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Person1881 – 1936

Lu Xun

Also called: Lu Hsün, Zhou Shuren

Leading writer of modern Chinese literature whose vernacular stories “A Madman’s Diary” and “The True Story of Ah Q” sharply criticized old customs and the national character

Born Zhou Shuren into a declining gentry family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, he studied medicine at Sendai in Japan. He later recalled that a lantern slide from the Russo-Japanese War, showing Chinese onlookers watching a fellow Chinese being executed, convinced him that the spirit mattered more than the body, and he turned to literature. Back in China he worked as an education ministry official and lecturer in Beijing while writing fiction and essays. From 1927 he lived in Shanghai, led the League of Left-Wing Writers and attacked the Nationalist government in biting essays until his death from tuberculosis in 1936.

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1 related event

  1. 1
    1915 – 1923New Culture Movementauthor

    Gathered around Chen Duxiu’s New Youth, intellectuals raised the banner of “democracy and science”, attacked Confucian ethics and launched a literature in the vernacular language people actually spoke.

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People who appear alongside

  • Chen Duxiu1879 – 1942

    Founder of the magazine New Youth who led the New Culture Movement under the banner of “democracy and science”, then helped found the Chinese Communist Party and became its first leader

Themes this person appears in

  • Republican China and Imperial Japan1912 – 1949

    The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle