What Do Chinese People Today Think of Lu Xun?
In a convenient follow-up to our much ignored translation and analysis of Lu Xun’s changing place in education, we ran across this post on Anti-CNN.
It’s a poll that asks “What kind of person was Lu Xun?” So far, 382 people have voted. People were allowed to select up to seven of the choices. Here are the results so far:
For more up-to-the-minute results you can check their site, but you’ll have to vote to see the graph and there won’t be any English text. We’ll leave the analysis to you on this one. Some of the comments of voters:
So someone in the forum is trying to destroy Lu Xun again eh? Ha ha, ridiculous.
…He was someone who had left China and studied abroad, so his perspective was larger than those domestic ground beetles, probably because of this there is [stronger] thought in his essays…I don’t dare compliment his private life, keeping a mistress, playing with female students…however thinking about how at that time [China] had just separated from its feudal societal state, men with many wives and concubines were still very common, so I won’t criticize too much.
Using the language of today: colluding with Japanese anti-China forces, publishing illegal magazines, inciting the ignorant masses, making chaos in society, influencing the harmony of society, the web manager should check his IP and he should be pursued across all borders.
Lu Xun is everyone’s Lu Xun. No matter how different the two sides are that are arguing, both can say “If Lu Xun were alive…”
This has given me a headache, who was Lu Xun really?
An old fenqing [angry youth], an old study-abroad student
I don’t know what kind of person Lu Xun was, the Lu Xun that I “know” all comes from things other people have said.
If you speak Chinese and are interested, check out the original post as there are tons of comments (over 24 pages).
Notice anything interesting here? What do you think of Lu Xun?
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That’s one of the strangest polls I’ve ever seen. Is that par for the course or conservative?
It is a bit bizarre. I have no idea if it’s par for the course or not; I’ve never seen another poll on Lu Xun (or anything similar really)…
After writing of how conservatives blame the May 4th movement and Lu Xun for the Cultural Revolution, fans of “guoxue re” blame Lu Xun for breaking with Confucian traditions, postmodernists blame Lu Xun as an “accomplice of power” for his careful rationality, post-colonialists blame Lu Xun for pandering to Western stereotypes of China through his “A Q” portrait, and liberals blame Lu Xun for being narrow-minded and anti-Western… Qian Liqun remarks, “Here then, is a striking cultural phenomenon. Chinese literary and academic circles of the past decade have been dominated by every possible -ism: yet no matter what -ism was adopted, almost without exception ‘criticizing Lu Xun’ was felt to be a necessary step to promote it.” To paraphrase Qian, if you piss everyone off, you might be onto something.