Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

In 1905 the examination system, which had incentivized the perpetuation of Confucian tradition and the continuity of Chinese intellectual culture, was abolished, helping to unleash new thinking in all areas of cultural life. Premises inherited from the past with respect to government, society, culture, even the meaning of human life itself, were all up for reconsideration. The loosening of government control permitted a period of creative intellectual ferment in which an energetic new generation of educated young people rejected major elements of Confucian culture (e.g., patriarchal family structure, formalized rituals of various kinds) and the classical language through which it was embodied and communicated. Instead, influenced by their introduction to Western values and modes of thought, they called for new thinking with respect to democracy, science, rational thought, empirical knowledge, individual and subjective experience, gender roles, and family structures and norms. They insisted that a new written language was required to express new ideas, not one whose difficulty restricted its value to a highly educated elite, but one that could be used by the population more broadly and that would enable their participation in nation-building.

The new generation of young urban intellectuals formed numerous literary societies, each with its own journal and employing the spoken vernacular as their medium of expression. They expected that literature, and the journals in which it was published, would constitute a forum for the interchange of dynamic, new thinking and for discussing urgent issues of national importance.⁵ An explosion of commercial activity in coastal cities, including the rise of the publishing industry, created new vehicles for intellectual and popular expression. The importance of these outlets was intensified by the events of May 4, 1919, when students in Beijing launched street protests against the Chinese government which, they claimed, was on the verge of capitulating to unfavorable terms for China in the Treaty of Versailles. The demonstrations spread beyond Beijing to Shanghai and other cities and were taken up by workers, merchants, and businessmen. It was the first major national movement of political protest and accelerated the spread of newspapers, journals, and other