The 140th Anniversary of Lu Xun

The West has George Orwell. We have Lu Xun (魯迅), one of the greatest writers in Asia in the 20th century.

In early 1927, Lu was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for the short story The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正傳), despite a poor English translation and annotations that were nearly double the size of the text. However, Lu declined to be nominated due partly to the domestic political environment and Lu’s deep disappointment in the Chinese society at that time.

One of my favourite lines from Lu’s works is “Do not break out in silence, perish in silence” (不在沈默中爆發，就在沈默中滅亡). Late Communist leader of China Mao Zedong (毛澤東) — himself a big fan of Lu’s writings — once said had Lu survived until the 1950s, he would "either have gone silent or gone to prison.”

This year marks the 140th anniversary of Lu, born on September 25, 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, the Qing Dynasty of China.