How much relevance do you believe Lu Xun has to modern China today?
I think that he’s relevant in a couple of ways. First, I think you still see his strange brand of nationalism (a passionate attachment to, yet disgust with China) in the PRC. China today is supposedly to be fully resurgent – yet even its elites remain eager for foreign approval and acknowledgement. The whole run-up to the Olympics was a case in point, with Beijing bubbling over with shiny, confident new building projects, while waging mass education campaigns to eradicate bad habits like spitting that might disgust foreigners. Secondly, Lu Xun left a complicated, contradictory legacy to Chinese literature: of cosmopolitanism and independence, but also of factional fractiousness and anxious patriotism. There are scholars in the West who, while acknowledging the power of Lu Xun’s writing, draw a pretty direct link between his angry, quarrelsome behaviour in the Chinese literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and the vicious cultural politics of the Mao period. A writer like Lu Xun was a f
