Abstract
What would have happened if Lu Xun had lived after the founding of the country? Asked this question, Mao Zedong replied, “He would either be silenced or in jail.” Although Mao Zedong, a political giant, and Lu Xun, a literary giant, never met in practice, this hypothetical question is an excellent measure of Mao’s attitude toward cultural and intellectual figures. This chapter looks at Mao’s harsh criticism of Liang Shuming and Hu Feng, and reveals that Mao’s politics-first view of literature and art is fundamentally incompatible with that of Lu Xun, and that it was inevitable that the two would have eventually clashed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In this speech, Mao mistakenly believes that Kautsky, an Austrian of Czech descent who was active in Germany, was a Russian.
- 2.
This story is taken from an autobiography (Zhou 2001) written by Lu Xun’s only son, Zhou Haiying, in which he wrote the following. “He (Luo Jinan) kept this in his heart and never revealed it to anyone. Only when Dr. Luo became very ill did he decide that this secret dialogue of decades ago needed to be made public and should not be taken to the grave, so he finally entrusted it all to one trusted student” (Zhou 2001, p. 371). Later, when Zhou Haiying attended a symposium in 1996, he heard it from that student.
- 3.
Some argue that these hypotheses are meaningless (e.g., Marukawa 2010), but I believe that they are very effective as thought experiments in considering the character, behavior, and beliefs of the charismatic figure known as Mao Zedong.
- 4.
http://www.chinanews.com/cul/2011/07-05/3159225.shtml. Mao Zedong came from Hunan Province and his southern dialect was said to be difficult to understand.
- 5.
It is located next to the Imperial Palace, the seat of the Party and government, and Mao’s residence was there.
- 6.
One of the conference halls in Zhongnanhai. It is used for various political meetings and as a venue for literature and art.
- 7.
Hsi Shih (Xi Shi), Wang Chao Chun (Wang Zhaojun), and Yang Kueifei (Yang Guifei), together with Diao Chan, are considered the four most beautiful women in Chinese history.
- 8.
The Zunyi Conference was the enlarged meeting of the Central Political Bureau at which the anti-mainstream faction led by Mao Zedong, who insisted on achieving a revolution that encompassed the cities by establishing a base in the countryside, took the lead against the mainstream faction that advocated an urban revolution in line with the COMINTERN’s directives. See Chap. 9.
- 9.
A labor camp refers to a prison that is the equivalent of a Soviet concentration camp. Originally, they were created by separating prisoner work facilities, such as farms and factories built inside prisons, with the purpose of correcting prisoners through labor, but in reality they became facilities for incarcerating political prisoners without trial procedures together with criminal prisoners.
- 10.
On August 1, 1935, the Communist Party of China issued the “August 1 Declaration” calling for a united anti-Japanese front, and in response, Party literary figures such as Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, and Zhou Libo proposed the slogan “National Defense Literature.” On the other hand, Lu Xun, Feng Xuefeng, Hu Feng, and others opposed the style of Zhou Yang and others and proposed the slogan “Mass Literature in the National Revolutionary War,” then a “national defense literature debate” developed between these two groups.
- 11.
For a detailed history of the intervening years, see Li (1996) and Maruyama (2001).
- 12.
A literary figure and philosopher who studied in the United States. Upon returning to China, he became a professor and later the president of Peking University. However, due to his support for the Kuomintang, he migrated to Taiwan after the Civil War.
- 13.
See Li (1996) Vol. 1, Chaps. 6 and 7, for more details.
- 14.
When Zhou Yang went to Mao Zedong to ask him about the handling of a mistake found in the draft stage of publishing a “self-criticism” written by Hu Feng in the People’s Daily, Mao told him, “I don’t care about such things; Hu Feng is already a counterrevolutionary,” leaving those involved speechless. See Maruyama (2001), pp. 150–151.
- 15.
From Lu Xun Selected Works, Vol. 12, pp. 132–133, 136. The explanation in Zhang (2009) and this text differ slightly in content.
- 16.
The Futian incident was an internal military uprising and purge that took place in 1930–31 in Futian, Jiangxi Province, in which a large number of officers and soldiers were exposed and executed for the alleged existence of a secret KMT organization (AB group) within the Red Army (see, for example, Beihai Xianren (2005), from p. 13). Mao Zedong, the Supreme Leader of the Red Army at the time, was naturally involved in the purge, and according to Beihai Xianren, he was the mastermind behind the incident. However, the official Biography of Mao Zedong only mentions the incident in passing. In September 1956, at the preparatory meeting for the Eighth Congress of the CPC, Mao mentioned the AB purge campaign in the Soviet District of Jiangxi Province, saying that he had made a mistake and erroneously purged the AB group, but he avoided going into details and did not criticize himself.
- 17.
This is a direct quote from Lu Xun to Masuda Wataru. It is introduced in Masuda’s “Commentary” in Lu Xun Selected Works Vol. 7, pp. 236–237.
- 18.
Uchiyama Kanzo, the owner of Uchiyama Bookstore in Shanghai in pre-War China, is known as having protected Lu Xun for long time.
- 19.
This statement is described in his Denghuo Manbi (Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor).
- 20.
It was not until 1965 that he was formally sentenced, and Hu Feng had been in prison ever since his arrest in 1955.
- 21.
If the literary scholar Lu Xun had clashed with the politician Mao Zedong, he might, in the extreme case, have been practically killed. However, Mao may have done what he did to Liang Shuming and placed Lu Xun under house arrest rather than taking his life, thereby blocking his activities.
- 22.
One interpretation of the poem is that “I ‘mocked myself’ for working as an ox for my young son Zhou Haiying” (Fujii 2002, p. 181), and since the title of the poem is “self-mockery,” that interpretation seems to be more correct.
- 23.
This is a re-quotation from Zhu (2013), Vol. 1, p. 107. The same point is made in “Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work (March 12, 1957)” (Mao Selected Works, Vol. 5, p. 412). However, Lu Xun’s name is not mentioned there.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nakagane, K. (2024). Mao Zedong and Lu Xun: What If Lu Xun Had Survived the Revolution?. In: Mao Zedong and Contemporary China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1761-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1761-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-97-1760-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-97-1761-3
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)