SOURCE: "Notes on Lu Xun," in Chinese Literature, Vol. 7, No. 7, July, 1982, pp. 94-104.

In this excerpt, Jiang stresses Lu Hsün's sympathy for the working and oppressed classes as a primary inspiration for his writing.

In 1920, Lu Xun published his short story "A Small Incident".

At that time he was not a Marxist but a revolutionary democrat. However, because he maintained close contacts with the peasants and had a relatively correct understanding of China's toiling masses, his stand differed from the humanism of certain bourgeois and petty-bourgeois writers. He did not condescend to the working people, or simply describe their "inferiority" or "wretchedness". In several stories in Call to Arms and Wandering Lu Xun's aim was to express the decadence of so-called high society and the misery of so-called low society, to expose the disease, in the hope that some remedy would be found. He sympathized with the...