Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

Throughout the 1920s, despite unrelenting political turmoil, complicated by the interests and interventions of foreign nations, Chinese hopes for national unification and economic reconstruction remained constant. Yet neither the political leaders in Beijing nor the regionally based warlords had been able to extend control over the entire country. Further, the Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), was disorganized, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; established in 1921) was weak.⁷ By early 1923 the new government of the Soviet Union, which had been advising the CCP, brokered an agreement that pressured CCP members also to join the Nationalist Party, which the Soviets judged best positioned to re-unify the nation. Indeed, by1928, the Nationalists, now under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975), had overthrown the warlords and seized nominal control of the central government and most of the nation. In consolidating power, the Nationalist Party had also brutally turned against its own left wing and, contrary to Soviet expectations, decimated its Communist partners. Attempting to rebuild the nation, the cash-strapped Nationalist government nevertheless organized new administrative structures and, strongly grounded in urban areas, laid foundational infrastructure for a modern nation. Yet the party proved unable to address the problems of rural China and never managed to destroy the Communists, who rooted themselves in the countryside. The two enemies’ military confrontations continued until the Japanese invasion and the onset of World War II precipitated a united front, which was soon followed by civil war and its resolution with the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China.⁸

Lu Xun’s thinking had evolved greatly during these tumultuous times. He and his small cohort had taken up literature as a means to national transformation. His early optimism that literary activity could change people’s hearts and minds and so bring about social change, a pursuit energetically expressed in essays he wrote while in Japan, had by the 1920s evolved into great doubts about its potency as an agent of change. Nevertheless, urged on by others and his own internal imperatives, he wrote short stories that articulated the problems of Chinese society and