Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

with bayonets disbanded the marchers. Although hard-core activists continued to organise sporadic protest movements, these inevitably resulted in imprisonments and sometimes death. Since the late nineteenth century Chinese intellectuals had been fighting to establish democratic institutions modelled on England and later on the United States. Having been sold out by the Western democracies that they had for so long worshipped, many Chinese intellectuals turned to the Russian model as a means of saving China from Western and Japanese imperialism. For patriotic reasons, many intellectuals also came to be convinced that organised collective action was necessary. Historians locate the end of the May Fourth era in the year 1921, the year in which the Chinese Communist Party was established and when greater efforts were made to strengthen the Chinese Nationalist Party.

China’s humiliation by the industrialised capitalism of the West and Japan dated to the middle of the nineteenth century, and during the New Culture Movement of the May Fourth era, Nietzsche’s superman empowered Chinese youth to seize the mantle of authority from their elders, whom they held responsible for propagating moribund cultural practices that impeded the modernisation of the nation necessary for it to enjoy status equal to that of other nations around the world. Confucian society was a clearly demarcated hierarchical, male-dominated society in which a person was hostage to the dictates of his or her superiors. Although barely understood, Nietzsche became a mantra for Chinese youth, who demanded the total trashing of traditional culture, including the literature and the classical language in which it was written. Lu Xun (1881–1936) emerged as leader of a younger cohort of writers who laid the foundations of China’s new literature, which was written in the vernacular language, modelled on modern Western writings, and dealt with contemporary society. Inspired by Nietzsche, many of these writers believed that their writings would help change society. However, the older and wiser Lu Xun knew well the fate of Russian writers after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and having experienced the ecstasy of writing two books of short stories and a book of prose poems, he