Friday, December 13, 2002

Lu Xun, one of the most intelligent and most original of the May 4th intellectuals in China, joined the Chinese branch of the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930 (the League was part of or affiliated with or at least sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party; not sure) but hated it and left because he said the Soviet idea of a perfect poem went like this:

Oh, steam whistle!
Oh, Lenin!

From Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, (1990; 1999 edition; damned if I remember the page number.) Spence says that Lu Xun refused to join the CCP and until his death in 1936 told the young Chinese writers to maintain a sense of Chinese culture, of social problems/conditions, and of the ridiculous.