Lu Xun, born Zhou Shuren and also known as Zhou Zhangshou, was a Chinese writer who lived from September 25, 1881, to October 19, 1936. He was a key figure in modern Chinese literature. He wrote stories, essays, poems, and political articles in both simple and traditional Chinese. His writing style was known for being sharp and critical, often reflecting on Chinese history and culture.

Lu Xun was born into a family of landlords and scholars in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. He wanted to take imperial exams but had to attend government-funded schools that taught Western-style subjects because his family could not afford other options. After finishing school, he studied medicine in Japan but later left to focus on writing. Financial problems forced him to return to China, where he taught at schools and colleges before working at the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China.

Lu Xun helped start the New Culture Movement by publishing the first novel written in simple Chinese, Diary of a Madman, in 1918. He became well-known for his political writings in La Jeunesse after the May Fourth Movement in 1919. In the late 1920s, he became more involved with Marxist ideas and leftist politics. During the 1930s, he was the leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. His works are considered important in the People's Republic of China because Mao Zedong greatly respected him.

Biography

Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Before the 20th century, many people used multiple names. His birth name was "Zhou Zhangshou" (周樟壽). His courtesy name was "Yushan" (豫山), which he later changed to "Yucai" (豫才). In 1898, before attending the Jiangnan Naval Academy, he took the name "Shuren" (樹人), meaning "to be an educated man." The name "Lu Xun," by which he is most famous internationally, was a pen name he used when his story "Diary of a Madman" was first published in 1918.

When Lu Xun was born, his family had been wealthy for many years. They earned money through land ownership, lending money, and having family members hold government jobs. His paternal grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was appointed to the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing, a top position for civil servants at the time.

Lu Xun’s mother was from the same class as his father, though her family lived in a smaller town called Anqiaotou, Zhejiang. Because girls were not expected to receive formal education, she learned to read and write on her own. The surname "Lu" (魯) in "Lu Xun" was the same as her family name.

Lu Xun’s early education focused on Confucian classics, including poetry, history, and philosophy. Later, he said these subjects were not useful or interesting to him. Instead, he enjoyed folk stories, opera, and tales like those in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and ghost stories told by a servant.

By the time Lu Xun was born, his family’s wealth had begun to decline. His father, Zhou Boyi, passed a county-level exam but failed a more difficult provincial exam. In 1893, Zhou Boyi was caught trying to bribe an exam official. His grandfather was punished for this crime, arrested, and sentenced to death. The punishment was later changed to imprisonment in Hangzhou.

After the scandal, Zhou Boyi lost his government position and was banned from taking civil service exams. His family paid many bribes to avoid his execution, and he was finally released in 1901. After the incident, Zhou Boyi drank heavily and used opium, which worsened his health. Doctors tried unusual treatments, such as using crickets, frost-surviving sugar cane, ink, and drum skin. He died in 1896 at age 35, possibly from dropsy.

Lu Xun took part in a local civil service exam in 1898 but later stopped pursuing a traditional Confucian education. He wanted to study at a prestigious school in Hangzhou but had to attend the free Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing due to his family’s poverty. His decision to attend a Western-style military school upset his family, and some relatives looked down on him. He left the academy after six months when he learned he might be assigned to work in an engine room, a job he considered degrading. He later said he was unhappy with the school’s teaching quality.

After leaving the academy, Lu Xun took the lowest level of the civil service exam and finished 137th out of 500. He planned to take the next level but gave up after his younger brother died. He then enrolled at the government-funded "School of Mines and Railways," where he graduated in 1902. This was his first exposure to foreign literature, philosophy, history, and science. He studied English and German and read works by authors like T. H. Huxley and John Stuart Mill. His later views on society may have been influenced by books like Ivanhoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

At the school, Lu Xun did well with little effort but faced racism from Manchu students. This experience may have shaped his later feelings about Han Chinese identity. After graduating, he planned to become a foreign doctor.

In 1902, Lu Xun went to Japan on a government scholarship to study medicine. He attended the Kobun Institute, a preparatory school for Japanese universities. A classmate encouraged him to cut his queue, a hairstyle required for Han Chinese men at the time. He also practiced jujutsu. He was unsure about joining Chinese revolutionary groups in Japan, such as the Tongmenghui. He faced anti-Chinese racism but also criticized some Chinese expatriates in Japan for their behavior. His earliest essays and translations of foreign books, like From the Earth to the Moon, were published while he was in Japan.

In 1904, Lu Xun began studying medicine at the Sendai Medical Academy in Japan but stayed there less than two years. He found his studies difficult, partly because of his limited Japanese. He became friends with a professor, Fujino Genkurō, who helped him prepare notes. Some classmates accused him of receiving special help from Fujino. Lu Xun later wrote a famous essay about Fujino, titled "Mr. Fujino," which is taught in Chinese middle schools. Fujino later honored Lu Xun in an obituary after his death in 1937.

While studying medicine, Lu Xun witnessed the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), which included battles on disputed Chinese land. In class, lantern slides showed news about a Chinese prisoner executed by Japanese forces for being an alleged Russian spy. The slide showed the prisoner tied up and surrounded by Chinese onlookers who seemed uninterested. This scene deeply shocked Lu Xun. In his book Nahan, he explained how this moment led him to abandon medicine and instead focus on writing to address China’s spiritual and social issues.

Legacy

Lu Xun has been called "the greatest writer Asia produced in the 20th century" by Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe. After Lu Xun died, Mao Zedong praised him as "the saint of modern China," but he used Lu Xun’s ideas to support his own political goals. In 1942, Mao quoted Lu Xun out of context to encourage people to be "a willing ox," but he told writers who valued freedom of expression that they did not need to follow Lu Xun’s example because Communist Party areas were already "liberated."

After the People’s Republic of China was created in 1949, Communist Party leaders described Lu Xun’s work as examples of communist literature. However, all of Lu Xun’s close followers from the 1930s were removed from their positions. Mao admitted that if Lu Xun had lived into the 1950s, he likely would have been forced to stop speaking or sent to prison.

Party leaders claimed Lu Xun helped "draw the blueprint of the communist future" and called him the "chief commander of China’s Cultural Revolution," even though Lu Xun was never a member of the Communist Party. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lu Xun and his peers met informally to discuss ideas freely. However, after 1949, the Party controlled intellectual life in China, and this independence was often suppressed.

Lu Xun’s satirical and ironic writing style was discouraged, mocked, and sometimes destroyed. In 1942, Mao said, "In a Communist society, we can shout loudly and do not need to use hidden or unclear expressions, which are hard for people to understand." In 2007, some of Lu Xun’s more critical works were removed from school textbooks. Julia Lovell, a translator of Lu Xun’s work, suggested this might have been an attempt to stop young people from adopting Lu Xun’s habit of criticizing problems.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party honored Lu Xun as a father of communism in China but also suppressed the intellectual culture and writing style he represented. Some of his essays are now required reading in Chinese and middle school curricula. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Chinese academies no longer generally assigned "In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen," an essay that criticized the killing of a student protester in 1926.

Under President Xi Jinping (2012–present), Lu Xun is still respected but is often portrayed as a friendly figure rather than a critic. Mao admired Lu Xun’s harsh criticism of old China and Confucian traditions, which he saw as broken and cruel. However, Xi has promoted the idea that traditional Chinese culture is not a problem and that issues come from outside China, which conflicts with Lu Xun’s writings.

Lu Xun translated works, especially from Russian, and admired Nikolai Gogol. His first story, "Diary of a Madman," was inspired by Gogol’s work of the same name. As a left-wing writer, Lu Xun helped shape modern Chinese literature. His books remain influential in China and internationally, and his works are included in high school textbooks in China and Japan. He is known in Japan as Rojin (ロジン; 魯迅).

Because of his political views and the role his works played in China’s history, Lu Xun’s books were banned in Taiwan until the late 1980s. Lu Xun also supported the Esperanto movement in China. He translated a work by Vasilij Erošenko in Shanghai after Erošenko was expelled from Japan for "Bolshevism."

Lu Xun’s importance in modern Chinese literature comes from his contributions to nearly every literary form of his time. He wrote clearly and influenced many generations through stories, poems, and essays. His two short story collections, Nahan (Call to Arms) and Panghuang (Wandering), are considered classics. His translations were important when foreign literature was rarely read, and his literary critiques remain sharp and well-argued.

Lu Xun also led the Woodcut Movement in China (1930–1950) and is seen as a pioneer of woodcut prints in China. After learning printmaking in Japan, Lu Xun used woodcuts as a tool to promote social change and an "alternative socialist road to art." Through his writing, lectures, and woodcut prints, he inspired many in China to adopt this art form.

Lu Xun’s work has been studied outside China. In 1986, Fredric Jameson called "Diary of a Madman" the "supreme example" of a literary form called "national allegory" in Third World literature. Gloria Davies compared Lu Xun to Nietzsche, saying both were "trapped in the construction of a modernity which is fundamentally problematic." Leonardo Vittorio Arena noted that Lu Xun had a complex view of Nietzsche, mixing admiration with criticism of Nietzsche’s style and content.

Many things are named after Lu Xun, including the Lu Xun Literary Prize, the asteroid (233547) 2007 JR27 Luxun, and the Lu Hsun crater on Mercury. The artist Shi Lu Xun used the second part of his pen name to honor Lu Xun.

Style and thought

Lu Xun was a skilled writer who used both traditional Chinese writing styles and 19th-century European literary methods. His writing style showed both kindness and a sense of distance at different times. In his early stories, he often wrote about characters who were weak, uncertain, and frustrated, and who suffered because of the strict rules in Chinese society.

His essays clearly pointed out problems in society, and his stories used simple, everyday language that made his works, such as The True Story of Ah Q, difficult to translate accurately. In these stories, he balanced showing the mistakes of his characters with showing understanding for those same mistakes. Lu Xun was very skilled at using irony and satire, as seen in The True Story of Ah Q, but he could also write clearly and directly, as in My Old Home and A Little Incident.

Mao Zedong considered Lu Xun the most important Chinese writer connected to the May Fourth Movement. He wrote strongly about problems in China, especially about the qualities of the Chinese people. He was sometimes called a "champion of common humanity."

Lu Xun believed the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 had failed. In 1925, he said, "I feel the so-called Republic of China has ceased to exist. Before the revolution, I was a slave, but after the revolution, I was tricked by slaves and became their slave." He even encouraged readers to study the critique of Chinese culture written by missionary Arthur Smith. His loss of hope in politics led him to believe in 1927 that "revolutionary literature" alone could not change China. Instead, he argued that "revolutionary men" needed to lead a revolution using force. In the end, he was deeply disappointed with the new Nationalist government, which he saw as weak and harmful to China.

Lu Xun stated, "[I]f Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish."