ABSTRACT
Needless to say, Lu Xun did not really believe that literacy per se was synonymous with ideological contagion. In fact, by the time he wrote this essay, he was already actively involved with the reformist May Fourth movement’s attempts to increase literacy by promoting the use of vernacular Chinese for literature and other purposes. Similarly, his critique of a disease of canonicity presumably did not extend to all literary canons tout court, given that he was himself one of the central figures of the May Fourth movement’s efforts, during the 1920s, to establish itself as the new literary orthodoxy for modern China.
