Lu Xun's Revolution

Writing in a Time of Violence

Gloria Davies

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674072640
• eBook ISBN: 9780674073968
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Literature

Widely recognized as modern China's preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the voice of a nation's conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare and Tolstoy in stature and influence. Gloria Davies's portrait now gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as "the sage of modern China" in his turbulent time and place.

In Davies's vivid rendering, we encounter a writer passionately engaged with the heady arguments and intrigues of a country on the eve of revolution. She traces political tensions in Lu Xun's works which reflect the larger conflict in modern Chinese thought between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses. During the last phase of Lu Xun's career, the so-called "years on the left," we see how fiercely he defended a literature in which the people would speak for themselves, and we come to understand why Lu Xun continues to inspire the debates shaping China today.

Although Lu Xun was never a Communist, his legacy was fully enlisted to support the Party in the decades following his death. Far from the apologist of political violence portrayed by Maoist interpreters, however, Lu Xun emerges here as an energetic opponent of despotism, a humanist for whom empathy, not ideological zeal, was the key to achieving revolutionary ends. Limned with precision and insight, Lu Xun's Revolution is a major contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of this foundational figure.

1

Eyes Wide Open

On 15 May 1925 a Japanese factory foreman opened fire on striking Shanghai workers at the local Japanese-owned Nagai Wata Mill, killing one and wounding several others. Local students responded swiftly with demonstrations in the streets and were in turn arrested and arraigned to be tried in the International Settlement’s courts. On 30 May some 10,000 Chinese workers and students gathered to protest the arrests and marched down the broad expanse of Nanking Road in the Settlement shouting anti-imperialist slogans and demanding fair treatment for the Chinese within the Settlement. In a brutal response, Sikh soldiers led by a British inspector opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, killing thirteen protestors and arresting more than fifty others.¹ The rapidly reported killings fanned widespread public outrage culminating in a general strike in Shanghai, street protests in other Chinese cities, and further sporadic casualties elsewhere.

Having condemned the killings as a massacre, many Chinese intellectuals rushed to commemorate the “May Thirtieth Movement,” eulogizing the mass protests it incited as harbingers of imperialism’s imminent demise. It was a time when Leninism was in full vogue. Six weeks later, on 22 July 1925, Lu Xun wrote the essay “On Seeing with Eyes Wide Open,” in which he characterized this rising revolutionary clamor as the “praise of blood and iron.”² Using Bismarck’s famous phrase, he remarked that the militant rhetoric augured nothing but the onset of a blinding self-delusion among the aspiring revolutionaries themselves. This essay provides a good example of the critical art Lu Xun named zagan (mixed impressions).

In his essays, the zagan effect resides in the skillful assemblage of diverse images to illustrate a central idea. The assemblage typically consists of ancient and modern, Chinese and non-Chinese elements inventively combined to fashion a blurring or “mixing” of time and space. In this particular case, the central idea was straightforward and simple. It came from a statement he had read in a recent article: “we should have the courage to face things squarely.”

The device of quoting from the media was one that he frequently employed: a quotation from a newspaper or journal would start the essay and serve as the point of departure for his disquisition. In the essay in question, Lu Xun begins with the quotation from the article, duly praises it for expressing a worthy sentiment, but then states that an even more pressing need exists, namely the need for the Chinese to stop fooling themselves.

He continues with a sweeping indictment of the literati of dynastic China, accusing his predecessors of having mastered the Confucian ability “to avert their gaze from all that is unseemly” (fei li wushi).³ He writes that centuries-old Confucian tutelage and a fastidious lack of attention to “the unseemly” had not only withered the ability of the Chinese to face “the unseemly” but had encouraged among them an unfortunate tendency toward “concealment and deception.” He then offers examples in support of his contention, ranging from politicized uses of the Confucian classics (The Analects and Mencius), through the treatment of plot and character in the popular romances and historical novels of the Ming and Qing epochs, to his own reflections on historical and contemporary events.

On the basis of these examples, Lu Xun concludes that over time, people grew accustomed to avoiding unhappy truths, with the result that they not only became incapable of self-scrutiny but also acquired an enormous appetite for outlandish fantasies. As evidence, he then cites several examples of impossible happy endings in Chinese literature, using them to clinch his argument against the revolutionary rhetoric of his time. He suggests that such rhetoric amounted to no more than a fantastic diversion from real and present social misery, noting:

The climate seems to have changed; we no longer hear the soulful odes to flowers and the moon that used to be everywhere, for these have now been replaced by the praise of blood and iron. But if we speak with a deceiving heart and a lying tongue, it hardly matters whether the subject is A & B or Y & Z, for both are equally phony. All that will happen is that those so-called critics who formerly disparaged compositions about the flowers and the moon will now be awed into silence, and content themselves with the prospect of China’s imminent resurgence. He who wears a great big “patriotic” hat, who has once again shut his eyes, is to be pitied. But perhaps someone like this has always had his eyes shut.⁴

The appeal for clear-sightedness (and the authorial perspicacity it implies) is a hallmark of Lu Xun’s essays. The perspicacity he sought and claimed for himself was empirical and sensory, not conceptual or theoretical. What he encouraged in the name of “seeing with eyes wide open” was a scrupulous observation of contemporary life and, more specifically, the gaps between published work and the actual lived social experience. In the passage above, he warns that the dramatic shift under way in baihua from “soulful odes” to revolutionary calls means nothing without a substantive change in the status quo, and implies that the revolutionary outpourings he has read have struck him as false.

Similar disavowals of revolutionary dreaming appear in numerous essays he wrote in the late 1920s and 1930s. Lu Xun, however, was never comfortable about dampening his readers’ enthusiasm for revolution and hence frequently mitigated his criticisms with a rallying call to action. He chose to end this 1925 essay with the encouraging statement: “China will not have a genuinely new literature without pathbreakers prepared to destroy traditional ideas and traditional methods of writing in their entirety.”⁵

Lu Xun’s insistence on perspicacity developed out of his lifelong ambivalence toward the idea of revolution. He supported the cause of revolution in his teens and twenties and was hailed as a pioneer of the “literary revolution” in his thirties. However, during the mid-1920s, as an eminent intellectual in his forties, Lu Xun encountered a new problem. Publicly hailed as a radical innovator, he had deep misgivings about the speed and breadth with which revolutionary language was spreading around him. To appreciate his unease, we need to consider the complexions of the term “revolution” in 1920s China.

Of Blood and Iron

In the 1900s, revolution was promoted as the patriotic (and indeed racial) violence required for bringing the Manchu Qing dynasty to an end and restoring Han Chinese sovereignty in the form of a modern nation-state.⁶ In 1912, with the founding of the first Chinese Republic, this idea of revolution entered the vocabulary of the state, where it became sacrosanct as the driving force of modern change in China. But despite the rhetorical authority of revolution, Sun Yat-sen, its leading proponent and the Republic’s founding figure, was soon ousted from national politics. Sun had occupied the office of president for only forty-five days, from 1 January to 15 February 1912, before agreeing to cede it to Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), the former commander of the Qing imperial troops. By November 1913, Yuan had forced Sun into exile in Japan. The nascent Republic then witnessed two failed attempts to restore the dynastic system: first Yuan Shikai’s bid to make himself emperor in 1915, followed quickly (after Yuan’s death in 1916) by the extremely short-lived restoration of the abdicated Manchu emperor Puyi (1906–1967) in 1917, orchestrated by the archconservative militarist Zhang Xun (1854–1923).⁷

By the time Sun Yat-sen returned to China in 1917, he had revised his views to place a new emphasis on “revolutionary construction,” an idea that became the centerpiece of his speeches and writings from the late 1910s until his death in 1925. For Sun, “revolutionary construction” meant, above all, revolutionary self-cultivation. He stressed the importance of self-knowledge to revolutionary success, encapsulating the idea as a four-character axiom, yi xing nan zhi: “to act is easy, to know is difficult.” In his famous essay of this title completed in December 1918, he chastised the members of his party for failing to follow the initial work of “revolutionary destruction” (that is, the 1911 revolution that ended the Qing dynasty) with “revolutionary construction” (in the early years of the Republic). He claimed that this failure was a result of their failure to understand the foundational importance of his “Three Principles of the People” and that they had committed the fatal error of dismissing these principles (of people’s rights, people’s livelihood, and nationalism) as “too lofty.” As a consequence, he averred, the revolution, having halted at “destruction” without the concomitant work of “construction,” was hijacked by counterrevolutionary forces.⁸

Sun Yat-sen’s political resurgence after 1917 at his new southern base in Guangzhou coincided with the rise of the “literary revolution” in Beijing. The basic goal of this literary revolution was simple but formidable. It sought to eradicate everything old (jiu) that was perceived to hold China back, and to create the new (xin)—in effect an entire New Culture—to hasten the arrival of a fully fledged modern society in China. The “soulful odes to flowers and the moon” to which Lu Xun referred were part of the modern romanticism that swept the New Culture into fashion: it was a revolutionary self-cultivation different from the one that Sun proposed. Its roots were in literature, not politics, and its pioneer was Liang Qichao (1873–1929), China’s best-known intellectual activist and cultural entrepreneur of the 1900s.

It was in the numerous journals and newspapers established by Liang that the educated elite acquired and practiced their sense of living in a modern world. For instance, Lu Xun recalled that when he had attended the School of Mining and Railways from 1899 to 1902, its cosmopolitan director had asked his students to write compositions on George Washington and had read Liang’s influential newspaper Shiwu bao (The Chinese Progress) as he rode to work each day in a horse-drawn carriage.⁹

Indeed, it was Liang who coined the term “literary revolution” in 1902, expressly to commend the powers of fiction in renovating human minds and shaping moral character. Liang insisted that “the reformation of the government of the people must begin with a revolution in fiction.”¹⁰ In the early 1900s Lu Xun, according to his brother Zhou Zuoren, was profoundly moved by Liang’s description of “literary revolution” as an act of self-transformation. Liang outlined the process as based in what he called the “four powers” of fiction (to envelop the senses, to immerse the reader in the narrative, to stimulate new feelings, and finally to effect a spiritual elevation, which Liang likened to a Buddhist awakening). Zhou recalled his older brother resolving to emulate Liang in order “to touch society and stir the nation’s spirit.”¹¹

The “literary revolution” launched in Beijing in 1917 was far bolder than what Liang Qichao had envisaged fifteen years earlier. Centered on the promotion of baihua, it included all varieties of publications, both literary and intellectual. The rules were simple and open-ended. As Hu Shi wrote in his 1917 position piece “My Views on Literary Reform,” the user of baihua need only heed “eight injunctions” (ba bu zhuyi) against the use of wenyan: “speak only of matters of substance; don’t emulate the ancients; pay attention to grammar; don’t lament without cause; discard wornout stock phrases; don’t invoke the classics; don’t heed [the traditional poetics of] matching rhyme and sense; don’t avoid the use of common words and popular sayings.”¹²

The themes of politics and romance were intertwined in baihua from the outset. Candid self-expression and modern ways of loving—as aspects of the radically new and revolutionary—were regarded as integral to modern nationhood. And with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, ideas and formulations derived from Marxist and Soviet works became a growing presence in this nascent literary vernacular. Sun Yat-sen was so impressed by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution that in October 1919 he remodeled his organization, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomingdang), along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai by two leading figures of the “literary revolution,” Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao.

In the early 1920s a Soviet-inspired discourse arose against the Republic’s descent into warlord misrule, a worsening national economy, and widespread social unrest.¹³ Moreover, the capitulation of several of China’s warlord regimes to Japan’s expansionist demands in exchange for financial and military aid further inflamed public anger. Patriotic sentiments burgeoned in the late 1910s and were volubly expressed during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. This movement was inaugurated by a student protest in Beijing against international disregard for China’s sovereign interests at the peace conference negotiations in Paris that year. It quickly spread to other cities. Chinese citizens demanded the rejection of the peace treaty’s intention to cede to Japan, instead of China, Germany’s former concessions in China. The protests continued for several months and developed in new agitative directions, including a boycott of Japanese goods. In the process, the symbiosis of patriotism and cultural radicalism in China’s “literary revolution” became more pronounced: its much-vaunted New Culture thereafter merged with the aims of “May Fourth.”

In the early 1920s, as banditry and armed conflict between rival warlords grew, Sun Yat-sen planned a new revolution with the aid of the Soviet Union. The alliance between the Nationalist Party and the Soviet Union was formalized in January 1923 by Sun Yat-sen and Adolf Joffe (1883–1927), the Comintern delegate to China. Thereafter Sun’s idea of “the people” was frequently conflated with the Marxist co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Translation
• Guide and Chronology
• Introduction: The Sage of Modern China
• 1. Eyes Wide Open
• 2. The Shanghai Haze
• 3. Guns and Words
• 4. Debating Lu Xun
• 5. Lu Xun’s Revolutionary Literature
• 6. Raising Revolutionary Specters
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index