Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

rebellions that decimated several Chinese provinces and weakened central government power. Adjusting to the Western threat was particularly difficult because it also posed an existential challenge to an entity that had defined itself as a universalistic, superior civilization to which others paid respect and homage.

China was suddenly forced against its will to redefine itself as a nation-state among others of equal standing. The Chinese leadership elite were consumed with the questions of why China had “fallen behind” in the competition for global power, position, and prosperity, and what it needed to do to catch up and stave off further catastrophe. Initially the government perceived the threat in military and technological terms. Over time it came to understand Western power as linked to its institutions, including the forms of governance, and finally to hypothesize that thought and culture had contributed to its dominance. The Chinese imperial government’s attempts at military, political, economic, and social reform seemed completely insufficient to the scope and speed needed to accomplish the Herculean task of rapid transformation.

At least that was the view of a core group of Chinese urban intellectuals who, growing impatient with the failure of reform efforts, also became convinced that at base China’s problems were being generated by patterns of thought and behavior arising from within China itself. They concluded that radical changes in the cultural and social domains were required to overthrow and replace old ways they had inherited with new patterns better suited to current challenges. This elite group shaped the intellectual discourse of their time and in some cases for decades to come. While certainly not unitary in their thinking, they advocated a critical, sometimes iconoclastic approach to Chinese society and cultural values. They called for incorporation of Western knowledge and perspectives as they strove to create a new China that would have power sufficient to reunite the country, reinvigorate Chinese culture, and expel unwanted foreign interference.