Lu Xun (1881-1936) is one of China’s most celebrated essayist and short-story writers. His writing “was peerless–at once sardonic and sentimental, burning with the idealism of youth in one passage, then cold, bleak and despairing in the next.” (Wealth and Power, page 152). Lu also spent time in Japan, originally to attend medical school. Propaganda… Read more »
Chen moved to his native Anhui province and launched a journal, in the mold of Liang Qichao in Japan. Chen’s Anhui Commong Speech Journal was influenced by the same Social Darwinist ideas running through the work of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. At the same time, Chen founded the Anhui Patriotic Society to help stir up patriotism…
A new face of Chinese dissidence emerged in the mid 1980s in Beijing, an Astrophysics professor named Fang Lizhi. With his physics background, the Western press dubbed Fang, “China’s Sakharov.” At a speech at Beijing University in November 1985, Fang urged the students in the audience to: “…be open to different ways of thinking…and willing to… Read more »