Comparing Lu Xun's Novels and Philip P. Pans’s Out of Mao’s Shadow
HIEA 2031-104
November 28th, Fall 2012
Pengyu Jiang
Final Paper, Topic 1
Last year in October, government leaders from both Mainland China and Taiwan were holding receptions across the nation to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, a revolution that terminated 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. This revolution, however, also uncovered the 100 years of authoritarian rule in China. In both the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-), though the official governments boasted that they have successfully saved the nation, turned it truly democratic, and bestowed real happiness to the common mass, in fact elements of personal oppression and dehumanization are still considerably common in the society. The depictions of such elements are abundant in the prominent Chinese writer Lu Xun’s short stories finished around 1920, as well as in the contemporary U.S. journalist Philip P. Pans’s Out of Mao’s Shadow—a collection of reportages about modern China published in 2008. Both authors described how ordinary, low-income, mostly uneducated men and women who had no special connections with influential figures were oppressed in these two very different time periods. In Diary of a Madman (1918), Lu Xun’s “madman” mentioned the bitter experiences of the ordinary people around him—“some have worn the cangue on the district magistrate’s order, some have had their faces slapped by the gentry, some have had their wives ravished by yamen clerks, some have had their dads and moms dunned to death by creditors”1. In Dragonboat Festival (1922), Lu Xun referred a street demonstration of college faculties aimed to get their delayed salaries from the government, but “the only tangible result of this demonstration was that government troops beat the professors bloody on a soggy stretch of ground in front of the New China Gate”2. Women were especially vulnerable in such a social circumstance. In Tomorrow
November 28th, Fall 2012
Pengyu Jiang
Final Paper, Topic 1
Last year in October, government leaders from both Mainland China and Taiwan were holding receptions across the nation to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, a revolution that terminated 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. This revolution, however, also uncovered the 100 years of authoritarian rule in China. In both the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-), though the official governments boasted that they have successfully saved the nation, turned it truly democratic, and bestowed real happiness to the common mass, in fact elements of personal oppression and dehumanization are still considerably common in the society. The depictions of such elements are abundant in the prominent Chinese writer Lu Xun’s short stories finished around 1920, as well as in the contemporary U.S. journalist Philip P. Pans’s Out of Mao’s Shadow—a collection of reportages about modern China published in 2008. Both authors described how ordinary, low-income, mostly uneducated men and women who had no special connections with influential figures were oppressed in these two very different time periods. In Diary of a Madman (1918), Lu Xun’s “madman” mentioned the bitter experiences of the ordinary people around him—“some have worn the cangue on the district magistrate’s order, some have had their faces slapped by the gentry, some have had their wives ravished by yamen clerks, some have had their dads and moms dunned to death by creditors”1. In Dragonboat Festival (1922), Lu Xun referred a street demonstration of college faculties aimed to get their delayed salaries from the government, but “the only tangible result of this demonstration was that government troops beat the professors bloody on a soggy stretch of ground in front of the New China Gate”2. Women were especially vulnerable in such a social circumstance. In Tomorrow