ABSTRACT
The Literary Revolution in China that began around 1917 – six years after the fall of the decaying Qing Dynasty – created multiple modernities, defined broadly as Westernization and break from tradition. China’s premier fiction writer of the time, Lu Xun, and the writers of the May Fourth Movement – an anti-imperialist and modernization front – used modernity as a tool to bring about Chinese participation in the outside world, producing literature demonizing both Confucian and Christian tradition and uniting workers and peasants. Both the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party attempted to either extinguish the spark of creativity or coerce writers to adhere to the party line. Some fiction pieces carried a whiff of revolutionary didacticism and propaganda, but Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Rou Shi, and Zhao Shuli produced classics depicting women’s struggle for liberation from foot-binding, sale of wives, domestic violence, and brutal exploitation. Lu Xun, in particular, took a surreal route by presenting the superstition-ridden Chinese society as cannibals eating other Chinese people: The hegemonic upper class consumed the poor class and the reformers, erasing all trace of their identity.
On the one hand, Chinese communist literature resisted imposition of Western literary style, seeing it as a dangerous collusion of imperialism and modernism. On the other hand, Chinese writers were accused of borrowing aesthetics and creative techniques from Western literature, saddling Chinese literature with the erroneous impression of being a failed imitation. But by replacing aesthetics with the criterion of modernity, modern Chinese literature wrests back autonomy from the West because the Chinese actually created their own modernity by using Western sources received via Japan.
