---
node: lu_xun
type: person
slug: lu_xun
title: "Lu Xun"
lead: "Lu Xun (1881–1936), pen name of Zhou Shuren, is the central figure of modern Chinese literature, whose stories and essays dissected his society."
published: 2026-07-09
updated: 2026-07-09
---

## Who they were

Zhou Shuren wrote as Lu Xun. He studied medicine at Sendai in Japan and, by his own account after seeing a lantern slide of an apathetic crowd, abandoned it to heal spirits through writing instead.

## What they did

"A Madman's Diary" (1918, in the journal New Youth) was the first major modern short story in vernacular Chinese — its madman reads "eat people" between the lines of tradition. "The True Story of Ah Q" (1921–22) satirized self-consoling "spiritual victories". His zawen essays made him the sharpest social critic of the era. He led the League of Left-Wing Writers from 1930 but never joined the Communist Party, and died in Shanghai in 1936.

## Legacy

Canonized in the PRC curriculum, he remains a writer whose irony resists simple sainthood.