The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China

Rana Mitter Lu Xun should be known to a wide range of readers overseas for two reasons. One – in a sense the more boring reason – is that he is politically very important. He’s always been brought up by the Communist Party as being the single most important writer of the 20th century in China. That’s partly because his message is about how China needed to radically reject its past associated with the Confucian system of ethics that underpinned the old empires, and instead embrace something more new and radical. You can see how that appealed to people involved in the Communist project. (Source)

Ma Jian This story is very famous, and also very short. Lu Xun didn’t write much in his life, and wrote both journalism and essays in newspapers, and literature. He was very outspoken in both. If a writer loses his criticism of society, I think that he is afraid to write about the truth. From reading Lu Xun, we can discover how authors must maintain a critical perspective. (Source)