Understanding China via culture: An intro to Lu Xun
It seems like now’d be a good time to get more familiar with China. As Trump incompetently initiates a trade war, everyone’s wondering whether we’ll see the multipolar world we’ve been reading about, here and there, for decades. If we do, one of those poles will inevitably be China.
But compared to the other possible poles — India, Russia — Chinese culture is comparatively unknown in the West. Russia, of course, is well known, having long been incorporated into the Western canon. India less so, but it has long held a place in the popular imagination, from Eliot ending The Waste Land with ‘shanti’ to the Beatles chanting ‘hari krishna’.
My goal here is to introduce one view on Chinese culture by considering one of its most famous 20th century writers, Lu Xun. Praised by Mao, memed by recent tangpinging jobless youth, his work is known by all Chinese today and studied in highschool. His most famous fictional character has become an idiom: as we’ll see, in the same way we talk about ‘big brother’, without realizing it’s from Orwell, so Chinese people talk about a particular type of person as having ‘Ah Q spirit’. The Ah Q spirit is someone who loses, but retells reality in such a way that they come out on top. (Which, errr, calls to mind a certain tariff-loving world leader.)
For those reasons alone — to get to know China on its own terms — Lu Xun is worth reading. But it goes beyond that: I’ll suggest that having put his work in its historical context, we can see how it speaks to our life today. He lived in chaotic, revolutionary times, in which his world and his father’s were very different. So we do, and we can get a better view on our chaos by considering his.
In order to appreciate his work, however, we’ll need to set the stage a bit, considering the historical and cultural context he was born and lived in.
Background
Lu Xun was born in 1881. Lots was happening in the West: Origin of Species was 40 years ago, Einstein’s paper on special relativity about 25 away. Anna Karenina and Brother Karamazov were newly published, and Joyce was born. Britannia ruled the waves.
Across the globe in China, things were going badly. As Lu Xun grew up, China was perhaps reaching the nadir of its ‘century of humiliation’, as the period of roughly 1840–1950 is known by some Chinese historiographers. Starting with the Brits in the opium wars, more and more countries forced themselves into China, developing trading outposts to get access to commodities hard to find elsewhere, or simply taking land.
Internally, too, things were tough. Famine, widespread opium addiction, increasing internal rebellions, and the simple difficulty of controlling 3.7 million miles of territory meant that the Qing empire, the final one, was struggling.
Before that unfortunate century, China had been run according to an admirable system for tens of centuries. This system came under fire by the people of Lu Xun’s generation, and to properly understand them requires discussing Chinese philosophy, politics, and economics.
In a sense, these three items form a neat system. At its heart, there is the Confucian philosophy. It’s hard to pithily define it, just because defining any large-scale school of thought and ways of life are difficult. (Try defining “democracy” or “liberalism”: it’s not easy.)
But the basic idea is that we are first and foremost occupiers of social roles, and we do well if we behave in the way appropriate for the role we find ourselves in. And our society does well provided there is harmony between its members, and no one is out of place.
Thus a particular person may be a father to children, a husband to his wife, a duke to his subjects, and in turn a subject to those above him, and most of all to the emperor at the top of the pyramid. As father and husband, he rules the household; as duke, he rules a part of the country. And he in turn is ruled by his bosses, until we reach the top of the pyramid, the emperor looking over his kingdom.
One acquired such social roles, dukes, ministries, etc, by competing in a series of grueling competitive exams. This was, for tens of centuries, the goal of becoming literate: first attain a local post, then a provincial one, and finally a national one. The difficulty of these exams, in theory and often in practice, lead to a meritocracy: a rulership by those who most deserve to rule.
The syllabus for these exams, moreover, gave one a fundamental grounding in the philosophical underpinnings just mentioned, as well as what is needed to adequately occupy the role you found yourself in. So, in addition to books of poetry, you’d read books of philosophy, as well as books of etiquette or proper behaviour, and a book of poetry.
You’d be expected to know these books by heart, and, using the classical language they were written in, write essays with convoluted structure about them and perhaps compose poems of your own. Notably, this classical language, the foundation of your education and mastery of which determined your position in society, was increasingly different from the everyday vernacular language which you spoke.
It’s all somewhat interlocking: the fundamental of political philosophy is found in a series of books mastery of which not only determines your prospects but also equips you with the knowledge to occupy the role in which you find yourself.
But as the centuries went on, this classical set of ideas increasingly came to clash with modern reality, as other countries developed and came to look beyond themselves.
The story tends to go that the Brits, in free trader mode, approached the Chinese in the 18th century, seeking to make deals. In turn the emperor responded that they have nothing the Chinese could want — there’s no provision in the classical outlook for such a thing — and declined. Then the Brits came back with guns and opium. Others followed suit, and by 1900 the empire had shrunk and ‘concessions’ had popped up around the country, controlled by Brits, Russians, Japanese, and others.
As Lu Xun came of age, the Qing rulers had made some attempt to catch up militarily to the West, and he went to a naval school first, where he was exposed to foreign languages. Thereafter he was sent, in a government program, to Japan in order to learn ‘Western’ ways, and as such had access to literature, political science, and philosophy coming from the West. He made an attempt to translate European literature, and met with others opposed, in various ways, to the Confucianism that still reigned.
By the time he was thirty five, and his first works appeared, much had changed. The Qing emperor finally abdicated, and a system that had been in place for at least a millenium, and that could trace itself all the way back to Confucius (circa 250bc, notably roughly the same time as Socrates and the Buddha), was seemingly over.
And so the natural question for Lu Xun and his fellows was: what should replace it? There were various thoughts. Some sought a synthesis: a new system that brought together the best of east and west. Others thought Confucianism was simply inconsistent with the best of the West: that evolutionarily, or economically, it was doomed to failure. Many were impressed with the proto-feminism of the era, and thought that the Confucian position on women was sufficient to refute it. And people focused on the language, and came to think that an ancient language was insufficient for the modern world. (For a good source of translated primary texts, see a Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol2, section 6, esp The New Culture Movement.)
With that, we can begin to look at Lu Xun’s work.
Early stories
The first we’ll consider is Diary of a Madman, written in 1917. Already from the title and frame introduction, we see a lot. The title is taken straight from a story of Gogol, and is in the surrealistic style of some of the Ukrainian’s work: it’s a first-person, (possibly?) unreliable narrator. The introduction is written in classical Chinese, but once we get to the diary itself, it is written in the vernacular.
And it’s the diary itself, of course, that is the interesting thing. The introductory, proper wrapper gives way to the narrator, who comes to suspect that his townspeople, his family, the world, are all cannibals.
The standard interpretation, buttressed by comments of Lu Xun himself, is that cannibalism is serving as an allegory for Chinese society itself. But what does that mean?
Well, think about it. What is a cannibal? The cannibal, very broadly, is self-directed, introverted, to an extremely pathological extent. We need something other than ourselves to sustain us: we need to ‘consume’ something other than us, else we’ll go into moral and physical depravity.
The second story is Kong Yiji. Similar to Diary, it it to a large extent imagistic and symbolic. And the symbol is this:
Kong was the only long-gowned customer to drink his wine standing. He was a big man, strangely pallid, with scars that often showed among the wrinkles of his face. He had a large, unkempt beard, streaked with white. Although he wore a long gown, it was dirty and tattered, and looked as if it had not been washed or mended for over ten years. He used so many archaisms in his speech (總是滿口之乎者也), it was impossible to understand half he said.
Note that scholar wear ‘long gowns’, and archaisms are all grammatical particles from classical Chinese. A page later we learn that he was a long unsuccessful examination candidate: he had grown up trying for the imperial exams, and failing, with the result that he is forced to steal for his wine. In the pub, he tries to engage people in conversation, asking the young boy narrator whether he knows how to read, but he is treated with mockery and cruelty by everyone.
And so, very succinctly, we have a picture of the classical culture, as well as the very real hardships it put people through (it was very common to try for the exams several times, so that you could find 30 or 40 year olds still trying out: a real arrested development avant la lettre) We also have a pretty unsympathetic picture of the people apart from Kong: according to Confucian tradition, a learned person should be accorded respect. This is a theme that we’ll see a few times: in Lu Xun’s world, there is little sympathy. The images of the Confucian scholars aren’t positive; but the everyday people are perhaps even worse.
The third story is Medicine. It is to a large extent the same, but speaks more directly to the 1911 revolution, of which, we know from secondary sources, Lu Xun was ambivalent. All that happened was that “the Manchus [the Qing leadership was ethnically Manchu] left the feast”.
Anyway, the plot of this third story is that a couple believe they can save their consumptive child by feeding him a roll dipped in blood. The son duly — spoiler alert — dies, and in the background there is news of a recently executed rebel, who provides the blood. All townspeople are unsympathetic to the rebel’s plight, and seek to pilfer what they can from his body, but the story ends on as hopeful a moment as we get with Xu Lun, as the mother goes to the graveyard to visit her son; happens to meet the mother of the rebel, who notices her son’s grave has been decorated with flowers. The child’s mum symbolically moves to the side of the rebel’s mum, and a bird flies in the distance. While ambiguous, there is a suggestion here that there can be some common core between the townspeople content in their backward old ways and those who try, even if poorly, to improve the Chinese lot. (I take this whole interpretation from Spence’s Gate Of Heavenly Peace, a very good source for this period).
Later stories: a proto-capitalist view on late capitalist realism
Before going on to the most famous work, the novella True Story of Ah Q, I want to consider some more later stories. These date from around the mid-1920s, and I think they are pretty readable on their own terms, and should immediately speak to at least some readers.
Bear in mind the context, both historical and Lu Xun’s own. He was born in a dying empire; having died, no clear replacement occurred. Confucianism didn’t regain a sound footing, but nor did Darwinism, democracy, and other Western ideas. Lu Xun himself, earlier in his career, moreover, struggled personally. Intellectual and academic projects failed: books he edited sold very poorly, and so on.
In these later stories, on my reading, there’s one clear theme: the impossibility of living the sort of free, principled life the reformers envisaged in light of the bare economic necessities of making a living. In addition to his value presenting a picture of a particular moment in time, his treatment of this common theme is worth reading.
The three stories in question are In The Tavern, The Misanthrope, and Regret for the Past. The stories are somewhat similar, so I’ll just talk about Regret. Two young, educated people, interested in the latest ideas and especially feminist, meet, fall in love, and manage to get a place together.
But immediately economic reality hits. The man has to go to work, and the woman almost immediately finds herself required to keep house, to spend all her time cooking, despite having little talent for it.
They want to live the life of their ideals, but they simply can’t, and what I think is valuable is the clear-eyedness of Lu Xun in telling this hopeless story. He tells how the man loses his job, and then is forced to work at home; but the place gets cramped and the cooking distracts him, so he spends more and more time away from home, hiding out in libraries as the only place with heat. Their relationship devolves into silence and icy looks before eventually the woman is ‘taken back’ to her family, her experiment with independent living having been a failure. And the man returns to the hostel he started with, love gone.
The other stories similarly feature disillusionment. People try to live their ideals but realize that they simply can’t, and are forced into work they dislike.
I can so easily imagine this story just slightly updated: the characters are members of DSA who end up having to learn to code (or whatever it is that’ll replace learning to code), or humanities PhDs shuffling from temporary contract to temporary contract, unable to build a home. And so if the first stories present us a world very different from ours, full of historically-grounded symbols not clear, the value of these latter ones is presenting situations we might already be familiar with and doing so completely uncompromisingly.
Ah Q
Let’s now go back a few years. The novella was written in 1921, so between the first and second set of stories we’ve considered. The titular character fits in the earlier world: an uneducated, ring-worm-infected village man who gets by on whatever jobs he can find, and is, like Kong Yigi, a figure of mockery and object of annoyance for his fellow townspeople. I want to discuss three things: the famed Ah Q spirit; the attitude towards the revolution; and the use of classical language. First, the spirit.
The story itself has a Candide-like feel, as the ‘hero’ skips from episode to episode, in each encounter evincing what is called the method of psychological victory (精神勝利法).
Ah Q is a type, and a recognizable one: when things go badly for him, he simply rewrites reality so that he comes out the victor (UK readers might think of Alan Partridge, whose (fictional) autobiography, if I’m recalling correctly, ends anecdotes with ‘needless to say, I had the last laugh’ twelve times).
For an example, early in the book Ah Q is mocked and beaten. How do spin this so that it’s not so humiliating? Simple!
Ah Q would stand there for a second, thinking to himself, “It is as if I were beaten by my son. What is the world coming to nowadays. . . .” Thereupon he too would walk away, satisfied at having won.
He turns his beating into an example of highly unfilial (highly unConfucian) behaviour, and gains some solace. Just after that:
Whatever Ah Q thought he was sure to tell people later; thus almost all who made fun of Ah Q knew that he had this means of winning a psychological victory (他有這一種精神上的勝利法)
So after this anyone who pulled or twisted his brown pigtail would forestall him by saying: “Ah Q, this is not a son beating his father, it is a man beating a beast. Let’s hear you say it: A man bearing a beast!”
Then Ah Q, clutching at the root of his pigtail, his head on one side, would say: “Beating an insect — how about that? I am an insect — now will you let me go?”
[they still beat him as usual but] [I]n less than ten seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking that he was the “foremost self-belittler,” and that after subtracting “self-belittler” what remained was “foremost.” Was not the highest successful candidate in the official examination also the “foremost”? “And who do you think you are anyway?”
A couple of chapters later, Lu Xun seems to want to say that this Ah Q spirit is the essence of being Chinese:
There are said to be some victors who take no pleasure in a victory unless their opponents are as fierce as tigers or eagles: if their adversaries are as timid as sheep or chickens they find their triumph empty. There are other victors who, having carried all before them, with the enemy slain or surrendered, cowering in utter subjection, realize that now no foe, rival, or friend is left — they have only themselves, supreme, solitary, desolate, and forlorn. Then they find their triumph a tragedy. But our hero was not so spineless. He was always exultant. This may be a proof of the psychological supremacy of China over the rest of the world.
Whether this is in any way a notable feature of Chinese people, I doubt. But arguably it’s an important type of guy. Perhaps it’s some sort of recency bias, but I think I see Ah Q spirits causing a lot of problems these days.
Second, revolution. Ah Q, having nothing to lose in his very unpromising situation, decides to join the revolution, not for any idealistic person, but just because things aren’t going well for him. But alas here things don’t go smoothly. Once the rebels come, they seem no better than the deposed Qing, and eventually he ends up being the fall guy for a crime he didn’t commit. The revolution holds out no hope; by virtue (at least) of his inclusion in it, Ah Q is looked even more down upon, and the townspeople generally aren’t pro-revolution. But nor in fact are the revolutionaries admirable seeming in any way. The old system doesn’t work, but nor does the new one, seems to be Lu Xun’s message, and it’s to his credit that he only seldom seeks the sort of consolation, hope, possibility-of-something-better that other writers might be tempted to.
And finally, language. The story, as all the others, is written in vernacular. But classical phrases and allusions pop up, sometimes in Ah Q’s voice, more often in the narrator. Unfortunately for most of us, getting these allusions is pretty tough, and even with google’s help I come up short, but here’s a nice small example.
At one point he wants to have sex with a nun. Having convinced himself by reference to the ancients that it would be unfilial to leave no descendants, he makes advances, which are rebuffed. The narrator notes:
Who could tell that close on thirty, when a man should “stand firm” (而立) he would lose his head like this over a little nun?
This will call to mind a very famous passage from Confucius’s Analects that goes:
At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm (而立); at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the will of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.
What do such uses suggest? The obvious thing is that the classical language, and by extension the user of that language, by further extension the conceptual repertoire of that user, is insufficient to describe the modern world. Cultured people capable of reciting poetry? Certainly. But horny mendicants, not so much. And — somewhat metaphorically speaking — our contemporary world is more horny mendicant, less cultured poet.
The classical language breaks down in trying to capture the modern world. Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a gigantic thing. The language millions of people had relied upon for many many centuries was viewed to have ceased to function. (It should be noted both that, as already noted, people had already spoken a vernacular for a long time; and that there’d even been a number of famous and well-received vernacular novels in centuries past, but I think it was only in the 20th century that was such a self-conscious breaking with the past).
Philosophers sometimes speak of conceptual engineering: of the importance of having as good a language or set of concepts as possible. It materially improved the world — to use the stock example — when the concept of ‘sexual harassment’, denoting an age-old practice of men mistreating women at work that had long gone un-talked about, was invented. Language matters: it helps us see and understand and thus act on the world. If one buys that, then the falling away of the longest-living language is a massive moment in human history.
(Incidentally, it’s been noted that the Chinese got to conceptual engineering 2.5 thousand years before we did: Confucius already put a lot of importance into ‘rectification of language’.)
So hopefully you’re with me that it’s at least of historical interest. But I also think it’s of current interest. With the falling of the last empire, the ceasing of the exam system, and the move to vernacular, Chinese culture changed massively (and much change, of course, would follow).
I have long made the case that we’re in a similar time of massive change, a time in which our ways of representing the world are no longer suitable. The reason for this is simple: the internet.
We do everything on the internet; literally, we spend our lives looking at screens, and that has brought with us a range of new affordances. In fact-checking this this morning, I talked to a Hong Kong friend thousands of miles and 7 timezones away about the use of ‘Ah Q 精神’; last week, an anonymous and false Tweet added some billions to the stock market. We know it’s weird, but we haven’t really gotten that far beyond saying that it’s weird. We don’t have a language for our new reality (oddly enough, I think man of the Current Thing, Bloomsberg finance journalist Joe Weisenthal, has a really interesting take about the change our culture is undergoing).
Similarly, there is no great internet novel; there is no great internet tv show. The reason is, I think, obvious: any TV show that was realistic, that showed somebody staring at work screen before returning to stare at home screen, all the while in the breaks staring at small, personal screen, wouldn’t be super interesting. Realism doesn’t work today, but we don’t know what does.
Maybe that’s tendentious. Maybe I’m trying to extract too much from the supposed analogy between the collapse of the Confucian culture and the advent of the internet. But at the very least, I hope you can appreciate what a time that must have been for educated Chinese people, especially able — as were Lu Xun and his friends — to go beyond the Chinese language and get Western knowledge from German, English, Russian.
So that’s the briefest of introductions to Lu Xun. We should care about him as giving a portrait of the Chinese in duress, and at a unique and fascinating historical moment. We should read him for his pessimistic realism about simply getting by without giving up one’s ideals, and for his view of the Chinese. And ‘Ah Q’ spirit is something to add to your vocabulary, in light of the fact that the theoretically most powerful man in the world has and will probably continue to gain ‘psychological victories’ as he continues to trash the world’s most powerful economy.
