schools, foreign science, and political argument.

Lu Xun came from a family of landlords and scholar-officials whose fortunes were already in decline when he was born. His grandfather had reached the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing, but family disgrace and costly bribery followed after Lu Xun’s father, Zhou Boyi, was discovered attempting to bribe an examination official in 1893. His father’s health later failed amid heavy drinking and opium use, and local doctors treated him with expensive quack prescriptions. He died in 1896 at the age of 35. Lu Xun’s mother, from the same landed-gentry class, had received no formal schooling because education was not considered appropriate for girls, but taught herself to read and write.

His education began with the Confucian classics, including poetry, history, and philosophy, though he later reflected that these subjects were neither useful nor interesting to him. He preferred folk stories, opera, mythological narratives from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and ghost stories told by a servant. In 1898 he half-heartedly sat for the first level of the civil service examination, then moved away from the traditional route. Family poverty led him to government-funded schools. At the School of Mines and Railways in Nanjing, he encountered foreign literature, philosophy, history, and science, and studied English and German. Writers and thinkers he read included T. H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao, along with novels about social conflict such as Ivanhoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In 1902, Lu Xun went to Japan on a Qing government scholarship to study Western medicine. He attended the Kobun Institute, later enrolled at Sendai Medical College in 1904, and then left medicine to pursue literature. Financial difficulties brought him back to China, where he taught at various schools and colleges before taking a position at the Ministry of Education. These years gave him a wide set of pressures and influences: family collapse, skepticism toward old learning, exposure to Western thought, experience abroad, and, at times, racism directed at him from resident Manchu bannermen.

Lu Xun is especially known for helping to pioneer the New Culture Movement. In 1918, he published Diary of a Madman, the first novel in vernacular Chinese, using the pen name by which he became best known. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919, he gained prominence through political writings in La Jeunesse. From the late 1920s onward, he became increasingly engaged with Marxist thought and leftist politics, and in the 1930s he maintained a close but fraught relationship with the League of Left-Wing Writers. His works were later canonized in the People’s Republic of China because of Mao Zedong’s high regard for him.

Lu Xun died on 19 October 1936, but his words still carry force because they were written from inside the tensions he examined: old status and new learning, private grief and public criticism, literary experiment and political argument. He did not write as a distant observer. He wrote as someone who had seen family rank fall apart, had tested several kinds of education, and had chosen literature as the place where a society could be questioned plainly.