Shaoxing, a turn in Japan, and a death in 1936

Lu Xun, the notes write, was a Chinese writer, a social activist and a thinker. He was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, and knew rural life at his mother’s family home. While studying in Japan he turned from medicine to literature. He wrote Diary of a Madman, took part in the New Culture Movement, fled to Shanghai under the pressure of warlords and the Nationalist Party, promoted a woodcut popular-art movement, and died in 1936. The pen name Lu Xun, they write, was taken from the hero of a novel they name Rudin. Those identifications stay as the notes give them.

A diary in New Youth, and a labourer’s spiritual victory

Diary of a Madman, published in New Youth in 1918, is, they write, China’s first modern story in the vernacular. A man with persecution fears records, in diary form, an obsession that those around him mean to eat him. The True Story of Ah Q, in this telling, shows the slavishness of the people through Ah Q, a day labourer, who consoles himself by turning real defeat into imagined victory — a habit they call spiritual victory. He tries to join the revolution, is refused, is mistaken for a rioter, and dies emptily. A scene with a revolutionary badge, they add, shows that the revolution was not noble, and that little had fundamentally changed even after the Qing had fallen.

In the work they also see the hypocrisy of Confucian morals, a tradition that proved its virtues by cruelty, a society that had not changed even after revolution, and isms that were names only.

From the Opium War to May Fourth, and a criticism they call affectionate

Beside the life they set a dated line. After the Opium War of 1840 to 1842, China was defeated by Britain and signed the Treaty of Nanjing. The Self-Strengthening Movement of 1861 to 1894 took in Western goods and built up munitions industry. A reform of politics, education and law was attempted in 1898. The 1911 Revolution, led, they write, by Sun Yat-sen, brought the Republic of China. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was an anti-imperial, anti-feudal student movement. Those dates stay in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total.

To read an era through a writer, they argue, one should set a life and the historical events side by side, and join a scene in a story to the problem it aims at. His message, they conclude, is a criticism aimed at all Chinese, and underneath it an affection for China. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student report on Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Ah Q, with the 1918 publication, the 1936 death, and the dated historical line left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026