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Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.

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On May 4, 1919, China’s first mass student demonstration took place in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing to protest a stinging humiliation: The Versailles Treaty, marking the end of World War I, had just decreed that China was to hand over German concessionary rights in Shandong Province to Imperial Japan even though China had supplied personnel to the Allied Forces in Europe. Furious, marching students sought to rescue China from both its weak and ineffectual warlord government and foreign exploitation, and their efforts ushered in a fresh sense of national purpose and optimism. Some looked to “save the nation” (救国) through “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” while others turned to the promise of Marxist revolution. 

But, as most activists looked outward to reorder their society and government, Lu Xun — a 30-year-old writer — also looked inward, naming and shaming the cultural, psychological and spiritual factors that he saw as obstructing China’s passage to modernity. 

“My aim,” he explained, “is to expose the disease so as to draw attention to its cure.”

In 1921, Lu published one of his most influential works: “The True Story of Ah Q.” Serialized in nine chapters and written under the pen name “Crude Fellow” (巴人), the novella satirized the hagiographies written of high officials during imperial times by chronicling the life of a wretched, cowardly non-entity named Ah Q. With no capacity for self-awareness or moral clarity, Ah Q is bullied by those who are more powerful and, in turn, relishes his ability to bully anyone weaker. His warped pride allows him to rationalize his myriad humiliations and defeats as cryptic victories. At the end of his meaningless life, Ah Q even manages to interpret his mis-identification as a revolutionary and subsequent execution as a reflection of his great worth. He is a character whom the literary scholar Leo Ou Fan Lee describes as a “body without a soul.”

For Lu, China itself had become a body without a soul. Ah Q, he explained to an editor, was a way of “exposing the weakness of my fellow citizens.” As he watched the newly formed Republic of China disintegrate into regional warlord satrapies, Lu came to blame the country’s retrograde traditional values and the crippling “slave mentality” toward authority they engendered.

“The simplest and most adequate way of describing the history of China would be to distinguish between two types of periods,” he wrote with his signature wry frankness. “First, there are the periods when people wished in vain to enjoy a stable slave condition. Second there are the periods when people managed to enjoy a stable slave condition.” 

There was, he charged, a “vileness and cowardice” at the heart of Chinese values that made people surrender obsequiously when weak, but then turn into tyrants when strong: “When the Chinese are confronted with power, they dare not resist, but use the words ‘taking the middle course’ to put a good face on their real behavior,” he observed in a 1921 letter. “But when they have power and realize that others cannot interfere with them, or when they are supported by the ‘majority,’ most of them are cruel, heartless, and tyrannical, just like despots and they do not take the middle course.”

[Lu Xun was] the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history.

Mao Zedong

Today, with China under Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping’s thumb, Lu’s century-old assessment seems hauntingly relevant once again. Led by an ideology that foregrounds its past humiliations, the Party has prioritized China’s “rise” at all costs, and has succeeded in attaining impressive levels of material advancement. But as Lu foresaw, there’s a flip side to this accomplishment. With Uyghurs in concentration camps, a legal system making a mockery of justice, and “wolf warrior diplomacy” aggressively seeking to spread “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Xi’s China has become as much the bully as Ah Q. Only now, with virtually no one inside China able to stand up in protest, there isn’t even a Lu Xun to call out its excesses and extremism.

After more than half a century following China’s impressive progress, such a state of affairs is dismaying. The critical missing element in the CCP’s vaunted “rejuvenation,” as well as its current supreme leader, Xi Jinping’s equally vaunted “thought,” is precisely this hard to define area of the human spirit that philosophers from Aristotle to Adam Smith and Confucius to the Buddha have viewed as fundamental to the human experience. The Australian Sinologist Geremie Barme has called it “the invisible republic of the spirit” that expresses itself largely through religion, drama, music, philosophy, literature and art, and so it is not easy to factor into policy discussions.

However, if China’s official Party culture is missing this dimension today, the Chinese people and their past culture are not. And reading the works of Lu Xun in parallel with those of Xi Jinping’s provides a stark reminder of how China’s spectacular record of material progress remains spiritually incomplete. Lu’s work was filled with a such a deep sense of moral conscience that when he died from tuberculosis in 1936, his casket was draped with a banner proclaiming him “the soul of the nation” (民族魂). Even Mao Zedong, who at the time of Lu’s death had just completed his Long March to the remote hills of Shaanxi Province, called him “the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history.” Never mind that Lu had never joined the Chinese Communist Party, took a dim view of its revolutionary extremism, and resisted all censorship, Mao admired Lu as “a fighter.” 

Despite this cognitive dissonance, the Party continues to try to cadge Lu’s historical luster. In a 2015 speech on culture that reprised many old Maoist themes (such as the need for art and literature to primarily “serve the people”), Xi Jinping proclaimed: “Mr. Lu Xun said that to transform the spiritual world of the Chinese people, literature and art are the top priority. And inseparable from literature and art is raising the banner of the spirit, establishing a spiritual pillar, and building a spiritual home. When tall buildings are everywhere on our land, the edifice of Chinese national spirit must also stand out majestically.”

The tall buildings that now dot urban skylines across China — clear signs of the country’s incredible economic progress — would no doubt make Lu proud. But he would likely also question what Xi means when he talks about a “national spirit,” much less a “spiritual home.” What, exactly, now constitutes the Chinese national spirit? Besides loyalty to the Party and nation, what are the core societal values that define what it means to be a “virtuous” human being in China today? In 2012, the CCP released 12 core socialist values — platitudes such as “friendship” and “harmony” decreed from on high — that have, in the years since, been used to justify restrictions on the press, intolerance towards people of faith and censorship of independent thinking. Xi has also attempted to inject a “spiritual” element into the hearts and minds of his citizenry with his new three-volume “The Governance of China.” But “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics For a New Era” so radiates Party-speak mendacity and autocratic sensibility that these efforts ring with immense hollowness. 

While Xi’s “thought” has even been read into the preamble of the Chinese Communist Party constitution, it lacks precisely those truly human, moral and spiritual dimensions that make Lu Xun’s century-old stories and essays still so affecting today. When we read the works of “real artists,” he once observed, “we not only like and delight in them, but more important we are moved and affected spiritually.” It is just such heartfelt expressions of sentiment that make his work such a good homegrown antidote to Xi Jinping’s didactic cant. Rereading Lu Xun today begs the question: Does humanism and spirituality matter in China’s epic rise?

Lu Xun’s stories remind us that behind the sterile surface of China’s Party-controlled literary scene, there is, in fact, a vital home grown tradition of probing, outspoken, public criticism from which contemporary Chinese can still draw inspiration to once again express themselves more freely — if only the Party would stop censoring, persecuting, detaining, and arresting them. 

A CHINESE JEREMIAH

Born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province in 1881 to a once celebrated scholarly family, Lu Xun was a short man with close-cropped hair, a bushy mustache, and penetrating dark eyes that gave him a brooding, implacable mien. A 1933 photo shows him standing beside the visiting George Bernard Shaw, who towers over him. 

“As we stood side-by-side, I was conscious of my shortness,” Lu dryly remembered. “I thought, 30 years ago, I should have done exercises to increase my height.”

He might have also been figuratively referring to China itself, because like so many of his generation, Lu was painfully aware of his country’s low international standing, repressive government, and generally benighted state. 

He viewed science and technology, which had fueled the West’s industrial revolution with Promethean energy, as critical to China’s fortunes. And so, like many other intellectuals of the era who were impressed by the success of the Meiji Restoration, he set off for Japan in 1902 to study medicine.

“A glorious future unfurled in my mind,” he wrote. “I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick, all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of reform.”

Such a rhapsodic vision of modern medicine’s ability to cure what ailed China was part of his as yet untempered youthful idealism, and such optimism did not last. When students at his school were obliged to watch a presentation about the Russo-Japanese War featuring a photograph of a blindfolded Chinese prisoner being marched to his execution in Manchuria, Lu was horrified by both the victim’s resignation and the passivity of the Chinese bystanders who stood gawking with “utterly, stupidly blank” expressions. 

“However rude a nation was in physical health,” he lamented, “if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gaping spectators, their loss to the world no cause for regret.” 

This image of a supine Chinese race being victimized without offering resistance, by Japan — a country that was still considered their inferior “younger brother”— convinced Lu that neither medicine nor science could remedy China’s malady. What afflicted its people, he concluded, was an ailment of the soul that needed “spiritual warriors” to effect a spiritual remedy.

But “where now are the warriors of the world of spirit, those who raise their voices for truth, who will lead us to goodness, beauty, strength and health?” he beseeched. “Who will lead us out of the wilderness? Our homes are gone and the nation is destroyed, yet we have no Jeremiah crying out his last sad song to the world and posterity.” 

So, Lu decided to become a Chinese “Jeremiah” himself and to minister to the spiritual sickness he saw as infecting the “national character” and corrupting the Chinese people with “hypocrisy, shamelessness and suspicion.” His woeful indictment suggested that short of a complete spiritual make-over, there was no way a “new China” would ever be born. “The first task, then,” he declared “was to change their spirit.” 

In 1918, he began a series of bold short stories that were later compiled into a volume he entitled “A Call to Arms.” His first story was the stunningly original “Diary of A Madman” (狂人日记), which recounted the travails of a diarist who is considered insane, because he cannot reconcile himself to living in a predatory, cannibalistic society. 

“I now realize I have unknowingly spent my life in a country that has been eating human flesh for 4,000 years!” he exclaimed. “With the weight of 4,000 years of cannibalism bearing down on me, even if once I was innocent, how can I now face real human beings?”

Lu was suggesting that the way people in traditional society treated one another — especially women, the poor, the uneducated and dissenters — was as inhumane as cannibalism. He was also suggesting that, since everyone in China had long since accepted the normalcy of eating other humans, it took a “madman” to see the practice as inhumane and aberrant. But just as Lu felt powerless to awaken the Chinese people to the retrograde nature of their traditional culture, so his “madman” is unable to awaken them to the obvious savagery of their cannibalism.

While Lu was a great satirist and humorist, he was also capable of writing with enormous pathos. One of the most heartrending short stories in the canon of modern Chinese literature is his autobiographical “My Old Home” (故乡) written in 1931 (and from which my novel takes its name).¹Schell’s debut novel, published on March 9. As he heads back to his ancestral home after a long absence, Lu looks forward to reconnecting with a peasant boy with whom he’d joyously and un-self-consciously played as a child. But when the old playmate finally appears, instead of the happy, ruddy-faced boy of memory, Lu finds a stooped, exhausted peasant who stands paralyzed in the doorway with “a combination of joy and sorrow registering on his face, his lips moving, but generating no sound.” Then, with heart wrenching servility, Lu’s old playmate utters the devastating greeting, “Master!” Then, he awkwardly pushes forward his shy son, ordering him to bow before “Master Lu.”

“I felt myself shudder with sadness at the recognition of what a thick wall had sprung up between us and I could say nothing,” wrote Lu, devastated both by his childhood friend’s subservience and the inequality he saw as still yawning between their classes. “I wanted new, different lives for them,” he mourned.

Although Lu yearned to believe in happy endings, the serial experiments in cultural and political reform that littered the early 20th century Chinese landscape with failure did nothing to allay his fatalism. Try as he might, he was unable to transcend his despairing assessment of China as fundamentally broken. However, despite his deep pessimism about how burdened China was by its past, he never surrendered.

When Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.

Lu Xun

“Let the conscious man bear the burden of the weight of tradition,” he implored after the May Fourth Incident in 1919. “Let him arch his back under the gate of darkness so that his children may be allowed to escape into freedom and brightness and lead truly happy and human lives.”

Lu’s tenacity and the singularity of his writing struck chords in Chinese society and he became the most celebrated author of his generation. By the time of his death, he’d become so influential that even Mao could not resist commandeering his legacy. If “Confucius was the sage of feudal society,” he proclaimed, “then Lu Xun should be regarded as the sage of modern China.”

The incongruity of such a defiantly autonomous artist being adopted by a communist party would not have surprised Lu. He’d once observed: “When Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of two methods: they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal.”

Lu’s beatification reached an apogee in Mao’s 1942 “Yan’an Forums on Art and Literature,” a crucial step in his early efforts to bring China’s free-thinking intelligentsia to heel. In these lectures, Mao exhorted “all Communists, all revolutionaries, and all revolutionary literary and art workers to learn from the example of Lu Xun” to become like “oxen working for the proletariat and the masses.” For Mao, all art and literature were to serve the revolution, not be used as forms of indulgent individualistic self-expression.

But despite Mao’s efforts to make Lu appear a fellow traveler, it’s clear the two never would have seen eye to eye. In fact, in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Campaign — a brief period of relative political openness — when an intrepid official dared ask, “What if Lu Xun were alive today?” Mao glibly replied: “Well, he could either sit in jail and continue to write, or he could remain silent.”

NEW PATHWAYS

For the abode of a writer with such a towering reputation, the old courtyard house in the Xicheng District of Beijing where Lu Xun lived in the mid-1920s is surprisingly small, dark and claustrophobic. It is reached through a narrow passageway that lets one into a cloistered yard shaded by a gnarled Chinese date tree and a few aging lilacs said to have been planted a century ago by the author himself. If he were to gaze up at the corporate high-rise headquarters that now tower over his old house from the city’s new financial district, he’d doubtless be surprised and impressed, for they are the very quintessence of the kind of material rejuvenation that eluded China during his lifetime. And he’d certainly be gratified to see that the “feeble and listless air” of the Chinese people that he saw as once crippling them has now largely dissipated.

“It will not be easy to revive China,” he despaired in 1927. “It will be like ordering a dead person back to life.”

And yet, this is exactly what has happened under the leadership of the CCP over the past several decades. China has been brought back to life, and when definitive histories are finally written, this great material transformation will stand as a stunning achievement. 

But despite all this obvious material advancement, if Lu were to return, he would likely be mystified by the way the CCP and its muscular-nationalist supporters still cling to their old narrative of victimization, even as China nears Great Power status. He would also surely find Xi’s regime even more oppressive than that of Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT in the ’30s. And, he’d doubtless bemoan the fact that there is still a huge missing piece in China’s rejuvenation portfolio — a piece Xi himself identified, albeit, in the most perfunctory of ways, in his speech praising Lu.  

“Realizing the Chinese dream of a great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a long, arduous and great undertaking, and a great cause requires a great spirit,” he observed.

Xi represents the polar opposite of Lu’s relentless curiosity, skepticism, wittiness, sense of irony, and penchant for probing the darkest recesses of both his own being and Chinese culture.

What makes Xi’s attempt to commandeer Lu’s legacy in this effort so off-key is that the very spiritual, humanistic dimension that makes Lu’s essays and stories so powerful is exactly what makes “Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era” so flat. And nowhere is this deficit more painfully evident than in his book, “The Governance of China.” In almost 1,800 pages of wooden bureaucratic prose, few — if any — are the places where a reader is moved. 

Of course, these volumes were not calculated to emotionally move but to create the simulacrum of “an oeuvre” hefty enough to grant Xi entrance into the ranks of reigning theoretical Socialist titans. The “Thoughts of Chairman Mao,” celebrated in his iconic “Little Red Book,” bespoke of Mao Zedong’s own grand pretension to make a Chinese contribution to this corpus of European socialist theory confected by the likes of Marx, Lenin, Engels, and Stalin. Now it is Xi’s turn to reach for the brass ring of such greatness.

Whatever his shortcomings as a theoretician, Mao, at least, wrote his own essays, composed poetry that wasn’t half bad, and sometimes even evinced an earthy originality in his writing style, leaving readers to feel that a mind was at work in his writing. By contrast, Xi’s speeches are utterly lifeless and to have to “study” (学习) them as “thought,” as many Chinese are now compelled to do, is to be entombed in an intellectual columbarium consecrated to the repose of ideological corpses. 

Xi’s stolid, uninquiring intellect represents the polar opposite of Lu’s relentless curiosity, skepticism, wittiness, sense of irony, and penchant for honestly probing the darkest recesses of both his own being and Chinese culture. Whereas Lu openly acknowledged the ambiguity of being what he called “something caught in between,” (中间物) — trapped between the past and present, tradition and modernity, and East and West — Xi avoids any such recognitions of complexity lest they make him look compromised and weak. While Lu was dedicated to limning the myriad tragedies of his refractory country in the most human way, Xi is dedicated to cheer-leading for the CCP, his own leadership, and the superiority of what he’s dubbed the “China option” (中国方案). His obsession with appearing “correct” (正确), even infallible, precludes precisely the kind of honest, self-introspection that defined Lu’s sensibility and made his writing such a compelling form of inquiry. 

Indeed, as the residue of Mao’s revolutionary totalism has begun to reappear in Xi’s writing and statecraft, we are reminded how difficult it is for a society to escape its history. After Deng Xiaoping waved his figurative magic wand in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many believed for a moment, at least, that he was capable of making Mao and the Cultural Revolution disappear. But even with his alchemic reform agenda, Deng was not magician enough to negate the formative powers of all the previous decades of Maoist politics that had been quietly embedding themselves on the political genome of Xi’s generation. Like dormant recessive genes, those traits are now re-expressing themselves in such notions as the “China Dream,” “a Chinese rejuvenation,” and “Xi Jinping Thought.” At the center of all of his thinking is a conflation of loyalty to the Party with love of the nation. 

“We must put the spirit of patriotism throughout the entire process of school education at all levels and types and bury the seeds of loving China in the depths of the hearts of every teenager,” Xi recently urged. 

Lu would have disparaged such efforts as “collective, patriotic arrogance” and those who chose to excite such dangerous xenophobic forces as “a tragic and sorry lot.” But then, Lu was rooted in a moral universe that factored what was humane into his political equations while Xi is rooted in a utilitarian universe that emphasizes orthodoxy, discipline and order. Given what is happening in China, it is hardly surprising that, despite testimonials from Chairman Mao and more recently from Xi himself, Lu is now being treated with ever greater circumspection. In fact, many of his works are now being removed from school curricula and a bot tweeting his quotations has even been silenced.

If Lu Xun and Xi Jinping are inverted images of each other, they do share one thing in common: being tethered to a leaden past. While Lu felt involuntarily bound to a moribund traditional culture, Xi has bound himself, voluntarily, to the moribund Communist Party culture borrowed from Stalinist Russia in the 1950s. While Lu ardently wished to escape the strictures of traditional culture, Xi not only resolutely embraced but celebrates Party culture as the wave of the future. His dedication to restoring aspects of China’s Maoist past makes it difficult to see how the country will ever become truly modern country under his leadership. Metaphorically speaking, China once again needs a Lu Xun-style “madman” to sound an alarm, this time against the figurative “cannibalism” of Xi Jinping’s latter day Leninism.

While living in his Beijing courtyard, Lu wrote, “I often felt in my depression that really great courage was needed to tell the truth, because a man who lacked courage and reconciled himself to hypocrisy could never open up a new pathway in life.”

Herein lies the biggest piece of unfinished business in China’s century-long odyssey to rejuvenation: to regain not only its lost “wealth and power,” a goal that it’s now well on the way to accomplishing, but to also find “a new pathway” that will allow it to embrace “the invisible republic of the spirit.” It would be an enormous tragedy if China’s leaders failed to recognize that the “China Dream” will never be developmentally complete so long as their beautiful new airports, high-speed rail system, and skyscrapers remain unmatched by a concomitant willingness to embrace such ideals as tolerance, truthfulness, openness, and justice. These are the values that underpinned Lu Xun’s work, and they still offer a blueprint for those ready once more to take up his “Call to Arms.”

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