GEORGE ORWELL AND LU XUN

by He Guanghua

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA (Honours)

School of English Faculty of Arts University of New South Wales

February 1992 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis stems from a conversation with Professor Michael Hollington, School of English, University of New South Wales - to him my deepest thanks for his knowledge and insight from which I have immensely benefited, and not least his great patience which is much needed in this work.

I am grateful to the following people who have been of great help to me during my work: Professor Mary Chan of University of New South Wales, Professor John Cleverley of Sydney University, Dr. Bruce Johnson of University of New South Wales, Mr. Tom Cappie -Wood and Mr. John Holman for their encouragement and reading my manuscript and suggesting many improvements. I am specially· indebted to Mr. Chiu-yee Cheung of Sydney University from whom I received much assistant and generous help in my work, from discussing every idea in the writing to resolving many related computer problems.

I acknowledge with gratitude the support from the Harbour Foundation and Harbour family, in particular their youngest son Daniel, to enable me to pursue this study.

Finally I am grateful to my husband Mr Huang Jianshe in Wuhan, China for his constant encouragement and support.

He Guanghua

28 February 1992 Table of Content

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Historical Background of the Thirties 10

Chapter 3 A Comparison Between the Genesis of The Two Writers 47

Chapter 4 Their Scepticism in LiteraryForm

-A comparison Between Animal J<'arm and "Curbing the Flood"

107

Chapter 5 Conclusion 146

Appendix A Comparative Chronology of George Orwell and Lu Xun 151

Abbreviations 158

Bibiography 159 Chapter One Introduction

In the search for a better society and more rational human relationships, socialism has been alluring to intellectuals oJseveral generations. However, intellectuals are difficult to win over. First of all, their longing for a better society grows out of a critical attitude towards the existing society of their times. One could say that intellectuals are born to be critical and that no one who lacks a critical mind deserves the label "intellectual".1 It is perhaps of the essence of intellectuals to lose faith when the supposed dream comes true. Literature and politics are in constant conflict, as both George Orwell (Eric Blair, 1903-1950) and Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) observed; because governments want to maintain the status quo and writers usually want a better society, they are frequently at odds with each other. It is a permanent conflict which one can win and for which no one can be blamed.

But it is not the intention of this thesis to discuss these issues in the abstract: the point is, simply, that I find that this conflict is to be observed in George Orwell and Lu Xun. Their critical attitude towards their time and society produced in them a turn to the left, but the same critical attitude also

1 There are different implications of the word "intellectual". But "in general, one can say that the intellectuals are the custodians of the tradition of creative and critical thinking about the normative problems of their society and the effort of men to relate themselves to symbols of meaning outside their imediate self-interest and experience." Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass (ed.), The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Collins <1977), p.315. See also Raymond Williams, Keywords, Fontana 0979), pp. 140-42.

1 forbade them from being assimilated into the communist party. They remained "fellow travellers", or even critical "un-orthodox" left-wing writers. Because George Orwell and Lu Xun had critical minds, their conflicts with the ideals of their times, namely the Soviet model of socialism and the communist party apparatus, also had the effect of revealing some fundamental problems in human society which cannot be solved by means of political revolution or reform. These conflicts will live on beyond the collapse of communism in

Eastern Europe and USSR. It is possible that some common characteristics of left-wing writers will be revealed through the comparison of George Orwell and Lu Xun in the process of demonstrating how they became attached to the ideal of socialism and later disillusioned with it, and how they developed insights into the monster which grew out from the dreams of their forerunners.

We may first ask what justifies a comparison between these two writers? First of all, they are among the most influential and controversial writers of this century, with reputations rising steadily since their deaths. Their writings have been translated into many languages and widely read throughout the world. Today, scholars' interest in George Orwell and Lu Xun is still on the increase, despite the past achievements of research into their work. In their turn, they have been compared with many other writers. George Orwell for examples has been compared with Charles Dickens,2 Huxley,3 Zamyatin,4

2 Gordon Beadle, "George Orwell and Charles Dickens: Moral Critics of Society", Journal of Historical Studies, 2 (1969-70), pp. 245-55. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell and Huxley (New Haven, 1965), pp. 37-73. 4 E.g. Gorman Beauchamp, "Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamyatin's We and Orwell's 1984 ". Comparative Literature Studies, 10 (1973), pp. 285-301.

2 and with Koestler;5 in the case of Lu Xun, parallels have been drawn between Lu Xun and Russian writers,6 Japanese writers,7 the English poet Byron,8 and the German philosopher Nietzsche. 9 However, as far as I am aware, no

comparison between Lu Xun and George Orwell has been undertaken. This thesis will be the first to attempt to compare the similarities and differences between these two prominent writers.

Yet a comparative study of them offers many challenges because of the fact that George Orwell and Lu Xun came from different cultural backgrounds and lived in different political situations: the former in the West, in the imperialistic Empire of Great Britain, and the latter in the East, in the semi­ feudal and semi-colonial society of China. It is most unlikely that they knew or had ever heard of one another. Under these circumstances, questions may

5 E.g. Jenni Calder, Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George OrweU and Arthur Koestler, London, 1968. 6 E.g. Han Changjing, Lu Xun yu Eluosi gudian wenxue (Lu Xun and Russian Classical Literature), Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe (1981); Wang Furen, Lu Xun qianqi xiaoshuo yu Eluosi wenxue (Lu Xun's Early Short Stories and Russian Literature), Xi'an: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe 0984). 7 E.g. Sun Xizhen, "Lu Xun yu Riben wenxue" (Lu Xun and Japanese Literature), in Lu Xun yu Zhong-wai wenhua de bijiao yanjiu (The Comparative Studies Between Lu Xun and World's Culture), Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian Chuban Gongsi (1986), pp. 391-403. 8 Chen Mingshu, "Lu Xun yu Bailun" (Lu Xun & Byron), in Lu Xun yu Zhong-wai wenhua de bijiao yanjiu (The Comparative Studies Between Lu Xun and World's Culture), op. cit., pp. 328-335. 9 E.g. Chiu-yee Cheung, Nicai yu Lu Xun sixiangfazhan (Nietzsche and the Development of Lu Xun's Thought), Hong Kong: Qingwen Shuwu (1987); "Lu Hsun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927," Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 18/19 (1986- 87), pp. 3-25.

3 arise about the validity of this study. I would defend the comparison by making reference to the theory and practice of comparative literature.

First of all, comparative literature studies can be divided into several branches: comparison between two writers in different times or countries or cultures, between literary movements in different countries or cultures, between literature and other disciplines, thematic (Stoffgeschichte) comparison, etc.10 For obvious reasons, I confine myself to the discussion of a comparison between two writers in two different cultures. Within this category, there are two major approaches: the study of influence and the method of rapprochement.

It would seem that the difference between these two approaches lies in whether there is or is not a certain contact between the source of influence and the writer or his/her work(s) influenced. If there is some kind of contact, then an influence study can be established. Alternatively, the method of rapprochement may be applied to isolate "analogies without contact".11

According to A. Owen Aldridge:

The vast majority of studies in comparative literature at the present time are

devoted to an exploration and presentation of resemblance in particular works of

-\ lO See Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory: Servey and Definition, tr. William Riggan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 3-28; Jan Brandt Corstius, Introduction to the Comparative Study of Literature (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 21ff; S. S. Prawer, Comparative Literary Studies (London: Duckworth, 1973), pp. 1-73, 99-165. 11 A. Owen Aldridge, "The Purpose and Perspectives of Comparative Literature", in A. Owen Aldridge (ed.), Comparative Literature: Matter and Method (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1969), p. 5; Ihab H. Hassan, "The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes Towards a Definition", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XIV:1 (September 1955), p. 68.

4 two or more national literatures .... the majority concern works by authors who

have had no direct contact with each other and who may not even have been

aware of each other's existence. 12

The idea of resemblance studies, though we may also discuss some problems of influence, would seem to provide an adequate justification for the approach adopted in this thesis.

Despite the fact that they had no direct contact with each other, there are certainly many similarities between George Orwell and Lu Xun. First of all, they lived through one of the most turbulent periods in human history-the first half of the present century, in which left wing literature developed and flourished because at that time, especially in the thirties, many writers, and indeed other artists and intellectuals, had turned to socialism to provide what they thought might be a permanent cure for the crises of the capitalist world. However, Orwell was unlike other British left wing writers and was attacked by them for his criticism of Russian Communism at that time. Lu Xun, a leading left-wing writer in China during the thirties, also sharply criticized those orthodox left-wing writers and showed his suspicion of the likely results of the communist party coming to power.

12 A. Owen Aldridge, The Reemergence of World Literature. A Study of Asia and the West (University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1986), pp. 44-45.

5 Their unorthodox socialist tendency is, in more specific terms, due to their humanism, patriotism and opposition to totalitarianism.13 George

Orwell's stand against totalitarianism is manifested in the criticism of imperialism and fascism in his early writings and of Stalinism in his later writings; in Lu Xun's case, it is manifested in the criticism of feudalism, of Kuomintang oppression, of the Japanese invaders, and of the pro-Moscow Chinese communists in their literary writings. Both Lu Xun and George Orwell display deep sympathy for the oppressed in colonial and semicolonial societies. They strongly identified themselves with their native countries and their respective peoples. They inclined to socialism because they believed that it would produce a society that might bring freedom and equality to the people of Britain and China respectively.

George Orwell and Lu Xun can also be considered as essayists, whose writings are often weapons of social reform and criticism. That their essays also contributed to the reform of the language and literature of their own countries has also been generally recognized. This thesis will concentrate on

13 "Totalitarianism" is a term in political science in this century which imp lies: "A theoretical view of Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet communism which sees them as examples of a political system dominated by a single party and ideology in which all political, economic, and social activities are absorbed and subsumed and all dissidence suppressed by police terrorism. Total monopoly of the ordinary flow of information and public argument is essential to such a system". (Alan Bullock & Oliver Stallybrass ed., The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Lonodn: Collins, 1977, p. 640.) I will suggest here that Chinese "feudalism", or "Oriental Despotism", can also be regarded as a kind of totalitarianism, even though it did not have at its disposal the power of modern technology. See Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 101-160.

6 their specific qualities as writers through a comparison of two of their short stories: Animal Farm and "Curbing the Flood". Orwell's fable Animal Farm, which earned him world fame, demonstrates similarities with a work taken from Lu Xun's Old Stories Retold in their political implications and their symbolic and satirical styles. The comparison of these two works, I believe, will reveal similarities of literary technique as well as of ideas.

This thesis will be presented in five chapters, of which chapter one is an introduction and chapter five, a conclusion. Chapter two is a historical background of the thirties which serves as a premise of this thesis. The author thinks it necessary to present a broad picture of the world political and economic situation in the thirties, especially the economical crisis in capitalist countries, the rise of fascism, the apparent success of the USSR, and Stalinism, in order to show why so many intellectuals were inclined to socialism at that time and why left-wing literature flourished. This will be followed by a description of the particular situation in England and in China which focuses upon comparative developments in left wing literature in these two countries.

The third chapter contains a comparison between the individual careers of Orwell and Lu Xun. The explanation of how they became creative writers in general and left wing writers in particular will be given. Although Orwell and Lu Xun are different from each other in their family background, education, and cultural background, they seem to share many common experiences in their life. For example, it is interesting to examine Lu Xun's experience as a

7 student in Japan and Orwell's service in Burma as an imperialist policeman, and the remarkable impact of these experiences upon their future careers. Both of them were deeply sympathetic to the sufferings of colonised peoples and fully aware of the crisis of the capitalist system.

In order to show their characteristic affinity, i.e. the similar unorthodoxies in their socialism, the contrast between them and those of orthodox communist writers will be also shown. They share a lot in common in fighting against various forms of totalitarianism and for socialism.

Chapter four develops a comparison between their literary careers and writings, which culminates in a comparative study of Orwell's Animal Farm

(1945) and Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood" (Li shui, 1935) in Old Stories Retold (Gu shi xin bian, 1936) as outstanding examples of the authors' respective powers as satirists. Animal Farm of course represents a betrayed socialist revolution through an animal fable. Its mock-allegorical form shows similarities to that of "Curbing the Flood" which demonstrtes the ambiguous future of a revolution in the rewriting of an ancient Chinese legend. George Orwell uses animals to satirize human beings, and Lu Xun uses the past to satirize the present.

Through the discussion of Lu Xun and George Orwell in this thesis, the author hopes to uncover some common characteristics of unorthodox left-wing writers in the thirties, through a comparison of their special position in world literature, their beliefs and their disillusionment with communist revolution. The author also aims to reveal some of the fundamental problems of human

8 society that their work explores, and which have sometimes been misrepresented as mere anti-communists propaganda.14

14 For example, George Orwell's Animal Farm has been regarded as this kind of poropaganda. E.g. see John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, New York: Oxford University Press (1989), pp. 384-87; Michael Shelden, OrweU: The Authorised Biography, London: Heinemann (1991), pp. 404-5.

9 Chapter Two The Historical Background

In order to provid~ a foundation for the comparative study of George Orwell and Lu Xun, it is necessary to explore first the political and literary background of the thirties. This chapter, therefore, will give a brief account of the relevant social and literary events in that period, mainly in Europe and East Asia, which will serve as premises of this study. However, the term "the thirties" used in this thesis will not refer pedantically to a precise period of time from 1930 to 1939, but twill be used as a loose concept to denote a period that starts with the Great Depression and continues to the beginning of the

Second World War. It is hoped that this account of background can illuminate the flourishing of left-wing literature in the 1930s.

I. The World in the0 Thirties.

The 1930s is one of the most chaotic periods in human history. From 1929 to 1939, the world was dominated and affected by two things - economic insecurity and political instability. Domestically, many countries were suffering economic troubles and political uncertainty. Internationally, they were threatened by the territorial aggression of Fascist powers. By 1934 the

1 ..•. word "crisis" had become one of the most used and abused of words, applied . '

1 alike to economic life, parliamentary governments and international relations. The Great Depression started in 1929; almost overnight the age of plenty gave way to the age of scarcity, and even the most prosperous nations, such as

10 the United States, found themselves in a state of acute economic difficulty. When the crash came on Wall Street on that Black Thursday, 24th October, 1929, banks closed their doors, and many companies went bankrupt. The impact of the crash soon swept the whole continent of Europe. The trade of the world dropped by one-half, and the terrible blizzard of the Depression brought the wheel of the world economy nearly to a standstill. In all the developed countries of the world, meat, coffee, fruit became unobtainable luxuries for N(. large sections of the population. Scientific methods en_ablethe producers of food and raw materials to grow an abundance of goods which the consumers of the world could not at that time afford to buy. Many crops, like Brazilian coffee or Canadian wheat, were destroyed for the lack of a market, while the underfed masses of Asia and Africa who needed them most could not afford to pay even at the lowest price. The decline of purchasing power lowered the effective demand for goods. Thus arose, throughout the world, that queerest of all paradoxes, "poverty in the midst of plenty." 1 To socially conscious people, it was a sign of the total destruction of the existing economic system. As factories slowed down their production or went out of business, millions of workers were thrown out of work. It is estimated that thirty million workers all over the world were unemployed at that time. In the United States unemployment figures reached 4,340,000 in 1930, and by the following year had risen to 8,020,000.2 Economically, Germany was the worst hit by the depression. By the end of 1931 over six million Germans were out of work, and social conditions were very grim. In Austria, Hungary and the surrounding countries, the situation was similar. The unemployed suffered from hunger

1 David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1980), p. 683. 2 These are average annual figures compiled by the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics. Cit. from Gordon Greenwood, The Modern World-A History of Our Time, p. 220.

11 and homelessness. They spent their time in idleness. People and governments found themselves in a nightmare world where civilisation was choked with its own power to produce abundance, where plenty had actually produced poverty, and where people starved because there was too much wealth. There appeared to be complete breakdown in the capitalist system. The consequences of the World Depression proved to be disastrous not only to the world's economic security and political stability, but also to the cause of world peace. The Depression had some profound effects upon the world of the thirties. It accelerated the uneven developments of the post-war world: that is, the rich countries became richer while the poorer countries became poorer. This meant that the poor countries were less and less able to buy the goods which were now being produced in ever-increasing abundance. There was a tendency in almost every country to attempt to cope independently with the depression and solve its own financial difficulties by individual national action. Consequently, European countries were reluctant to take effective collective action against the potential aggressive militarism of

Germany and Japan.3 Under these circumstances, Hitler was able to consolidate his power and prepare for another world war. 4 The crisis of the years 1929-34 was also a general crisis of confidence. The abruptness of the changes that were taking place bred a mood of disappointment and bewilderment. It was also a moral and psychological crisis that shattered the ideals and codes of behaviour on which the old order had rested. In 1919 the world had been sustained by a revival of confidence in capitalism, by a generous desire for social improvement and by a fervent belief that civilisation could progress in peace. But this confidence was first

3 David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1980), p. 700. 4 H. R. Kedward, Fascism in Western Europe 1900-1945, London: Blackie (1969), p. 107-134.

12 shaken by the global economic crashes, then by the evident weakness of democratic governments in the face of growing unemployment and depression. People's faith in the system of capitalism itself began to waver. The world lay exposed to the disruptive forces of brutal and inhuman ideologies, as well as to the eruption of violent and destructive tyrannies. The current in favour of nationalist authoritarian and even militarist dictatorship had already surfaced by 1926 and became a powerful tide by 1934. The world of the 1930s saw the rise of polarised movements of both right and left.

The above-mentioned social and political climate had helped the spread of Marxism. Moreover, the apparent achievement of the Soviet Union and the urgent need to combat fascism encouraged many intellectuals to turn to Marxism which became very popular in many intellectual fields in the 1930s: for instance, in literature, philosophy, sociology and psychology. Many intellectuals, like John Cornford, Stephen Spender, Auden and other left-wing writers, as well as many students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s. In a certain sense, this developed into an intellectual fashion. In France, members of the PCF increased from 28,000 in 1933 to over 300,000 by the end of 1937. New members came from the background both of the working class and the intelligentsia. It was symptomatic that intellectuals turning to the Left wanted to break with their past or their families, or with their role as university students, to become "workers" and "peasants". The Soviet Union was the first socialist country in history. The apparent success of its social and economic development coincided with the deepening of the crisis in the capitalist world. The Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan was completed in four years, at the very time when production was

13 falling most sharply in the capitalist world. Moreover, the end of the twenties and early thirties was a period when some of the important cultural achievements of the Soviet Union were becoming known in the western world.

The Soviet novelist Sholokhov's Quiet Fiows The Don, and Alexei Tolstoy's trilogy and earlier works were translated into English. The new Soviet literature seemed to contrast with what western people would have seen at the time as the "decay" or "crisis" of culture under capitalism. The contrast naturally made many people in the West think that their demand for an alternative society might look for its model to the socialism of the USSR. In the early thirties, like believers on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, many western intellectuals visited the Soviet Union. Helene Stocker, militant feminist, pacifist, social reformer and the first woman in Germany to be awarded a university doctorate, strongly recommended Soviet educational policy as she

saw it in the late twenties. 5 Bernard Shaw, on leaving the Hotel Metropole in Russia, wrote in the visitor's book: "Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and

return to our Western countries of despair." 6 Harold Laski found in Russia "a buoyant and optimistic faith I have never before encountered."7 The Soviet union was considered at that time by many western intellectuals as an ideal society able to provide a remedy for the crisis of the capitalist world, although, as we shall see, many of them became disillusioned later.

One of the political consequences of the Great Depression was the rise of fascism which fed on a variety of discontents and insecurity, ranging from intellectual restlessness to economic hardship. The fascist movement won

5 David Caute, The FeUow-TraveUers Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1973), p.61. 6 Cited from David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1973), p. 62. 7 Ibid,. pp. 63-64.

14 support not only from army officers, high officials in the bureaucracies, the church hierarchy, frightened conservatives and wealthy landowners and big industrialists, but also from disillusioned middle-class people who had suffered from the economic depression, and from the ranks of unemployed workers. Support also came from many young people who were hungry for leadership and were in revolt against the weaknesses of certain liberal and democratic policies of their governments. Young people in Germany, however, additionally supported the fascist movement because of a resentment about the humiliation that resulted from the First World War. The movement's supporters were inspired by Fascist ideals of strength, national power and authority. With fascist parties in power in Germany and Italy, fascist movements became active everywhere throughout Europe in the early 1930s. In France, the Stavisky scandals produced a riot in February 1934; its reverberations shook the whole of France. Between 1934-36, Jacques Doriot, who was expelled from the French Communist Party as a traitor in the middle of June, 1934, created the largest and most dynamic Fascist Party, the P. P. F. The threat of Fascist rule appeared to hang over the French Republic. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley and his followers were the most significant Fascists to emerge between the wars. His Black Shirts specialised in smashing Jewish windows and shops in London's East End and in beating up hecklers during the large propaganda meetings at Olympia and the Albert Hall. Leon Degrelle, leader of the Belgian Rex, led the fascist movement in Belgium. He was financially supported by Mussolini, and welcomed by Hitler. The fascists made the world of the thirties what it was, i.e. one that was constantly under the threat of war and the possibility of destruction. Already in 1931, Japanese

8 David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1980), p. 687

15 fascist aggressors had invaded China. In 1935, Mussolini waged war against Abyssinia. The bloody Spanish civil war-plus-international war which erupted in 1936, was a significant prelude to the Second World War.

The rise of fascism, however, had in turn helped to stimulate the growth of left-wing movements. Communists, socialists, anarchists and radicals fought bravely against fascists. There were overt or covert civil wars between communism and fascism in many countries at that time; the Spanish Civil War can be seen the climax of such conflicts. It broke out on 18 July 1936 when a group of army officers led by General Franco resented the growing socialist and anti-clerical tendencies of the Republican government, and organised a revolt against the government. It was a total war which included foreign intervention on both sides: Franco was supported by Hitler and Mussolini while the Spanish Republic was supported by the Soviet Union and leftists in other countries. There in Spain, the internal crisis merged with the international crisis. The Spanish struggle actually became the symbol and focus of world anti-fascist resistance at that time. Hundreds of volunteers from the whole of Europe went to Spain to support the Spanish Republic. The famous International Brigade was organised and became involved in the heavy fighting around Madrid throughout the war. People on the Republican side felt that the Spanish War was not just a war on behalf of the Spanish people, but a war on be half of everyone. They also felt that if they could win the war, the victory would probably prevent the start of a new world war. What was startling and special about the Spanish Civil War was that many writers volunteered to participate in the struggle. Some of them did medical work, some engaged in actual fighting, some in propaganda or

16 political activities, and some went to Spain simply to report events. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Ernest Hemingway and many writers put aside their books and their pens and went to Spain to help the Republic. Some of them were killed in Spain: Ralph Fox, John Cornford, Charley Donnally, Julian Bell. Some, like George Orwell, were wounded. The Spanish Civil War greatly stirred the writers of the thirties. "Everything", John Lehmann, editor of New Writing, has recalled that:

all our fears, our confused hopes and beliefs, our half-formulated theories and imaginings veered and converged towards its testing and its opportunity, like steel filings that slide towards a magnet suddenly put near them.

And

When the full significance of what was happening in Spain gradually became apparent, and all the political parties, organisations, the unattached liberals, intellectuals and artists who had become aware that their own fate was deeply involved in the battles developing in front of Madrid and Barcelona, had banded themselves together to organise the International Brigade and the Spanish Medical Aid, I think every young writer began seriously to debate with himself how he could best be of use, by joining the Brigade, or driving an ambulance, or helping the active committees in England or France, or in some other way. The pull was terrific, the pull of an international crusade to the ideals and aims of which all intellectuals ... who had been stirred by the fascist danger, felt they could, in the hour of apocalypse, wholeheartedly assent.9

Not surprisingly, Spain became a test for the writers of the thirties. "Today, the struggle is in Spain. Tomorrow, it may be in other countries-our own." In June, 1937, a letter "To the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland,

9 John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery, 1955. pp. 273-75.

17 Ireland and Wales" in the name of Aragon, Auden and ten other writers, urged its recipients to take sides:

Are you for or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side. and emphasised moreover that

... now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.10

The pressure was evidently enormous for writers to take one side or another.

And sides were taken. The results were published by Left Review in book form in 1937, showing a massive vote of sympathy by the British writers for the Spanish Republic and a mass willingness to endorse the United Front against fascism. This represented a tide of anti-fascism from the left in the 1930s. As the situation polarised, the temptation to put oneself to the test was very strongly felt.

Against the background discussed above, the literary scene in the thirties showed the characteristics of the times. The progress of events - war, unemployment, economic depression - found expression in the literature and art of the thirties. Social conscience became a driving force, as large numbers of left writers and intellectuals emerged all over the world: Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Gide, Malraux in France; Piscator, Becher, Seghers, Brecht in

10 "Authors Take Sides On the Spanish Civil War", Left Review 0937). Cit. from Spanish Front -Writers on the Civil War, edited by Valentine Cunningham, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 51.

18 Germany; Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Day Lewis, in England; Sinclair, Dos Passos, Steinback, Caldwell in the USA; Tobaya Takiji in Japan; Qu Qiubai, Lu

Xun, Guo Moruo in China. Left-wing poets, writers and artists, left-wing papers and magazines, left-wing book clubs and writers associations, left-wing cinemas and theatres - all these formed a great tide of left-wing literary movements at that time. The point to stress for my thesis is that the cause of the Left developed into a global phenomenon of the thirties. In the particular circumstances of the time, there were some common themes in left-wing literature: discontentment with the capitalist system, opposition to Fascism or any form of imperialism, and approval of Socialism.

2. Britain in the Thirties.

In The Thirties, one of the earliest books about Britain in that period, Malcolm Mugge ridge recalled the circumstances of writing the last pages of the book in December 1939 in a barrack hut at Ash Vale near Aldershot:

One phrase intruded itself into all my thoughts and deliberations - "Lost in the darkness of change." It seemed to sum up my, and everyone else's, situation. We were lost.. .. 11

This may well expressed the typical mood of the British at the end of this decade. For the British who lived through these terrible hard times the 1930s were a kind of a nightmare. They were compounded of many catastrophic events: mass unemployment, hunger marches, demonstrations and the threat

11 Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties 1930-1940 in Great Britain, London: The Quality Book Club, p. 20.

19 of fascist activities. Of all periods in recent British history, the thirties, as A.

J.P. Taylor has written, "have been called black years, the devil's decade." 12

The government's response to mass unemployment was to implement economic measures that included cuts in unemployment benefit and the introduction of the Means Test. There were infamous cuts in the dole and in the wages of teachers, civil servants, post office workers and the police. There was great political uncertainty. Unrest in the Navy made headline news: the sailors at Invergordon mutinied because of a cut in pay. Confidence was shattered by these events:

If England can no longer trust to her naval crews, how can she ever be sure of the morrow or safeguard her power in the world? 13

By July 1930, there were over 2 million people out of work in Britain. When the Means Test was introduced by the government, the life of the unemployed became more difficult. A sufferer described his own hardship in 1934 when he failed to find a job after his engineering firm had closed down:

My wife was able to earn a few shillings to supplement our dole income [and] the feeling of strain became more marked. The final blow came when the Means Test was put into operation .... Both my wife and son, who had just commenced to earn a few shillings, told me to get out, as I was living on them and taking the food they needed.14

12 A. J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press (1965), p.317. 13 Cited from Marion Yass, The Great Depression, London: Wayland Publisher 0970), P. 55. 14 H. L. Beales & R. S. Lambert, Memoirs of The Unemployed (1934). Cited from Marion Yass, The Great Depression, London: Wayland Publisher (1970), p. 65.

20 In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell described the effects on health of bad diet and underlined again one of the great paradoxes of life in the thirties in this book:

You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. Whole sectioq-tofthe working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. 15

Unemployment continued to rise through the winter of 1931-32, reaching a peak in the autumn of 1932 when there were almost 3 million people out of work in Great Britain. The unemployed joined mass hunger marches in protest at the Government's failure to find them work. In October, 1936, came the great Jarrow march led by Ellen Wilkinson, then Labour candidate and later Member of Parliament for J arrow. In Hyde park, the English Communist Party organised a big demonstration protesting against mass unemployment. The demonstration grew to enormous size when people knew that the Jarrow Crusaders had arrived there.

The whole situation in Britain in the thirties seemed to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Harold Macmillan, later Conservative Prime minister but then a back-bench MP, put it very clearly:

Now, after 1931, many of us felt that the disease was more deep-rooted. It had become evident that the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down, not only in Britain, but all over Europe and even in the United State. The whole system had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all: it

15 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1987), p. 80.

21 certainly could not survive without radical change .... Something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home but overseas.16

The English Communist Party increased in strength throughout the thirties, especially in the years 1930-32 when its membership grew rapidly. The Party exercised great influence not only on some sections of the working class and on some industries such as mining, but also on students and intellectuals. Left-wing views were fashionable, and Left-wing university organisations came into being. Within a year of its formation in 1931, the Oxford University October Club had 300 members, and the Cambridge Socialist Club 1000 members by 1938. The Left Book Club provided a sounding-board for left-wing ideas and by 1937 had a membership of 50,000.

Social conscience led many members of the British intelligentsia to adopt Marxist ideas. John Strachey, a politician influenced by Marxist theory, published a book in 1932, The Coming Struggle For Power, in which he stated:

The capitalist system is dying and cannot be revived .... Religion, literature, art, science, the whole of the human heritage of knowledge will be transformed. And the new forms, whether higher or lower, which these principle concepts of man's imagination will assume, will depend on what new system will succeed the capitalist system. 17

16 Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, London:(*) (1966), P. 283. Cited from Jon Clark, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee, Cuiture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1979), P. 16. 17 Cited from Julian Symons, The Thirties-A Dream Revolved, London: Faber and Faber (1975 ), p. 50.

22 The Coming Struggle For Power was a book that caused deep shocks to many intellectuals in the early thirties. According to John Strachey's views, the era of capitalism was over, and only two political systems, Communism or Fascism, could possibly replace the current capitalist system. His opinion attracted many intellectuals because what he said seemed to correspond with the realities. Seeing the utter inability of the government to solve the problem of unemployment or to reduce the misery of the people, many intellectuals were inclined to Strachey's analysis and to agree with him that the future belonged to Communism. Moreover, communist views of the disintegration of the capitalist system seemed to complement those of T. S. Eliot expressed from a different perspective in The Waste Land. Influenced by such ideas, some young British writers converted to communism. John Cornford, an English poet of the thirties who died fighting against fascists in Spain in 1936, is a good example. In his poem"Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca" Cornford expressed his great enthusiasm for Communism - a new course for which he was fighting: , / , . Stand by our guard on Huesca's plain, Swear that our dead fought not in vain, Raise the red flag triumphantly

For Communism and for liberty. 18

The political and economic crisis had a direct and immediate impact on the English writers of the 1930s, whom Samuel Hynes has described as a new literary generation - the Auden Generation. He explained that he was talking about" the men and women born in England between 1900 and the First World

18 Valentine Cunningham (ed), Spanish Civil War Verse,England: Penquin Books(l983), P.133.

23 War, who came of age in the twenties and lived through their early maturity during the Depression."19 Auden has been considered the chief representative

of a generation that included poets such as Spender, Day Lewis, Betjeman, Lehmann and MacNeice and novelists such as Isherwood, Upward, Waugh, Greene, Orwell, Powell, Connolly and Green. They began to write and publish in the late twenties. Most of them were left-wing writers, at least in a broad sense; only a few were apolitical or inclined to the right. They shared important formative experiences, being sons of the English or Anglo-Irish professional or administrative class who were educated at boarding schools and were very conscious of the First World War but too young to fight in it. With the significant exception of Orwell himself, most of them went to university at Oxford or Cambridge .

This new generation of young writers, especially poets, was very much concerned with the social and cultural turmoil of the thirties. They became rebels against the. old social and literary tradition. They have left their generational mark on the history of modern English literature, a mark in which the characteristic events of their time - the slump, unemployment, social unrest, the rise of fascism and war - is reflected. Since the thirties was a time of crises, the most important writings of the period are best seen as responses to those crises. W. H. Auden has been described as the leader of a group of young left­ wing poets who dominated English poetry in the 1930s. He was influenced by Marx and Freud, and wrote about public subjects and themes like abandoned factories, unemployment, the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. After

19 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation-Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, London: The Bodley Head 0976), p. 9.

24 the publication of the collection Look Stranger in October 1936, 'Audenesque' became an established idiom to describe a particular style similar to Auden's. In his vision of the changed and changing world, Auden expressed what his generational group felt about their historical mission and final fate. Auden's images alluded to European tyranny and political violence, to poverty, Hunger

Marches, and the fatal indifference of the governing classes. He prefigured the inevitability of total change. Earlier in "What I Expect?", one of his best poems, Spender had expressed a vision of heroism in traditional and romantic images, and a general mood of the time:

The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee.20

The presence of the words "cripples, the pulverous grief, the sick" in the poem corresponds to the presence of the poor, the underfed, the unemployed in the outside world of urge-nt suffering. It demonstrates the poet's concern for the social problem. Louis MacNeice, another outstanding poet of the thirties, expressed with subtlety the feelings of many intelligent people during the weeks of Munich, in his long poem "Autumn Journal".

Hitler yells on the wireless

ZO Stephen Spender, Poems, London: Faber & Faber (1933 ), p.25.

25 The night is damp and still And I bear dull blows of wood outside of my window; They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill. 21

What MacNeice brings together in this poem are the trivia of daily events and the shadow of violent death, the coffee and the roast flesh, the lorries and the tumbrils. The poet's sense of the catastrophe of the time is clearly shown. · Christopher Isherwood is regarded as a significant thirties novelist. He went to Berlin in 1929 and remained there until 1933 while it became the centre of the political nightmare. His two Berlin novels - Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) are his most important works in the thirties. The emphasis in his Berlin stories is unequivocally on the present. The two books are attempts to account for the triumph of fascism in Germany in the early thirties, and the condition of Europe which brought this about. At Cambridge, he and Upward created Mortmere, an imaginary world that saw the ordinary world as hallucination. Edward Upward was an admired figure among the young left-wing writers, and is often thought to have been an important influence on Auden and Isherwood. His The Railway Accident is a kind of fantasy describing a nightmare about the English, and another of his fictions, Journey to the Border published in 1938, is a tale of conversion: a journey to the border of insanity, beyond which lies the sanity of commitment to Marxism. The book, as V. S. Prichett thought, is "a brilliant .... study of a widespread contemporary state of mind".22 The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner in 1937 is a vigorous and self­ confident fable of revolution. His second novel in 1938, The Professor, is about

21 L. MacNeice, "Autumn Journal", from Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber). 22 Valentine Cunningham. British Writers oft'he Thirties, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1989), p.368.

26 the failure and death of liberalism and the triumph of fascism. And finally, George Orwell contributed much to thirties writing, even if his most remarkable achievements are his fables of the forties. His writings in the thirties are usually attacks upon or exposures of either capitalism or imperialism, except Homage to Catalonia of 1937, which is an account of his experience as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War and which was rejected by Gollancz of the Left Book Club because of its tendency against Soviet Communism.

Writers on the left rejected the notion of literature as passive contemplation and generally saw it as an active participant in social issues. Auden wrote in a birthday poem to Isherwood in the mid-thirties:

So in this hour of crisis and dismay, What better than your strict and adult pen Can warn us from the colours and the consolations, The showy arid works, reveal The squalid shadow of academy and garden, Make action urgent and its nature clear? Who give us nearer insight to resist The expanding fear, the savaging disaster?23

Here, Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be effective, immediate and concerned with social reality. But he also urged the writers to go beyond that reality to seek for alternative worlds, worlds of imagination, which would constitutes new and meaningful ways of life, and through which literature could play a moral role in transforming the actual world. In "The Poet and

Revolution", Day Lewis had said of the revolutionary poet: "If the capitalist

23 W. H. Aud en, Poem XXX "August for the people and their favourite islands", Look, Strenger! London: Faber & Faber (1936 ), pp.65-6.

27 system is dead, his poetry will expose the fact. ... If there is new life about, you

may be sure he will catch it". 24 To many writers of the thirties, writing became a mode of action. A poem, a novel, or a play is first of all a social event. The publication of New

Signatures in 1931 became an important event to the young writers of the thirties. It was an anthology of left-wing poets who were originally university graduates from either Oxford or Cambridge, and was regarded as that generation's manifesto. John Lehmann, who produced the book with Michael Roberts, wrote to his friend Julian Bell:

These new poems and satires ... are a challenge to the pessimism and intellectual aloofness which has marked the best poetry of recent years. These young poets rebel only against those things which they believe can and must be changed in the postwar world, and their work in consequence has a vigour and width of appeal which has long seemed lacking from English poetry.25

Auden's The Orators: An English Study was published in May 1932, two months after New Signatures. It expressed the political uncertainty of the early thirties, but also implied an uncertainty about the role of the writer in such a time. This anthology was taken seriously by many reviewers and was treated as an important expression of the postwar generation's state of mind. New

Country, the continuation of New Signatures but including fiction and essays as well as poems, was published in 1933. The differences between the two books suggested that some changes had taken place in the authors and in the world of that year. There were also some left-wing magazines of the period. New Verse

24 Cited from Samuel Hynes. The Auden Generation-Literature and politics in England in the 1930s. London: The Bodley Head0976), P.76. 25 Cited from Julian Symons. The Thirties- A Dream Revolved, London: Faber and Faber (1975), p.61.

28 was an important and influential magazine in the literary thirties, and in its six years of publishing life (1933-1939) it published more poems of good

quality by young poets than any other English journal. The Left Review was the journal of Left cultural discussion from 1934-1938, which published a surprising quantity of left literary theory by Rickword, West, Day Lewis and

Fox and other communist writers. In the spring of 1936 a new periodical New

Writing edited by John Lehmann appeared. It was self-declaredly "independent of any party," but, characteristically of the period, it did "not

intend to open its pages to writers of reactionary or fascist sentiments". 26 New Writing provided a larger audience for writers of the Auden Group. Lehmann also printed many pieces by writers in other countries who were in sympathy with the Popular Front.

The year 1936 was particularly disturbing in Britain: the Left Book Club was founded, the Spanish Civil War began, the Surrealist Exhibition was held, the Jarrow Crusade took place, the first issue of New Writing appeared and the fascist movement became obtrusive. The Left Book Club was founded by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz as an experiment in political education. His plan was to issue to his members each month political books on current subjects selected by John Strachey and Harold Laski, aimed at changing the world by changing the contents of men's minds. In the last three years of the decade, the Club flourished. From its first month its membership grew steadily, by from 3-5 thousand new members each month, until in the autumn of 1937 it reached more than 50 thousand members. The Club circulated

altogether about a million copies of its books. It held a few large meetings to

26 Valentine Cunningham (ed), "Introduction" Spanish Civil War Verse, Penguin Books, p.29.

29 appeal for a Popular Front, to protest against the Japanese invasion of China, to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco. The Club certainly affected the political education of many English people. Finally, in the thirties, there was the growth of socialist theatre in Britain, and by the late thirties around 300 left-wing theatre groups performed plays and sketches to labour movement audiences all over Britain. The Group Theatre produced plays like "The Dance of Death" and "The Dog Beneath the Skin". "Waiting for Lefty" was performed over 300 times by Unity Theatre Club between 1936 and 39, and was applauded by a predominantly working-class audience.

3. China in the Thirties

The political and literary arena in the Thirties in China is a very different scenario. China was yet in deeper crisis and here the crisis had continued for several decades. Since the Opium War in the 1860s, China had gradually degenerated into a semi--feudal and semi-colonial society which was nevertheless dragged into the mainstream of world affairs. There were two important political events in the modern history of China: the 1911 Revolution and the May Fourth Movement of 1919. They marked two watersheds in the political and cultural development of modern China and both of them bore the influence of Western ideologies. The May Fourth movement helped the spread of Marxism in China and eventually gave birth to the Chinese communist party.

30 During the 1911 Revolution, the revolutionaries led by Sun Yet-sen and mainly guided by Western democratic and nationalist ideologies, dedicated themselves to overthrowing the old order and leading China out of degradation. It must be pointed out that in the latter half of the 19th century the social and political problems of capitalist countries had become very obvious and all kinds of socialism started to spread. The fact that China was a victim of imperialist powers meant that many Chinese nationalist revolutionaries were influenced by different kinds of socialism, although the dominant ideas still concerned national independence and democracy. However, they only managed to overthrow the monarchy of the Qing Dynasty, and the Republic they established did not turn out to be a golden age, or even the strong, independent and prosperous country they had hoped for. It had been relatively simple to bring down the tottering Manchu Dynasty since the Manchus were actually foreign invaders: the revolutionaries could easily justify their actions even in the face of the die-hard conservative Confucians. But it proved to be very difficult to implement new political orders, social institutions, and their associated modern ideas.27 The revolutionaries quickly realised that the 1911 Revolution was only the first step in a long process towards the reform of Chinese society. A new revolution, which aimed at the reform of different aspects of China neglected in the 1911 Revolution was desperately needed.

That the new revolution was conceived as a cultural revolution can be

traced back to the publication of New Youth (Xin qingnian) in 1916. The magazine brought together a number of progressive intellectuals. Among the earliest and most prominent editors and contributors were Chen Duxiu (1880-

27 See "Xiguan yu gaige" (Customs and Reform), LXQ, IV, p. 228.

31 1942), Hu Shi (1891-1962), Li Dazhao (1889-1927), and Lu Xun. 28 The major concern of this new cultural movement was the promotion of new trends of thoughts in the West, mainly democracy and science.29 As the movement developed, Confucianism, which has been adapted, if not distorted, to become the official ideology for feudal autocracy for many centuries, became their main target.3°Chinese intellectuals unravelling these threads of Chinese tradition, were now ready to proclaim its death. They were convinced that China had to be reborn, and that Confucianism had to be replaced by an ideology that would be more capable of confronting the challenges of the

West.3 1 However, their ideas did not receive much attention from the public until the break-out of the nation-wide protest against the war-lord government in 1919. The original May Fourth Movement began as a demonstration on 4 May 1919 against the Peking warlord government, which had complied with the decision of the Western powers at Versailles to cede the province of Shandong to Japan. The government arrested a number of the student demonstrators, but public sentiment ran so high that the whole nation seemed on the side of the students and against the notorious pro-Japanese government. In Shanghai and other cities, merchants closed their shops, and workers went on strike. The

28 See She Suizhi (ed.), Lu Xun shengping shiLiao huibian (A Collection of Materials About Lu Xun's Life), Vol. 3, Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe, 1983, pp. 588-94. 29 Chen Duxiu, "Jing gao qingnian" (To Young People, 1915), Chen Duxiu wenzhang xuanbian, Vol. 1, Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 1982, p. 18. 30 See Tang Tao (ed.), Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (History of Modern Chinese Literature), Vol. 1, Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, Beijing, 1979, pp. 24-26. 3 l See Qian Xuantong, "Zhongguo jinhou de wenzi wenti" (The Present Problem of Chinese Language and Its Future), in Hu Shi (ed.), Zhongguo xinwenxue da xi. Jianshe lilunji Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935, pp. 142-44. See also C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971, pp. 3-27.

32 Chinese delegation at the Paris Conference was warned by the public not to sign the treaty. The government was finally forced by this strong demonstration of national sentiment to release the student demonstrators, and to dismiss three well-known pro-Japanese ministers from office. The struggle began on the fourth of May, and ended in early June. 32

The tide of the May Fourth Movement engulfed the entire country. It produced its waves that spread everywhere, provoking successive movements which included the May Thirtieth movement of 1925. This was an anti­ imperialist and anti-feudal movement which, politically speaking, engendered the birth of the Chinese Communist Party;33 speaking culturally, it pushed the cultural revolution ahead and crushed any resistance from the conservative

intellectuals.34 Traditional ideas and institutions had had crippling effects, and young people had begun to challenge the authority of their clans and families: a fissure opened between the generations that was never again closed. The old ways of behaviour and thinking that still governed much of Chinese life were now being mortally assailed. The May Fourth Movement brought together belated tributaries of all the main streams of European philosophical, political and social thought, such as democracy, anarchism,

syndicalism, Marxism, etc. It opened up new horizons and stimulated a veritable revolution in thought, morals and literature, and rapidly deepened the channels of political change and social conflict. 35

32 See Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in China, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960, pp. 92-120. 33 Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (ed.), Republican China, Harmondswoth: Penguin Books, pp. 87-92. 34 See Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in China, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960, pp. 182-86, 289-317. 35 Ibid, pp. 289-99.

33 The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had a profound impact on many

Chinese intellectuals who found it relevant to their immediate concerns. It seemed as if China's two main enemies, feudal institutions and the imperialist powers, had been correctly identified and that a way to overcome them had been provided, in theory as well as practice. Chinese intellectuals finally found a new ideology which seemed able to solve China's immediate problems.36 Thus when Comintern agents went to China to establish a communist party, they found a ready response among May Fourth intellectual leaders such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong and Zhang Guotao.37 Under Comintern guidance the Communist movement gathered momentum during the 1920s, and Marxist ideology spread among the urban proletariat and peasantry. The new communist party organised labour unions, peasant associations, student groups; moreover, Leftist newspapers, journals and pamphlets now flourished.38 Realising under the influence of the Russian revolution the necessity of a social revolution, Dr Sun re-organized the shattered nationalist revolutionary organisations and established the Kuomintang in 1923. The original Kuomintang was modelled upon the Russian communist party and in fact many young members were sent to Russia to receive all kinds of training. Under this new situation, Dr Sun even claimed that one of his main principles

36 For example, the founder of Republic China and the Kuomintang, Dr Sun Yatsen was influenced by the Russians and their socialism. See S. T. Leong, "Sun Yatsen's International Orientation: The Soviet Phase, 1917-1925", in J. Y. Wong (ed.), Sun Yatsen. His International Ideas and International Connections, Sydney: Wild Peony, 1987, pp. 53- 88. 3? See Harold Issacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1951: revised edition, pp. 57-58. 38 Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (ed.), Republican China, op. cit., pp. 116-32.

34 in his "The Three People's Principles" was "communism".39 With the help of Russian representatives, the nationalist and the Chinese communists joined together to form a united front against the warlord government. Many communist leader had actually joined the Kuomintang to help them to carry out social reforms, so that the Kuomintang were regarded by the Western powers and the warlords as "reds."40 During the 1920s, Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and the Communists went hand in hand, but moved along separate paths and toward different goals. The Kuomintang leaders were very much concerned for their political and military power and reluctant to share them with the communists. The Communists on the other hand, were more interested in mass organisation and in the propagation of their new ideology. Their party was then heavily under Comintern control. Instead of warning them to be on their guard against the Kuomintang, the Russian advisers urged the Chinese Communists to keep faith with the Kuomintang and preached Stalin's instructions that the Chinese Communist party could not carry on a revolution by herself alone but at this stage should prod the Kuomintang to go as far as possible.41 The Chinese communists thus allowed the Kuomintang to control the army- a mistake for which they were to pay dearly in April 1927.42 Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, and

39 See Song Shitang, "Shi lun Sun Zhongshan dui shehuizhuyi de tansuo" (A Tentative Study of Dr Sun Yatsen's Exploration of Socialism), Xinhua wenzhai, 1991, No. 1, pp. 66- 69. 40 Harold Issacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, op. cit., pp. 58-73. 41 Harold Issacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, op. cit., pp. 169-70. Cf Leon Trotsky, "The Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang" (27 September 1926), "The Friendly Exchange of Portraits Between Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek (18 April 1927)", and "The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin (7 May 1927)", in Leon Trotsky on China, New York: Monad Press, 1976, pp. 113-120, 157-98. 42 Harold Issacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, op. cit., pp. 175-78

35 his death marked the turning point of cooperation between the two political movements.

Sun Yat-sen's successor, Chiang Kai-shek, had for a long time felt that the alliance of the Kuomintang with the Communists was intolerable.43 In 1927, Chiang suddenly unleashed a "White Terror" against the Communists: he struck to disarm their pickets, and to slay those Communists he could catch. The Communist party was cast out, driven from power and proscribed; the Russian advisers were sent back to Moscow. In the following year, Chiang unified China and removed the capital to Nanking, where it was soon recognised by the relieved foreign powers. Chiang Kai-shek then became the dictator of China. Because of Chiang's submission to foreign powers and his admiration for-~------feudal culture, the goals of the Chinese democratic revolution - the eradication of feudalism and the expulsion of imperialist powers - remained unachieved.44 The foreign powers still retained their concessions and their extra territorial privileges, and Chinese society had changed very little: the land problem and the poverty of peasants remained as bad as before, and workers in the big cities were still suppressed. Thus the revolution remained far from complete. Chiang's coup d'etat had a profound impact on the Chinese communist movement. Because of Comintern's misjudgements concerning China's situation, the Chinese communists had been urged to cooporate with the Kuomintang and rely on the "left" fraction led by Wang Jingwei to resist

43 See Wang Guangyuan (ed.), Chen Duxiu nianpu (Chronology of Chen Duxiu), Chongqing Chubanshe, 1987, pp. 198, 203-4. 44 See Mayling Soong Chiang, "Foreward" to New Life frQ__Kainghsi<--- -- and Chiang Kai-shek, "My Religious Faith", in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (ed.), Republican China, op. cit., pp. 151-58.

36 Chiang before the coup. Some Chinese communists who were aware of the mistakes of Comintern and of dissenting opinions in Russia - the party secretary Chen Duxiu, for instance, and some other members who had stayed and studied in Russia - formed the Trotskyite Opposition.45 In a certain sense, one could say that this was the first time that Chinese Communism suffered from Stalinism. The defeat of the Chinese communist movement also caused a hot debate in the USSR and became one of the major conflicts between the

Stalinists and Trotskyites.46 The Russian and Chinese communists were torn apart by their different opinions and policies. As Stalin consolidated his position after Trotsky lost out in the power struggles and was expelled from the party, the conflicts within the Chinese communist party grew into a wrestling match between the Russian trained dogmatic "internationalists" and the local communists who fought in the soil of China. Their leader was Mao Zedong.47

In the thirties, China was mainly torn into two political camps: the Kuomintang and the Communists, a situation which seemed as suggested in previous sections to reflect global trends. However, China was also a semi­ colonial country which was suffering the oppressions of foreign powers; this made i~/; markedly different from its European counterparts. The thirties was a decade in which China suffered from the greatest national disaster in its history: as a result of the aggression of Japanese fascism and the feeble resistance on the part of the Chinese nation. From 1927 to 1937, during ten

45 Wei Zhixin, Chen Duxiu sixiang yanjiu (Studies of ChenDuxiu's Thought), Nanjing Daxue Chubanshe, 1987, pp. 86-104. 46 See Harold Issacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, op. cit., pp. 238-51; 47 See Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row, 1980, p. lllff.

37 years of Kuomintang's rule, Japan occupied Manchuria and Jehol and infiltrated Inner Mongolia and North China. War finally broke out in 1937. During the long and cumulative series of aggressions, the Nationalist government yielded step by step, without resistance, without listening to the clamour of the people, the indignation of the intellectuals, or the appeals of those provinces which they abandoned. The rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1930s had an obvious influence on China. Chiang Kai-shek not only employed a number of German advisers to train his army, but also modelled his secret police upon the Nazi SS. He suppressed the communists as well as all the democratic movements and tried all means to get rid of his opponents to consolidate his dictatorship. When the Japanese aggression accelerated, Chiang Kai-shek devoted his time and his German-trained armies to fruitless campaigns against the Communist guerrillas in South China.48 In these vain attacks, huge sums of money were spent, and a vast quantity of material was wasted, so that many of the best trained and equipped soldiers died. None of these troops were ever permitted to fight the Japanese, or to garrison threatened areas. Chiang Kai-shek's avowed policy then was "domestic pacification prior to resistance to foreign attack", which actually meant hunting the Communist guerrillas while yielding vital territory to the Japanese.49 Between 1930 and 1934 Chiang Kai-shek launched five "bandit extermination" campaigns against the Communists and several large-scale attacks to crush the Communists' Jiangxi Soviet government and its offshoots in the region south of the Yang-tze River, but all his efforts failed. The

48 See Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977 (enlarged and revised edition), p. 410; Helen Foster Snow, My China Years, London: Harrap, 1984, pp. 137-8. Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography, op. cit., p. 119. 49 Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, op, cit., pp. 60-61.

38 Communists found a way to survive, grow and spread. In April 1932, the

Communists declared war on Japan.50 After the Russian trained self-claimed "one hundred percent Bosheviks" took over the leadership of the Chinese communist party and deployed rigid military and political strategies borrowed from the Russians and which had little relevance in a Chinese context, the situation changed dramatically. The Chinese communists were forced to leave their guerrilla bases and escaped to the north in October 1934.51 During their march, Mao Zedong was elected to take charge of the party. Under his leadership, the Chinese red army broke through Kuomintang lines, and they successfully reached the north-western province of Shaanxi in October 1935 where they decided to adjust their position and to regard the struggle against Japanese invasion as their major task. In 1936 the Sian Incident changed the whole situation in China. From the point of view of Communist policy, its outcome was a successful one, for it resulted in a United Front consisting of all classes of the whole nation in resistance against Japan.52 Because of the leadership of the United Front the Chinese people were able to win the war against the Japanese aggressors. The Chinese Communist party henceforward cast a spell over educated classes in China, and won wide spread support. Their Yan'an University of Resisting Japanese Invaders in the Shanxi hills became a haven for active and enterprising students from all over China.

50 See Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography, op. cit., p. 118. 51 See Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography, op. cit., pp. 114-21. 52 For the latest scholarship on the Incident and policy of the Chinese Communist, see Zhang Kuitang, "Zhong Gong Zhongyang heping jiejue Xi'an Shibian fangzhen de zhiding" (The Principle of a Peaceful Settlement of the Xi'an Incident of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party), Xinhua wenzhai, 1991, No. 1, pp. 71-4.

39 The Chinese literary scene of the thirties was dominated by left-wing literature and Chinese literature in the thirties was a direct product of the May Fourth movement. The literary side of the movement is closely related to its cultural and political purpose. Before the movement, classical Chinese was used in all mainstream publications, but it remained the exclusive property of a small group within a cultural elite and was far too difficult and esoteric for average Chinese people to comprehend. In order to warn the masses how dangerous China's situation and how muddle-headed its government was and to enlighten people with revolutionary ideas and to improve their education, China needed a new means of communication, a new language. So, the May Fourth movement also called for the promotion of a vernacular language and the abolition of the requestment to write in classical Chinese. Intellectual leaders of the May Fourth----- Movement, like Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi embarked on a campaign to publish magazines, newspapers, and books in colloquial style (baihua). This language revolution sparked off a literary revolution and Lu Xun played a leading role in it. His "A Madman's Diary," (Kuangren riji)

published in New Youth in 1918, was the first short story in vernacular style in modern Chinese literary history and immediately became a modern classic. Lu Xun also grew famous for his essays, and his works in the twenties became established as models for modern literature. The distinctive characteristic of May Fourth literature was its social consciousness, a feature which later developed into political consciousness and eventually led to the emergence of

left-wing literature in the thirties. 53 However, after the Kuomintang coup d'etat in 1927, some radical left­ wing writers, instead of struggling with the Kuomintang government, launched

53 See C. T. Hsia, "Obsession With China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature", in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, op. cit., pp. 533-54.

40 a campaign of "revolutionary literature" and attacked other progressive writers.54 This campaign, which developed into personal attacks was finally stopped by the Chinese communist party.55 On 2 March 1930, the League of Left-Wing Writers was fouru!J_n Shanghai, which provided a united front for all Chinese writers who were against feudalism, imperialism and the Kuomintang government. Lu Xun was regarded as the spiritual leader of the League which was under the direct influence of the Communist Party; he also played a significant role in its formation. The Left-wing League established connections with revolutionary organisations within the country as well as with left-wing literary movements abroad; it founded several branch associations such as the associations of Marxist literary theory, International Culture, and Popular Literature. The League itself published a number of magazines; though some of them were closed down by the Kuomintang censors, new magazines would simply spring up to replace them: from 1933- 1937, the most popular and prestigious left-wing magazine was Literature (Wenxue). Through its publication and other activities, the League attracted a large number of writers, and its members rapidly increased.56 The League of Left-wing Writers contributed a great deal that was new to Chinese literature in the thirties, and those writers who had emerged during or after the May Fourth Movement, such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun made

54 All the major articles have been compiled in "Geming wenxue" lunzheng ziliao, 2 Vols, Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1981. 55 See Yang Hansheng, "Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng chengli de jingguo" (The Establishment of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers), and Feng Xiaxiong (ed.), "Feng Xuefeng tan Zuo Lian" (Feng Xuefeng on the League of Left-Wing Writers), Lu Xun yanjiu niankan, 1980, pp. 17-29. 56 Detailed activities can be found in "Zuo Lian" huiyilu, a two volume set of recollections by the left-wing writers at theat time, published by Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chubanshe in Beijing, 1982.

41 new progress both as thinkers and as literary artists. Lu Xun's Old Tales

Retold, for instance, which was published in 1935, is a collection of historical stories based on historical events which have been adapted to satirise the society of his time. The stories also employed symbolic methods, and embody Lu Xun's view of Chinese society and his prediction of the future of China and her revolution. During this period, Lu Xun also wrote a large number of militant essays (or in Chinese, zawen), which were extremely popular with Chinese readers. 57 Most of the prominent and prolific writers in the thirties were members of the Chinese Communist Party. For example, Mao Dun, the pen name of Shen Yanbing (1896- ), who having once modelled himself on Zola had become

China's most important realist novelist, was a member of the Party.58 Qu Qiubai, a prolific translator of Marxist literary theory from Russian in the thirties, was a former leader of the Comunist Party. Although he had studied and worked in Russia, Qu Qiubai was a victim of the secret purge to eliminate dissident members launched by the "internationalists". Both Mao Dun and Qu Qiubai were close friends of Lu Xun. Many writers who were actively involved in the promotion of the new literary movement such as the writers of the Creation Society and Sun Society were members of the Chinese Communist Party; indeed they formed a majority in the League of Left-Wing Writers. The League of Left-Wing Writers attached much importance to bringing up young writers, who started writing in the late twenties. With the help of the League and especially with the help and guidance of Lu Xun, a number of young writers produced short stories of good quality which established their

57 Tang Tao (ed.), Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (History of Modern Chinese Literature), Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 92-107. 58 Tang Tao (ed.), Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (History of Modern Chinese Literature), Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 130-61.

42 reputation.59 Among them, Zhang Tianyi 0907-) was the most brilliant short­ story writer in the thirties. Zhang Tianyi's first story A Dream of Three and Half

Days was published in 1928 in the magazine Ben Liu., its editor, Lu Xun, was greatly impressed by the talent it displayed. From then on, Zhang Tianyi published in the span of ten years a large number of collections of his short stories. There were other well-known young writers like Ding Ling, Jiang Muling, Wei Jinzhi, etc. Their emergence brought a fresh vigour to the new literary movement in the thirties. 60 Left-wing literature in China also included the writings of such independent writers as Pa Jin, Lao She and the playwright Cao Yu. These writers were neither Communists nor members of the League. But their writings shared much with the left-wing literature. Pa Jin's Family (1931), Lao

She's Camel Xiangzi (1937), Cao Yu's Storm (1934) and Sunrise (1936) are among the best pieces of writing produced in China in the 1930s. These works are brilliant representations of the sufferings of the people of the lower classes in China, which expose the dark side of that society, and the corruption of its government.61 The thirties represent the richest literary period in the history of modern China. Not only short stories and novels, but nearly all kinds of literary forms including prose, drama, poetry and essay developed rapidly. Left-wing dramas were especially notable. The League of Left-Wing

Dramatists, a branch of the League of Left-Wing Writers, gathered together a

59 See Lu Xun, "Thoughts on the League of Left-Wing Writers", LXSW, III, pp. 103-8. 60 Tang Tao (ed.), Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (History of Modern Chinese Literature), Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 235-82. 61 See Tang Tao (ed.), Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (History of Modern Chinese Literature), Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 162-95. Cf C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, op. cit., pp. 165-88, 237-56.

43 number of remarkable actors and actresses of the period, and many left-wing dramas and plays were performed. Translating Western literature became very popular in the thirties, and a great deal of western literary works as well as Marxist literary theories were introduced from Germany, Britain, Russia, and Japan, contributing to the rich literary climate in the period. Because of its political nature, the League also suffered from t~ '-._,_ external and internal pressures and danger. First of all, ~onstantly suffered from Kuomintang interference and suppression. Many left-wing writers, poets and intellectuals were imprisoned or killed; left-wing books were banned and bookshops were closed; left-wing theatres and cinemas were attacked and damaged; and progressive films and plays were prohibited. 62 This suppression only turned more and more Chinese intellectuals against the Kuomintang government and made the Communists more popular. For example, the execution of five young left-wing writers in 1931 was a major factor in Lu Xun's quite radical changes of in his late years. ~ \ Struggles inside the communist movement also affected the League. During the thirties, the Russian trained so-called "internationalists" took charge of the Chinese communist party for a few years, the result of which was a disastrous defeat by the Kuomintang. The "internationalists", who were obviously trained in Stalinist tactics, adopted a merciless policy in handling dissident party members. It has been argued that it was actually the "internationalists" who gave information to the Kuomintang that led to the execution of the five young writers of the League. 63 After the brief but

62 See Lu Xun, "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the People" and "The Present Condition of Art in Darkest China", LXSW, III, pp. 119- 26. 63 Tsi-an Hsia, "Enigma of the Five Martyrs", The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China, Seattle: University f Washington Press, 1968, pp. 164-233.

44 disastrous rule of the "internationalists", the Chinese communists began to move away from the manipulation of the Comintern and to formulate a more independent policy which was not always in tone with that of Russia. As we shall see in the next chapter, Lu Xun, as a key figure in the left-wing literary movement, was inevitably caught up in these conflicts.

4. Conclusion

The preceding survey of the social history and literary history of the thirties providing something of the background to the work of George Orwell and Lu Xun, has attempted to show some similaries between these contexts, despite the clear differences between Britain and China at that time. Due to the serious social and political turmoil in that period, social injustice and struggles became the major themes of these writers of the thirties and of left-wing writers in particular. At times of crisis, no one can avoid involvement. Most thirties writers consciously used their writings to provide some kind of social critique; especially on the left:wmg, writing was

considered part of the social and political struggle of t-h-e society. These writers themselves consciously developed their work into a means of engaging themselves in the arena of social and political struggles. Because of the similar patterns in the of'global political situation of the thirties and the political commitment of left-wing writers, there is something

distinct and common in left-wing literature. Most of them expressed the concern of the oppressed and exploited people, their accusation of the capitalist system, their protest against imperialism and fascism. In China, because of its backwardness, anti-feudalism is also a popular theme.

45 The thirties is also a important stage of the radical transition beginning at the turn of this century, which also affected the development of literature itself. In China, left-wing literature is a continuation of the May Fourth literary revolution, and so the movement includes writers of two generations. Because of the miserable situation in China, which was far more desperate than that in any of the developed countries, and because of the the large scale and scope of the May Fourth movement, China also had a larger number of left-wing writers and sympathisers. Left-wing literature was more dominant and influential in China than in England, and the achievement of the left-wing writers was also perhaps more prominent. It is to be remembered that in England, the Auden generation consists mainly of young writers.

It is also noticeable that the Chinese ~t.-~,i~! ~it_:~~;Y movement wa directly, though not strictly, under the control of the Communist Party, while in England, the movement seems to have developed spontaneously without the control of any political party. As for literary forms, left-wing literature in England is perhaps more conspicuous and successful in poetry, while in China, short stories, novels, and essays are more popular and influential. But one should note that George Orwell's major contribution to the left wing literary movement is in the same genre as that of the Chinese left-wing writers'. Compared to other British left­ wing writers, Orwell seems to promise more affinities and resemblances with his Chinese counterparts.

46 Chapter Three A Comparison Between the Genesis of The Two Writers

1. How they became writers Orwell and Lu Xun are not writers of the same period: Orwell belongs principally to the thirties and forties while Lu Xun was already well-known in the twenties. Although they belonged to different times and cultures, one can still find certain similarities in their early lives, education and family backgrounds, and how they became writers.

George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in 1903 in Motihari, India. His father, then aged forty-six, was a sub-deputy agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Orwell could number some aristocrats amongst his ancestors. Charles Blair (1743-1820), his great-grandfather, was a rich man, an owner of plantations and slaves in Jamaica, who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, though his fortune had dwindled by the time that Thomas Blair (1802-1867), Orwell's grandfather, was born. Thomas Blair was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge for only one year, and was ordained in the Anglican church, serving many years in Australia and India before settling down as a vicar in rural Doset. Orwell's father, Richard Blair, had to fend for himself from the age of eighteen. He served in the Opium Department in India for thirty-six years until he retired in 1912 as a first grade Sub-Deputy Opium Agent on a pension of 438 pounds a

47 year. 1 Orwell described his family ironically as "lower upper-middle-class",2 that is, toward the bottom end of a salary spectrum running from three hundred to two thousand pounds a year. 3 Orwell's parent owned no property and had no extensive investments. Like many English middle-class families of the time, they depended on the government for their livelihood and prospects.

Lu Xun's family background is somewhat similar to Orwell's. He was born in 1881, twenty two years earlier than Orwell. Lu Xun's real name was Zhou Shuren, and he was the eldest son of an official in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. The Zhou family had produced a number of prominent officials and scholars in the past. But when Lu Xun reached his thirteenth year, his grandfather, who had been a high rank official at the imperial court, was thrown into prison because of his involvement in a bribery case. Lu Xun's father, who had not been able to pass any senior imperial examinations which would entitle him to official emoluments, could do nothing to stop the decline of the Zhou family; moreover, he became seriously ill about this time and died three years later in 1896. Thereafter, Lu Xun's family was reduced to poverty.4

Thus both Orwell and Lu Xun came from declining official families of the ruling class. Their special situation enabled them to witness the hypocrisy

1 Bernard Crick, George Orwell-A Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1987), pp. 40-48.

2 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1987), p.120.

3 Ibid., p. 106.

4 See Zhou Jianren and Zhou Ye, An Age Gone By: Lu Xun's Clan in Decline, tr. Zheng

Ping and Huang Long, Beijing: New World Press (1988), p. 34ff; Wang Shiqing, Lu Xun. A

Biography, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, (1984), pp. 1-34.

48 and dark side of the rich people or the upper class, and to realise the sufferings of the poor people or the lower class. It was not an accident that they rebelled against their own class in their later lives; for one thing, they shared an unhappy childhood, which would contribute to their future rebellion.

When Orwell was one year old, his family returned to England and settled at Henley, though his father worked in India until his retirement in 1912. Apparently his father was reserved and distanced himself from his children. Before he was eight, Orwell seldom saw his father who appeared to him simply

"as a gruff-voiced elderly gentleman forever saying 'Don't"'.5 Like Lu Xun, Orwell had more love for his mother, who was less conventional, and eighteen years younger than her husband. Orwell was born between two sisters with a five-year gap on both sides; his childhood was often lonely. According to his own account in his long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", his attitude toward his immediate family members, except his mother, was generally negative.

As for Lu Xun, his childhood was spent in such bad times that "unforeseen

events came one after another".6 After his grandfather's imprisonment, Lu Xun became aware the plight of the Zhou Clan. "There were quarrels between daughters and daughters-in-law, wrangles between wives of brothers, fighting between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and bickering between husbands and wives. One of his relatives hanged himself or herself one day, and the next

5 Jeffrey Meyers, A Reader's Guide to George Orwell, London: Thames and Hudson 0975),

pp.20.

6 Zhou Jianren and Zhou Ye, An Age Gone By -Lu Xun's Clan in Decline, op. cit., p. 18.

49 day another committed suicide by drowning in the river, or by swallowing gold or poison."7 For a period of time, Lu Xun was sent to stay with a relative where he was regarded as a 'beggar'. Young Lu Xun suffered from humiliation, bullying and discrimination. His grandfather stayed in prison for eight years, and was a great burden to Lu Xun and his family.J.• ~n recalled that during that e_ert°"dl' Because of the distress of the family, Lu Xun realised the

I hypocrisy of people and became aware of the cruelty of society.8 For many years, Lu Xun could still recall how he was treated by a member of Zhou clan Mrs Yan:

After my father's death I went on going frequently to her house, onl~!o play-with

other children but to chat with her and her husband. At that time there were many

things I would have liked to buy, things to read or eat, only I had no money. Once

when I mentioned this, she said: "Just take some from your mother. Isn't her

money yours?" When I told her my mother had no money, she said I could take her

trinkets to raise money on them. When I told her there were no trinkets, she said:

"Perhaps you haven't looked carefully. If you search the drawers of that big chest

and odd corners of the room, you're bound to find a few pearls or things of that

sort.... "

This advice seemed to me so odd that once more I stopped going there.

Sometimes, however, I was really tempted to open the big chest and make a

thorough search. Probably it was less than a month after this that I heard a rumour

7 Ibid., p.18.

8 See "My Father's Illness" and "Fragmentary Recollections" in Dawn Bossoms Plucked

at Duck, tr. Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press (1976), pp.

61-79.

50 to the effect that I'd been stealing things from home to raise money on. This really

made me feel as if plunged into icy cold water .... 9

One of Lu Xun's unforgettable memories of his childhood was his father's illness and eventual death. He recalled in the preface to Call To Arms many years later that:

For more than four years I frequented, almost daily, a pawnshop and pharmacy. I

cannot remember how old I was at the time, but the pharmacy counter was exactly

my height and that in the pawnshop twice my height. I used to hand clothes and

trinkets up to the counter twice my height, then take the money given me with

contempt to the counter my own height to buy medicine for my father, a chronic

invalid. On my return home I had other things to keep me busy, for our physician

was so eminent that he prescribed unusual drugs and adjuvants: aloe roots dug up

in winter, sugar-cane that had been three years exposed to frost, original pairs of

crickets, and ardisia that had seeded... most of which were difficult to come by.

But my father's illness went from bad to worse until finally he died.10

Lu Xun learned about people, human nature, and society through these experiences. He realised that his father was fooled by quacks and mountebanks, and he showed deep sympathy for their patients and the patients' families. This perhaps explains why his first idea of a career was to become a doctor, so as to cure people of their physical sufferings and thus redeem the guilt feeling that his father's death gave rise to. These painful

9 "Fragmentary Recollections" in Dawn Bossoms Plucked at Duck, op. cit. pp. 70-1.

10 LXSW, I, p. 33.

51 experiences, especially that of being deceived by the quacks, also revealed to Lu Xun the dark side of Chinese traditional culture which contributed to his radicalism during the May Fourth cultural movement after 1919.

As a young boy, Orwell was also made aware of the cruelty of his society.

)J l At the~r of eight he was sent to St. Cyprian's - an expensive but very successful prep school in Britain at that time. It was a private boarding school run for profit and designed to prepare the sons of rich families for entrance at the age of thirteen into the leading English public schools. The school took in a few boys at very much reduced fees whose task was to gain scholarships to the very top public schools so as to bring glory and ultimately profit to the school. Orwell's family, though not really hard up, found it difficult to afford the full amount of the tuition fees. But for Orwell's parents, their son's education was an investment as well as a mark of status; they counted on him to succeed and retrieve their diminishing fortunes. Orwell was accepted as a fees-reduced pupil for which he was frequently humiliated by the Headmaster and his wife as well as the other school mates from rich families during his five years' stay in St. Cyprian's. There were a number of things about the school which he detested, and which scarred him psychologically. Thirty years later he wrote his famous essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", in which he recalled that he was so miserable and lonely, and developed disagreeable

mannerisms which made him unpopular throughout his school days. 11 His feelings about the school, which he anatomised and condemned in this essay - perhaps the most withering attack ever written about English preparatory

11 CEJL, I, p. 1.

52 schools - were so intense, his revelations so painful, that the essay could not be published during his lifetime.

In this essay, Orwell recalled one of the typical experiences at the school. Soon after he arrived, at the age of eight, he was beaten by Mr. Wikes, the headmaster of the school, for wetting the bed. At first, young Orwell tried to make light of the beating, though he was beaten with a bone-handled riding crop. However, Mr. Wikes overheard him telling his fellow students outside the room that "It didn't hurt", and Orwell was immediately beaten again. This time the headmaster used such force that he broke the handle of the riding crop, and little Orwell collapsed "into a chair, weakly snivelling". 12 Later he was beaten again when he wet the bed once more. The beatings caused that deep grief which is peculiar to childhood: "a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them ... ". The young Orwell developed a conviction of guilt and weakness, which, by his own account, he was not able to overcome for years. He wrote in "Such, Such Were the Joys" that "This was the great abiding lesson of my boyhood: That I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good ... it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung". 13 The atmosphere of the school with its cruelty, favouritism, bad teaching, snobbery and wealth, filth and bullying was something that Orwell learned to hate and despise. Although the Headmaster and his wife always reminded him

12 CEJL, IV, p. 382.

13 Ibid., p. 383.

53 of how much they had done for him, a scholarship boy who lived on their bounty, Orwell felt no gratitude to St. Cyprian's for pushing him on, or for taking him at half-fees. Instead, he hated the school and he hated the Headmaster and his wife. When Cyril Connolly, Orwell's contemporary at St. Cyprian's and one of Orwell's lifelong friends, published a book about their preparatory school in 1938, Orwell said to him, "I wonder how you can write about St. Cyprian's. It's all like an awful nightmare to me." 14 Orwell's unhappy years in St. Cyprian's had profound influence on his later life. He had a sense of inferiority and failure which haunted him. He was made to feel guilty: he was poor, he was lazy, ungrateful, and unhealthy, disgusting and dirty-minded, "weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly." 15 He was convinced that he was doomed to failure. Even after he had won two excellent scholarships, he found it difficult to believe in himself because "success was measured not by what you did but by what you were" .16 His childhood experience also had effects on his literary works. The atmosphere of St. Cyprian's - the lack of privacy in the living quarters of the school, the oppression with the encouragement of Mr and Mrs Wikes, of the weaker boys by the stronger, the spying, especially in search of heterodox behaviour or sexual misdemeanours among the boys - all these appeared in his writings later, though changed and magnified. Orwell left St. Cyprian's in December 1916, and never returned there.

14 "Letter to Cyril Connolly," in CEJL, I, p.380.

15 CEJL, IV, p. 413.

16 CEJL, IV, p. 416.

54 It is interesting to compare the early education of the two writers and their effects on their development: on the one hand, Orwell was crammed with Latin and Greek in St. Cyprian's under the pressure of the Headmaster for a competitive examination at the age of thirteen to achieve reputation for the school; on the other, at six in the morning every day Lu Xun was made to recite the "eight-part essay", a kind of stereotyped classical Chinese essay, in a strict traditional way before he was granted permission to go with the rest of the family for an outing, and he was later sent to a traditional school where he was taught only to recite lines whose meaning he did not understand. Both Orwell and Lu Xun felt disillusioned and resentful of their early education. Orwell felt that much of his training in the classical languages was the dullest kind of rote learning; whilst Lu Xun escaped from the boring recitations by drawing or tracing illustrations in class. He "used to draw ... to trace the illustrations to various novels, just as we traced calligraphy. The more books I read, the more illustrations I traced. I never became a good student, but I made not a little progress as an artist..." 17 Their early education nurtured their rebellious nature.

After five years' learning in St. Cyprian's under the urgings (and beatings) of the Headmaster and his wife, Orwell won an excellent scholarship to Eton, and in 1917 he matriculated as a King's Scholar at Eton, the most famous public school in England. In contrast to St. Cyprian's, Eton offered a liberal academic atmosphere and was far less oppressive. There, Orwell was no longer intimidated by the headmaster or bullied by his school mates, but he never

17 Lu Xun, Down Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

55 exerted himself at academic work. 18 After the years of cramming in Latin and Greek in St. Cyprian's, he did only enough at Eton to maintain a class standing that would permit him to retain his scholarship, and no more, 19 but he taught himself by extensive reading. His reading included John Galsworthy, H. G.

Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Jack London.20 In 1921, Orwell completed his studies at Eton. For a young man graduating from a public school like Eton, the next step would normally be to study at Oxford or Cambridge or at least to read for a degree at a provincial university. Apparently Orwell could have had this opportunity, because Eton provided scholarships to some of its students who could not otherwise afford to attend a university. However, Orwell showed no desire to enter university, and rather unexpectedly chose to work in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police.21 He decided to step out from what he saw as the ivory tower of school and university and go out into the real world.

The latter part of Lu Xun's education was quite different from Orwell's. In Lu Xun's early years, the Qing monarchy became corrupt and impotent and China was threatened by intensified imperialist aggression. In order to survive, the Qing government attempted to appease foreign powers by yielding to them its own sovereignty and parts of its territory, while suppressing the resistance of the people and peasant uprisings. Reduced to semi-colonial status, China was in imminent danger of being partitioned by the imperialists.

l8 Bernard Crick, George Orwell-A Life, Harmondswoth: Penguin Books (1987), p. 111.

19 Michael Shelden,Orwell-The Authorised Biography, London: Heinemann (1991), p. 66.

20 Bernard Crick, George Orwell-A Life, op. cit., pp. 128-29.

21 Michael Shelden,Orwell-The Authorised Biography, op. cit., pp. 85-90.

56 Lu Xun's home town was also shaken by the general social crisis and the dangers confronting the whole nation. The decline of the Zhou clan was in fact caused by peasant rebellions. Because of the collapse of the imperial system, Lu Xun did not want to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather or father, nor to become a merchant or a clerk in the magistrate's office (yamen), as did most of the sons of the impoverished gentry in his home town. He decided to take a different path. In 1898, he left for Nanjing and entered the Naval Academy, where no tuition fees were charged. He was soon dissatisfied with this institution. The following year he transfered to the School of Railways and Mines attached to the Jiangnan Army Academy, also in Nanjing, but again, he was not happy with the institution itself. However, here he became acquainted with the ideas of bourgeois reform and constitutional monarchy, and read a number of translations of western literature and science. During the four years in the school of Railway and Mines, Lu Xun became convinced that in order to save China from imperialist partition, revolution and the overthrow of the Qing monarchy was necessary. In 1901 Lu Xun was granted a government scholarship to study in Japan, and during his study in Japan a small incident marked a turning point of his life.

It seems to be a coincidence that Orwell also experienced a dramatic change of his life after he left his motherland and worked in Burma. Orwell made his decision to go to Burma as an imperial policeman, perhaps, because of his Anglo-Indian family background - on both sides, members of his family had lived and worked in India and Burma in the Army, administration, or trade. Orwell seemed to follow the family tradition. He sailed for Burma in 1921 and stayed there for five years. In Burma, he gradually realised the nature of the imperialism he was serving. Strongly rejecting it, he became

57 disillusioned with his job, returning home on sick leave in 1927. He never went back to Burma, and instead resigned from the service. He explained in The Road to Wigan Pier that he had decided to resign from the Police because of his bitter hatred of imperialism.22 He wrote that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner he threw up his job and got out of it the better. His experience in Burma is vividly illustrated in his essay "Shooting an Elephant", written many years later, after the fact, which indicates his ideas about the impending end of the British Empire by describing his feelings during an incident when he was forced by a Burmese crowd to shoot an elephant, even though he knew that the runaway beast had turned harmless and he did not want to kill it. Another essay about his Burmese experience was "A Hanging", describing his revulsion over the execution of a native. And the five years of service in Burma gave Orwell the groundwork for his first novel Burmese Days which was written in 1931 and published in 1934. The Burmese experience was very valuable to Orwell in his formation as a writer and a thinker. At any rate, it was with a feeling of strong opposition to British imperialism and a reawakened idea of becoming a writer that Orwell returned in 1927 from Burma to England. This was a great change in Orwell's life: a critical evolution of an imperial policeman into a writer.

During the first two years of his eight years in Japan, Lu Xun studied medicine. There were several reasons for this choice of subject: first of all, from his reading of translated histories he had learned that the Meiji Reform owed its success, to a large extent, to the introduction of Western medical science. He hoped that he could also bring the knowledge of western medicine

22 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, op. cit., p.129.

58 back to China and help the political reform. Second, Lu Xun wanted to cure patients like his father who had suffered from the wrong treatment. Third, he thought if war or revolution broke out he could serve as an army doctor. He enrolled, therefore, in Sendai Medical College.

However, Lu Xun was not really interested in medicine and his study was rudely interrupted by a particular incident. One day a series of newsreel slides about the Russo-Japanese War were shown in the college, in which Lu Xun saw the tragic apathy of the oppressed Chinese. He recalled the tragic scene many years later:

One of them was bound and the rest standing around him. They were all sturdy

fellows but appeared completely apathetic. According to the commentary, the one

with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians who was to be beheaded

by the Japanese military as a warning to others, while the Chinese beside him had

come to enjoy the spectacle."23

This incident shook Lu Xun to his depths. He was convinced that medical science was not as important as he had previously thought and that people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they might essentially be, were in such a position where they could only be made examples of or become witnesses of such dreadful spectacles. He further realized that the most important thing was to change people's spirit. The best means to change people's spirit, Lu Xun thought, was literature, because literature could stir up the feelings and arouse the anger and sympathy of

23 Lu Xun." Preface to Call to Arms", LXSW, I, p.35.

59 people.24 Soon after this incident, Lu Xun left the Medical College and he started to translate western literature as a first step in his career as a writer.

Although Lu Xun and Orwell did not choose creative writing as their first career, it was not an abrupt change of direction when they turned to literature. Both of them had been keen on literature when they were young. Lu Xun was interested in reading classical novels since he was a little boy and his favourite subject in Sendai Medical College was ethics instead of medicine. Similarly, Orwell was also interested in literary writing and had been thinking of becoming a writer. He confessed in "Why I Write":

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I

should be a writer. Between the age of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to

abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that sooner or later I should

have to settle down and write books. 25

Therefore, it is not accidental that they eventually chose to become writers. Besides their love of literature, however, it was their social conciousness and their sympathy with the oppressed and injured which urged them to write. In Lu Xun's case, one should consider the influence of the tradition of Chinese intellectuals who are expected to protect and care about the common people and the particular situation at that time, when China was on the brink of being conquered. Therefore, Lu Xun's literary career was a social commitment, and even had an indirect political implication: he wanted to awaken and

24 "Moluo shili shuo" (On the Power of Mara Poetry, 1908), LXQn, I, pp. 69-71.

25 CEJL, I, p.23.

60 strengthen China through literature. Lu Xun's motivation was also patriotic, as he expressed in his poem "On a Photograph of Himselr' (1903):

There is no way for my heart to evade the arrows of Cupid.

While the wind and rain like a millstone darken my homeland.

Asking in vain the chilly stars to greet my people.

I'm resolved to shed my blood for my great motherland. 26

Patriotism was once important to Orwell. Early in St. Cyprian's, Orwell published in the local newspaper his first poem "Awake! Young Men of England" which expressed his patrotic feelings:

Oh! give me the strength of a lion,

The wisdom of Reynard the Fox,

And then I'll hurl troops at the Germans,

And give them the hardest of Knocks.27

However, liberty and social justice rather than patriotism became the main concern of his mature works.28 Their differing attitudes towards patriotism may be explained by the fact that they belonged to two different countries - a powerful and aggressive empire and a weak and oppressed nation - and the

26 Poems of Lu Hsun, tr. Huang Hsin-chyu, Hong Kong: Joint Publications (1979), p. 1; cf.

W. J. F. Jenner, Lu Xun - Selected Poems, Beijing: Foreign Language Press (1982), p. 31.

27 Bernard Crick, George Orwell. A Life, op. cit., p. 85.

28 See George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit. A Study of George Orwell, Minerva Press

(1966), p. 255.

61 fact that they both cared about the sufferings of the people. Their sympathy with the oppressed was mainly due to their experience of childhood in a declining or declined family. Although they came from the ruling class, they witnessed the sufferings of lower class people and experienced the injustice of society. All these provided the impulse for them to engage in literary writing; their sense of social responsibility also indicated their future development as writers.

62 Section 2. How They Became Left-wing Writers

After choosing to be creative writers, Orwell and Lu Xun gradually turned towards leftwing politics. This section tries to describe the process of this development, in which similarities between the two, especially in their inclination to socialism, will be revealed through an analysis of their works and their literary and political activities.

One may observe that one of their motives for writing was to expose the injustice of society and the sufferings of the oppressed, as already discussed in the previous section. This motive, which in itself implied the possibility of an attraction to socialism, was more and more apparent as their involvement in the social and political activities of the time became more frequent and intense. Orwell proclaimed his motive for writing in "Why I Write" (1946):

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political

writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of

injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to

produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose,

some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a

hearing.29

This is one of the reasons that Orwell went into the slums in Paris and London, to the badly depressed northern mining districts of England and to the

29 CEJL, I, pp. 26, 28.

63 Spanish Civil War frontline. By doing so, Orwell eventually became politically conscious and grew up as a socialist.

Lu Xun also expressed himself clearly in "How I Came to Write Stories"

(1933):

As to why I wrote, I still felt, as I had a dozen years earlier, that I should write in

the hope of enlightening my people, for humanity, and of the need to better it. I

detested the old habit of describing fiction as "entertainment", and regarded "art

for art sake" as simply another name for passing the time. so my themes were

usually the unfortunates in this abnormal society. My aim was to expose the

disease and draw attention to it so that it might be cured. 30

Because of the more desperate social situation in his lifetime, Lu Xun experienced more dramatic changes and became more deeply involved in social and political struggle than did Orwell. But both Lu Xun and George Orwell committed themselves in social reforms through their creative writings. Because their writings aimed at social changes, their careers can be considered political in a broad sense. The chief difference between the early stages and later stages of their careers, i. e. the stages in which they are regarded as left-wing writers, centres around their attitudes towards socialism. Therefore, it will be crucial to trace its development through a number of different stages. A comparison of their development as left-wing

writers will reveal that their realist method of literary creation31 and humanist

30 LXSW, III, p. 263.

31 By the realist method of literary creation, I mean the author's effort to reproduce

truthfully his experience in real life or to express his opinion or feeling by means of

64 social attitudes contributed to their sympathy towards socialism and were a catalyst for their developing views.

In this section, their social commitment will be shown through an analysis of their writings and their social and political consciousness will be described through an account of their social activities.

Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was an autobiographical reportage of his discovery of poverty in the two capital cities in 1928-29. Why did he choose this theme? Looking back later in The Road to

Wigan Pier, Orwell explained that his motive for plunging into the social depths after he returned from Burma arose from feelings of guilt because of the punitive role he had played as a colonial policeman in Burma. He was conscious of an enormous weight of guilt he had to expiate, so he wanted to make contact with the social outcasts, with tramps, criminals and prostitutes, the lowest of the low in society. He explained further:

I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of

them and on their side against their tyrants ... 32

Through his exploration of the lower depths of the society, Orwell saw the sufferings of the poor and the injustice of society, and for the first time, he

truthfuJdescription and narrative of people and events in daily life or in history.

Whether his creation is "real" or not is another issue and is beyond the discussion of this

thesis. For a brief discussion of the debate about realism, see Damian Grant, Realism

(Methuen, London, 1970). For a brief account of the history of realism in English

literature, see C. Hugh Holman (ed.), A Handbook to Literature (Indianapolis: The

Odyssey Press, 1976), pp. 433-35.

32 George Orwell. The Road to Wigan Pier, op. cit., pp.130-131.

65 became aware of the working class whom he thought were as much the victim of injustice in their own country as the oppressed Burmese he saw in Burma. Moreover, his own experience of poverty during this period increased his sympathy for the oppressed and his indignation at the social injustice of the time. All this resulted in his first book Down and Out in Paris and London, through which Orwell wished to bring the English middle class, of which he was a member, to an understanding of what the life they led and enjoyed was founded upon.

"Poverty is what I am writing about,"33 Orwell declared squarely in the first chapter of the book, and indeed he presented a wide-ranging picture of it: his own experiences as a temporary tramp and a dishwasher, and the various sorts of poverty more deeply and endlessly suffered by those with whom he came into contact. Orwell's description of areas of the poor people was vivid and startling in a manner clearly influenced by Dickens: "very narrow street- a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse", "a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body", "a patina of antique filth". 34 He also described the working environment of a dishwasher that he saw:

rI came] into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stop in

places. It was stifling hot and very dark, with only dim yellow bulbs several yards

33 George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London, Harmondsworth: Penquin Books

(1988), p. 9.

34 Ibid., pp. 5, 72, 115.

66 apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages - actually, I

suppose, a few hundred yards in all - that reminded one queerly of the lower

decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of

food, and a humming, whirring noise ... It was too low for me to stand quite upright,

and the temperature was perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit... Scullions, naked to

the waist, were stoking the fires. 35

One remarkable aspect of the book is his description of the psychology of poverty, as he discovered it in the hotels, hospitals, pawnshops and parks of the mean and degenerate Paris and London. Hunger reduced one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition; "you are not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs." 36 Orwell pointed out that: "the evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually."37

The book achieved a fair critical success when it was published. J.B. Priestley commented on the book that it was "uncommonly good reading, and a social document of some value. It is, indeed, the best book of its kind that I have read in a long time".38 The comments of reviewers at that time made clear how interesting the book was to his contemporaries, and how well his choice of the topic chimed in with the social consciousness of the 1930s. It was

35 Ibid., p. 50.

36 Ibid., p. 17.

37 Ibid., p.181

38 Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation, London: Constable

(1979), p. 13.

67 Orwell's experience among the poor and outcast in Paris and London that made him aware of the need for radical change. The problems exposed in

Down and Out in Paris and London, seem to demand the reform of capitalism; it seems that any solution (though this is not made explicit before The Road to

Wigan Pier) must be a socialist one. Through Down and Out in Paris and

London, Orwell demonstrated himself a successful realist writer with a strong moral humanist sense.

Compared to Orwell's, Lu Xun's attitudes towards social reform have a different complexion because of a difference in social context. After the Opium War, China had degenerated into a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, in which there were major obstacles to social reform, among them feudalism and imperialism with its Chinese agents. Lu Xun's short story "A Madman's Diary" represented the conflicts in this social situation.

It is worth mentioning that it was not easy for Lu Xun to write his first successful story after he failed to found a literary movement during his study in Japan. He was so disillusioned that he became very sceptical about the possibility of any cultural changes at that time. In the preface of his first collection of short stories Call to Arms Lu Xun recalled his disillusionment at that time and how he was encouraged to write again:

In S-Hostel was a three-roomed house with a courtyard in which grew a locust

tree, ... For many years I stayed here, copying ancient inscriptions. I had few

visitors, the inscriptions raised no political problems or issues, and the days

slipped quietly away, which was all I desired ... The only visitor to drop in

occasionally for a talk was (an) old friend ...

68 "What's the use of copying these?" One night while leafing through the

inscriptions I had copyed, he asked me for enlightenment on this point.

"There isn't any use."

"What's the point, then, of copying them?"

"There isn't any point."

"Why don't you write something?"

I understood.They were bringing out New Youth, but since there did not seem to

have been any reaction, favourable or otherwise, no doubt they felt lonely.

However I said:

"Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible,

with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation. Dying in their

sleep, they won't feel the pain of death. Now, if you raise a shout to wake a few of

the light sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable

death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?"

"But if a few wake up, you can't say there is no hope of destroying the iron house."

True, in spite of my own conviction I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to

the future. I had no negative evidence able to refute his affirmation of faith. So I

finally agreed to write, and the result was my first story A Madman's Diary. And

once started, I could not give up but would write some sort of short story from time

to time to humour my friends, until I had written more than a dozen ofthem.39

The publication of "A Madman's Diary" in 1918, however, marked a turning point in Lu Xun's life and a new starting point of his literary career. The story, which was written in the vernacular style (baihuawen) also marked the first victory of the May Fourth literary revolution.

39 LXSW, I, pp.37-38.

69 "A Madman's Diary" is about a madman in the late-Qing period who suffers from a persecution complex. The madman thinks that all those around him, including his immediate family, are going to kill and eat him. To confirm his suspicions, one evening he delves into a Chinese history book:

In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather

hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology and scrawled

all over each page are the words 'Confucian Virtue and Morality.' Since I couldn't

go to sleep anyway, I read intently half the night until I began to see words

between the lines. The whole book was filled with the two words: "Eat people!"40

Here, the indictment of traditional Chinese life as hypocritical and cruel is presented satirically in the madman's "delusion": seeing the words 'eat people' in connection with the old Confucian canon, he establishes a connection between them. By pointing out that Chinese society was a 'man-eating' society, Lu Xun condemned the feudal system with its ideas and supposed morality. His concern is especially with the young who were corseted so tightly by the traditional feudalistic prescriptions and restrictions. He has the madman end his diary with a plea: "Perhaps there are still children who haven't eaten men?

Save the children ... "41

40 Ibid., p. 42.

41 Ibid., p. 51.

70 It has been argued that Lu Xun's first short story is symbolic rather than - r:-.,J J,i) realistic,42 therefore has more in common with Orwell's later work, such as ; Animal Farm and 1984. Although the story may seem different from Orwell's earlier realistic writings, in fact it is also different from Lu Xun's other stories in the same collection of short stories Call to Arms. It nevertheless shares a similar motive to expose and criticise the society and urge people to change it with other Lu Xun and Orwell stories. If we broaden our scope to take in the whole of his first collection of stories, we find more resemblances between the two writers: Lu Xun also demonstrated a strong humanist feeling in his realist stories published just after "A Madman's Diary".

It is interesting to note that both Lu Xun and Orwell were haunted at this time by similar feelings of guilt towards the oppressed. Orwell spoke of his guilty feelings in The Road to Wigan Pier:

For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a

bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces-faces of prisoners in the dock, of

men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged

peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of

rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally .. .) -

haunted me intolerably. 43

42 E.g. Yan Jiayan, "Lun 'Kuangren riji' de chuangzuo fangfa" (On the Mehtod of

Creation of "A Madman's Diary"), in Beijing Daxue xuebao, 1982, no. 1; See Liu Yukun, Lu

Xun xiaoshuo yanjiu shu ping (A Critical Account of the Studies of Lu Xun's Short

Stories), Emeishan: Xinan Jiaotong Daxue Chubanshe (1989), pp. 189-220.

43 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, op. cit., p. 129.

71 In his short story "A Small Incident" (1920), Lu Xun also expressed his guilt feelings towards people of the working class. He extolled the compassionate attitude of a rickshaw man towards an old woman who crossed the road in front of him and was thrown to the ground. The rickshaw man, ignoring his educated client's command to keep going helped her up and took her to a police station.

Suddenly I had a strange feeling. His dusty, retreating figure seemed larger at

that instant. Indeed, the further he walked the larger he loomed, until I had to look

up to him. At the same time, he seemed gradually to be exerting a pressure on me,

which threatened to overpower the small self under my furlined gown ... 44

And he ended the story with the words:

This incident kept coming back to me, often more vivid than in actual life,

teaching me shame, urging me to reform, and giving me fresh courage and hope.

The guilt feelings of Orwell and Lu Xun, which are indeed quite common among progressive intellectuals, not only revealed their sympathy for the oppressed, which is also common among humanist writers, but also their hostility towards their own class. It is this guilt feeling that became their dynamic impulse to demand the social reforms of their societies. And it is their humanism that eventually made them socialists.

44 LXSW, I, p. 77.

72 Orwell declared himself a socialist with the publication of The Road to

Wigan Pier (1937), though his previous writings had already shown the tendencies of the left. By 1936, he had already published three novels: Burmese

Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and a few important essays like "A Hanging", "Hop-picking" and "Shooting An Elephant". Orwell's writings during this period were realist writings whose theme was either anti-imperialism or the exposure of poverty and social injustice. By then, Orwell, like many of the writers of his generation, had become convinced of the need for a complete social change. Between 1936 and 1938, Orwell's socialist sympathies gradually developed into a firm political commitment. In July 1936, two months after he started writing The Road to

Wigan Pier, he attended the ILP Summer School where he gained further consciousness of socialism. It is clear that he was reading and thinking about socialism in a serious way at that time. Actually Orwell began to move from observation to participation in socialist activities.

In January 1936, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to make a survey of unemployment in the badly depressed areas of the north of England and to write about what he had seen. Wigan was an industrial and mining town in northern England, suffering particularly from unemployment at that time. There, as Orwell found, workers and their families were living on unemployment benefit, the dole, which was set at a very low level. The poor and unemployed endured their plight passively and saw no alternative. Orwell observed jerry-built, overcrowded working-class homes and talked with unemployed miners. Orwell also spent some busy days in the Wigan Public Library, reading up facts and figures about local health and employment which shocked him. Orwell even went underground himself to investigate the terrible

73 working conditions of coal miners, and he reflected that the daily life of the whole England depended on the continuity of their exhausting work. There in Wigan, Orwell also made contacts with many local communists, Trotskyites and ILP members all of whom he regarded as working-class activists.

Orwell's two months in the North pushed him closer to socialism. He felt something urgently needed to be done to reform the current society which was bringing so much misery to the working people in towns like Wigan. Orwell, then, openly advocated socialism as a remedy for the conditions which he expressed so passionately from first-hand knowledge in The Road to Wigan Pier. The book is divided into two parts: the first part is his observation and impression of the industrial north; the second a series of idiosyncratic essays on socialism and social class. However, for Orwell, socialism was not an economic theory but a philosophy of life which demands that poverty, injustice and deprivation be replaced by a fuller and richer existence. Throughout his elaboration of socialism words such as 'justice', 'liberty', and 'decency' are frequently employed. Therefore, Orwell's conception of socialism was a deeply humanitarian vision, undoctrinaire and compassionate. The book was a significant move in Orwell's wrestling with the problems of an unjust society, and his enthusiasm for social reform further increased.

After the success of his short story "A Madman's Diary" published in 1918, Lu Xun consciously used his writings to enlighten his people and his works played an important role in the May Fourth literary revolution. He continued to publish many outstanding short stories like, "Kong Yiji", "Medicine",

"Tomorrow", "My Old Home", "The True Story of Ah Q", and "The New-Year Sacrifice". These stories established Lu Xun's fame as a great realist writer in

74 modern Chinese literature. The chief characters in these stories are "the injured and insulted" in a feudal society. Lu Xun made a strong protest against their tragic fate, and mercilessly exposes and attacks the forces that oppressed them.

The most famous and influential of his short stories during this period is

"The True Story of Ah". Ah Q is a poor labour e_mployed for odd jobs by whoever needs him. Despite being the lowest, he has a very high opinion of himself. He tends to turn even beatings and humiliations into psychological victories. Moreover Ah Q not only often forgets his enemies and oppressors, he takes revenge on people weaker than he is, assuming the airs of an oppressor himself. When the Revolution of 1911 comes, Ah Q is eager to revolt. Then a hilarious episode occurs: a rich family in the village is robbed and Ah Q is afraid of being suspected, because he has treated the family with great disdain, since he thinks of himself as a revolutionary. But those "Bogus Foreign Devils", the opportunistic former reactionary gentry, contemptuously refuse to admit him to the revolutionary ranks. Not only that, he is hauled off

to prison and executed for disturbing the peace. Through Ah Q, Lu Xun tried to describe a true representative of the voiceless, brutalised masses of China, and he let his readers see the age-long oppression of the Chinese people. Lu Xun declared that he wanted to portray the "silent soul of the people" which for thousands of years "grew, faded and withered quietly like grass under a great

rock".45

45 LXQn, VII, p.82.

75 Because of the desperate domestic situation in China and his ideas of social reforms, Lu Xun was involved in social and political activities almost all his life. During his early studies in Japan between 1902-1909, he was active in the Chinese students' political meetings to protest against the Qing Dynasty's persecution of the revolutionaries and to discuss the way to save and strengthen China. He was a member of the revolutionary organisation, Guang Fu Hui, in Japan. The October Revolution in Russia in 1917, which brought Marxist ideas to Lu Xun and offered the example of a new socialist country, helped Lu Xun find his way to become a socialist later. In 1919, Lu Xun was caught up in the storm of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism of the May

Fourth Movement. It produced in him a strong impression of the decay and incompetence of.J;ltt(Duan Qirui's government and the strength of the newly­ born Chinese proletariat. Lu Xun was taught by harsh social reality and he took a firm stand on the side of the oppressed and persecuted. In 1926, at the time of the massacre of March 18, Lu Xun wrote a number of essays to protest at the ruthless killing of students by the reactionary war-lord government. He poured his indignation out in "More Roses without Blooms":

China is being devoured by tigers and wolves, yet no one cares. The only ones to

care are a few students, who should be devoting all their attention to study but are

too disturbed by the situation to do so ... Bullets shed the blood of young people,

true. And this blood can neither be hidden by written lies, nor soothed by written

dirges - not even authority can suppressed it, for it can neither be cheated nor

killed.46

46 LXSW, II, p.259.

76 Through participating in the social struggle, Lu Xun began to realise the need for radical change, which eventually led him to communism.

However, it was only after 1927 that Lu Xun completed his conversion to socialism. In that year, he witnessed the "White Terror' unleashed by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists and other progressive forces. The counter-revolutionary massacres took place in many towns and cities. The scale was a lot larger than the March 18 massacre. Some of the victims were Lu Xun's friends, students, or associates. There were many Communists among the students which meant that they were treated with special cruelty. Bi Lei, a student who once showed Lu Xun around Guangzhou, was abducted, like many others, sewn into a sack, weighted with stones, and then thrown into the Pearl River.47 Li Dazhao, one of the earliest Marxists in China and Lu Xun's close friend, was secretly murdered even earlier by the warlord Zhang Zuo Lin in Beijing.48 To protest against the reactionaries Lu Xun resigned from Sun Yet-sen University where he was the dean of the

department of literature.49 The bloody social reality taught Lu Xun a lot and

caused another change in his thought.50 In 1927, he published a collection of

his prose poems Wild Grass which describes his feelings during the struggles

47 LXQn, IV, p. 361; Li Jiang, "Lu Xun yu Bi Lei" (Lu Xun and Bi Lei), Zhongguo xiandai

wenyi yanjiu ziliao, V (1980), pp. 211-41.

48 LXQn, IV, pp. 523-25.

49 Ruth F. Weiss, Lu Xun: A Chinese Writer for All Times, Beijing: New World Press (1985),

p.119.

50 LXSW, II, pp. 171-79.

77 against reactionary forces. One of the poems "Amid pale Bloodstains" is clearly a lament for the friends he saw murdered:

At present the creator is still a weakling.

In secret, he causes heaven and earth to change, but dares not destroy this

world. In secret, he causes living creatures to die, but dares not preserve their

dead bodies. In secret, he causes mankind to shed blood, but dares not keep the

bloodstains fresh for ever. In secret, he causes mankind to suffer pain, but dares

not let them remember it for ever. 51

In the thirties, the social situation became intense in China, which helped push Lu Xun towards Communism. Lu Xun kept in close contact with the communist party and devoted much of his energy to their cause. He was both a writer and an activist on their behalf. Early in 1928, he joined the Revolutionary Mutual Aid Society; in 1930, he became one of the founders of the China Freedom League. When the China League of Left-wing Writers was established in Shanghai in March 1930 - a historic event in the revolutionary literary movement - Lu Xun was one of its founders and he remained its chief leader until 1936. In January 1933, Lu Xun joined the China League for Civil Rights; and in May he went to the German Consulate in Shanghai and handed in a protest against the brutalities of the Nazis. Moreover, Lu Xun helped to organise the international anti-imperialist, anti-fascist conference in Shanghai, which owing to the white terror, had to be held in the strictest secrecy. Although Lu Xun was not present, he was one of the honorary chairmen. Lu

51 LXSW, I, p. 361.

78 Xun's political activities made him live in hourly danger of arrest or assassination, but he never stopped fighting.

Lu Xun's writings in this period include a large number of critical essays which became a powerful weapon in his criticism of the society. His essays attacked innumerable enemies: imperialists, war-lords, Kuomintang die-hards, those who advocated a return to the past, reactionary writers and so on. For instance, in 1931, when Lu Xun received news of the murder of five young left­ wing writers by the Kuomintang authorities, he reacted with grief and anger in his essay "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers". Lu Xun began the essay with the words:

The revolutionary literature of the Chinese proletariat, coming into being as today

passes over into tomorrow, is growing amid slander and persecution. Now at last

in the utter darkness its first chapter has been written with our comrades' blood.

And Lu Xun went on to clarify why literature in China always has political overtones:

Through history our toiling masses have been so bitterly oppressed and exploited

that even the boon of a schooling was denied them. They could only suffer

slaughter and destruction in silence. And our ideographic script is so difficult that

they have no chance to learn to read themselves. Once our young intellectuals

realised their duty as pioneers, they were the first to raise a battle cry, a cry

which terrified the rulers as much as the cries of revolt of the toiling masses

themselves. Then hack-writers rallied to the attack, spread rumours or acted as

79 informers. And the fact that they always operated in secret and under false names

simply proves them creatures of darkness.52

Through his essays on a great variety of topics, Lu Xun attempted to indicate a new way of life for the Chinese people - socialism- through the democratic revolution, so that the oppressed could live "like human beings" and hundreds of millions of people might become the masters of their own fate". He finally declared, "the future belongs solely to the rising proletariat." 53

Orwell's political enthusiasm as a left-wing writer reached its height when he went to Spain and fought for the Spanish Republic against fascism. When the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936, Orwell was in the middle of writing

The Road to Wigan Pier and he became increasingly preoccupied with the events in Spain. This was even reflected in that book:

As I write this the Spanish Fascist force are bombarding Madrid, and it is quite

likely that before the book is printed we shall have another Fascist country to add

to the list... 54

Especially at this time when he had just expressed in this book his approval of socialism and hatred of imperialism and fascism, he was inspired by Spain as a concept and reality. He was eager to go to Spain to see what was going on there himself. So as soon as he finished the book Orwell immediately left

52 LXSW, III, p. 119.

53 Ibid., p. 179.

54 George Orwell. The Road to Wigan Pier, op. cit., p. 150.

80 England for Spain where he stayed for six months fighting the fascists in the Aragon front until he was wounded and invalided back home.

It was his experiences in Spain that made Orwell a convinced socialist. Spain showed him that socialism in action was a human possibility. On his arrival in Barcelona, he was deeply impressed by what he saw in the city where a new society seemed possible, where the word "comradeship", was no longer mere a political term but had become a reality. The democracy and equality of the militia, in which everyone got the same pay, the absence of privilege and boot-licking despite the shortage of everything, provided Orwell with a concrete example of Socialism in action. He came to believe that he had witnessed in the Aragon hills of Spain "a crude forecast of what the opening stage of socialism might be like". Orwell's vision of socialism, with its emphasis on freedom and equality, was clearly illuminated in his Homage to

Catawnia,

In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There

is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of

Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of

Socialism. Many normal motives of civilised life -snobbishness, money-grubbing,

fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class - division of

society had disappeclred to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money­

trained air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves,

and no one owned anyone else as his master ...to the vast majority of people

socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that

81 those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias,

while they lasted, were a kind of microcosm of classless society. 55

Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of his return to Barcelona (there was street fighting between the different groups of socialists), the Spanish experience gave Orwell hope. He said that "The effect was to make my

desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been

before."56

In a letter to Cyril Connolly dated 8 June 1937, i.e. more than a year after his trip to Wigan, Orwell wrote of his experience in Spain, "I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before".57

From his The Road to Wigan Pier to Homage to Catalonia, there is a clear growth of faith in socialism in Orwell. By then some of the issues that had remained unproved for Orwell at the time of Wigan Pier, in particular the question of his capacity to live up to his convictions, had been tried and tested by his experience in Spain. There is a clear line from his experience in the years of poverty and rejection of privilege - the wandering years - to the experience of shared hardship in Barcelona, and there is also a clear break, from a personal option to a common cause. Until he arrived in Spain Orwell's advocacy of

socialism was entirely theoretical, and it was only after Spain that Orwell became a revolutionary socialist. Orwell himself admitted in 1947:

55 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, England: Penguin Books (1981), p.102.

56 Ibid., p. 103.

57 CEJL, I, p. 301.

82 The Spanish Civil War and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter

I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has

been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic

socialism, as I understood it. 58

In 1938 Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party and explained, "One has got to be actively a Socialist, not merely sympathetic to Socialism". 59

To conclude this section, the similarities between Orwell and Lu Xun's development into left-wing writers can be summarised as follows: first of all, it is their humanism,60 their sympathy for the oppressed and the poor and their sense of social responsibility that motivated them to write; because their aim was social reform, they adopted realism as their principle mode (although in the case of Lu Xun there is experiment with other modes) - a realism that was inevitably critical; their humanist thinking and critical realist method of creation put them in a position akin to that of socialism; finally, it was social and political turmoil, rather than their reading of left-wing literature, that pushed them to the left. Therefore their development was based more on moral grounds, and their humanism, rather than on a firm ideological conviction. The

58 Ibid., p. 28.

59 Ibid., p. 374.

60 By humanism I refer to the thought which values human beings as of the utmost

importance, concerns the liberation of human individuals, and the conditions of the

underprivileged. See Bogdan Suchodolski "Renaissance Humanism and Marxist

Humanism" in Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism, London: Allen Lane The Penguin

Press <1967), pp.28-37.

83 fact that their political attitudes developed in this way eventually led to scepticism about communism and finally to a break with many of their colleagues on the left.

84 3. How They Became Sceptical about Communism

In the later stages of Lu Xun's and George Orwell's intellectual development, there was another similar turning point: their change of attitude towards the communism represented by the orthodox, or Stalinist communist parties. They became sceptical about what they had previously believed. Their scepticism grew out of the conflicts between their faith in the revolution and the cold-blooded internal strife within the ranks of the revolutionaries. To put it simply, they felt a conflict between their ideals and the reality they confronted. Their hope of revolution, as this had evolved out of their humanism, appeared to be incompatible with the concrete practice of the communist party. The conflicts occurred immediately after they became involved in revolutionary activities.

George Orwell went to Spain with his politics untried and his ideals untested. The Spanish Civil War provided Orwell with a special education: on the one hand, he witnessed and experienced socialism as a social reality; on the other hand, he became sceptical about communism. The Spain experience educated him in the complexities, ambiguities, compromises and betrayals of

politics. It was because of his Spanish experience that Orwell became critical of the Russian version of communism.

Orwell arrived in Barcelona on 30 December 1936, and he was immediately attracted and inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere of the city. He enlisted in the militia of the POUM (Worker Party of Marxist Unification) to fight the Fascists for the preservation of the Spanish Republic, "because at that time

85 and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do." 61 The war in its early stage appeared to Orwell as a black-and-white struggle between Socialism and Fascism, and it did not seem to bother him which militia party he joined as long as he was fighting the Fascists. In his political innocence, Orwell had not realised that the Spanish Civil War was also a conflict among different factions of socialist themselves, that each militia had its own ideology, and that the POUM was increasingly caught up in an internal power struggle between the competing revolutionary factions: As it happened, joining the POUM militia pushed Orwell into the centre of an intricate and bitter political struggle between rival socialist parties.

Immediately after his memorable encounter with socialist equality at the Aragon front, Orwell received a rude shock when he returned to Barcelona on leave shortly before the May riots. He found that the euphoric atmosphere he had revelled in only a few months ago had dissipated. The rough egalitarian atmosphere of the city had changed to such a degree that Orwell could detect "no outward sign of working-elass predominance ... "62 The civilian population had clearly lost interest in the war and it was obvious that "the normal division

of society into rich and poor, upper and lower class, was reasserting itself."63 More important, it was also obvious that "politically conscious people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between Anarchists and Communists

than of the fight against Franco."64 The mood of the city became tense and expectant after a series of political assassinations and sporadic shooting in the streets. As the struggle between the rival revolutionary parties sharpened,

61 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1962), p. 8. 62 Ibid., pp. 106-7. 63 Ibid., pp.107-8. 64 Ibid., p.108.

86 the POUM, one of those dissident Communist parties in Spain, took an increasingly anti-Stalinist line which made the party an ally of the Anarchist CNT ( National Confederation of Labour - revolutionary anarcho­ syndicalists).65 The POUM paid a heavy price for its independent revolutionary line.

Large scale rioting broke out in Barcelona on 3 May between the Communist PSUC(Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and the Anarchist CNT and its sympathisers, such as the POUM. It was reported that, when the riots were over by 8 May, more than 500 people had been killed and 1000 wounded.66 Afterwards, the Communists were in a position to impose their will on the opposition and thus launch a ruthless purge of all real or suspected members of the opposition. The ragged, insignificant POUM was specially singled out for persecution and eventually liquidation.67 Orwell, who had witnessed the confusion and inaction at one of the principal POUM installations, was outraged when the Communist and pro-Communist newspapers presented the fighting in Barcelona as a "deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engineered solely by the POUM with the aid of a few misguided uncontrollables" and "carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus paralysing the Government."68 Members of the POUM militia who had served with distinction at the front were denounced as "Fascist agents" and jailed indefinitely, pending possible execution for treason. Orwell escaped such a fate when he was sent back to

65 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1984), pp. 523, 525,649. 66 Ibid., p.660. 67 Ibid., pp.701-9. 6S George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, op.cit., pp153-54.

87 Barcelona to recuperate from a serious wound in the throat. His commanding officer at the front, George Kopp, "a man who had sacrificed everything­ family, nationality, livelihood-simply to come to Spain to fight against Fascism,"69 was arrested. Bob Smillie, the grandson of the famous labour leader, who "had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness,"70 was thrown into a prison in Valencia where he died. The other acquaintances of Orwell with POUM credentials or connections, such as Stafford Cottman and John Macnair, had been forced into hiding. "No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later," Orwell later testified. "will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men". 71 On-23 June, Orwell fled to France with his wife to escape imprisonment and probable execution by the Communist police. As he later put it:

We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping

over the border with the police panting on our heels. 72

The bitter experience in Spain was so crucial to Orwell that he wrote

Homage to Catalonia as soon as he and his wife returned to England. In "Why I Write?", Orwell said of this book that he "did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth."73 The great truth he discovered in Spain was that there was a civil war within the Civil War and the Spanish workers' revolution was betrayed by the

69 Ibid., p.200. 7o Ibid., p. 206. 71 Ibid., p. 142. 72 CEJL, I, p. 311. 73 Ibid., p. 29.

88 pro-Moscow Communists in Spain (Orwell called them Stalinists) in order to meet the needs of Soviet diplomacy. As he gradually realised, the real struggle was between the Comintern and the Spanish Left-wing parties. To Orwell, this internecine strife between the revolutionary factions was more horrible than the actual war against the Fascists. Orwell also accused the Communist and pro-Communist press of intentionally concealing the truth and unjustly vilifying the real revolutionaries, such as the Spanish Anarchists. While in Spain, unaware of the true nature of the political situation, Orwell had naively wanted to join the Communist-dominated International Brigade in the defence of Madrid, but after the May riots he changed his mind as he felt that "after this affair I could not join any Communist controlled unit".74 Orwell then believed that the communism of Stalin was not socialism, but merely "a particularly vicious form of state-capitalism."75 Once he had sensed the communists' liquidation of the POUM, and once he had sensed the failure of the pro-Communist Left to protest against this political persecution, he could not suppress his nausea, indignation and disillusion. Orwell suffered a profound revulsion which led to his scepticism about Communism.

Like Orwell during his experiences in Spain, Lu Xun suffered the same frustration in the struggles with a few orthodox Communists throughout the period of his activities in the left-wing literary movement controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

74 Stephen Wadhams (ed.), Remembering Orwell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1984), p.89. 75 CEJL, I, p. 369.

89 In 1926, when Lu Xun was on his way to Guangzhou, he thought of forming a united front with the Creation Society, originally a group of romantic writers who later joined the socialist movement, to carry on the social and cultural criticism kindled by the May Fourth cultural revolution. However, in early 1928, some young communists and left-wing writers, such as Cheng Fangwu, Jiang Guangchi, and Feng Naichao, formed the Sun Society to promote proletarian revolutionary literature with the Creation Society. Some of them were influenced by the Japanese Marxist Fukumoto Kanzo's militant version of communist revolution. They put the theory into practice in China and picked out Lu Xun as their main target. They regarded Lu Xun as a dedicated foe of the proletariat and launched attacks on him at the time, strangely enough, after Lu Xun was shocked by the Kuomintang's massacre in 1927 and was in the middle of a conversion to the left-wing literary movement.

The polemics with the Creation Society lasted for over one year, which helped Lu Xun see the dangerous tendencies within the revolutionaries. He gave his warnings in the talk at the inaugural meeting of the League of Left­ wing Writers on 2 March 1930 that, "Instead of dealing with the old literature and old ideas, our new writers started scrapping with each other in one corner, allowing the old school to watch in comfort from the side."76 And he further warned the young left-wing writers of the possibility that they might turn into a "Right-Wing":

If you simply shut yourself up behind a glass window to write or study instead of

keeping in touch with actual social conflicts, it is easy for you to be extremely

radical or 'Left'. But the moment you come up against reality all your ideas are

76 Ibid., p.106.

90 shattered.Behind closed doors it is very easy to spout radical ideas, but equally

easy to turn "Rightist".77

Their attacks on Lu Xun had such a negative influence in literary circles that Li Lisan, the general secretary of the Chinese communist party at that time, decided to intervene. Through internal channels, Li Lisan ordered the party members of the two Societies to stop their attacks and invited Lu Xun to form an association of left-wing writers, the League of Left-Wing Writers. Lu Xun considered that their move to cooperate proved that he was right in the debate, but some radicals resented the party's decision.

After establishing the League of Left-Wing Writers, Lu Xun had aligned himself with the Party's line. However, this did not last long because of the impracticability of Li Lisan's policies which were later labelled as left-wing opportunism. For example, Li Lisan once asked Lu Xun to make an announcement denouncing the Kuomintang government. Such an announcement would lead to persecution under the Kuomintang's fascist rule, and Li Lisan could only suggest that Lu Xun should escape abroad after it was published.78 Lu Xun refused because this would mean that he could no longer continue his cultural and social criticism and promote literary revolution. He felt that exile from one's home country was a death sentence to a writer. There were some other policies of the Communist Party which Lu Xun detested. Under the influence of Li Lisan whose views were shared by those closely associated with the Com intern and labelled as the "International School",

77 Ibid., p.103. 78 Zhou Jianren, "Huiyi Lu Xun zai Shanghai de ji jian shi" (Recollections of Severals Things About Lu Xun in shanghai), in Lu Xun huiyilu, Vol. 1 (Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe, 1978), pp. 9-11.

91 there was an attempt to impose the Russian experience upon the Chinese context, or force the Chinese situation into the Procfastean bed of the "universal" Russian model. Party members, including left-wing writers, instead of engaging in literary creativity, were encouraged to participate in fruitless assemblies and demonstrations by a handful of revolutionaries in big cities which could only lead to their further estrangement from the people.79

It must be mentioned here that Lu Xun's impressions of the communists were not entirely negative. As I have shown in the previous section there were some communists such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Chen Yannian, who won Lu Xun's admiration. In the thirties, the former leader of the CCP Qu Qiubai became a close friend of Lu Xun when he was staying in Shanghai for health reasons and became involved in the literary activities of the left-wing literary movement. Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai had jointly published a few articles criticising the government.80 Lu Xun also met a Red Army general Chen Geng who spent a couple of evenings telling him how the Chinese communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek's troops again and again under Mao Zedong's leadership.81 Some members of the League of Left-Wing Writers like Roushi dedicated themselves to the revolution and the left-wing literary movement also impressed Lu Xun very much. Lu Xun treated Roushi as his own son. 82

79 Xia Yan, "'Zuo Lian' chengli qianhou" (The Founding of the League of Left-wing Writers and After), Zuoiian huiyilu, shang, Beijing: Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chuabanshe (1982), pp. 35-59. SO See Shan Yanyi, Lu Xun yu Qu Qiubai (Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai), Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe (1986), pp. 64-118. 81 Zhang Jialin, "Chen Geng jiangjun tan he Lu Xun xiansheng de yi ci huijian" (About the Meeting Between General Chen Geng and Lu Xun), Lu Xun huiyilu, Vol. 1, Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe (1978), pp. 50-2. 82 See LXQn, IV, pp. 481-83.

92 Another reason why Lu Xun became estranged from the party apparatus was the fact that he was anonymously attacked by some leading members of the League. He thought it natural to be attacked by his enemies for his revolutionary activities. What he found difficult to accept was the attacks on him from his own side by those so-called "comrades". In April, 1934, when he was attacked by Tian Han who disguised himself as Shaobo, Lu Xun was enraged and warned publicly: "if someone from the same camp assumes a disguise to stab me in the back, I detest and despise such a man even more than an open enemy."83 The internal splits in the League, and especially the experiences of being stabbed in the back, gave him a particular view of human nature which helped develop pessimistic ideas at a deep level of his mind and a sceptical attitude towards communism at the end of his life.

Lu Xun's struggle with those orthodox Communist writers culminated in the middle of the thirties in the dismissal of the League of Left-Wing Writers and the "Two Slogans" debate. In 1935, both international and Chinese national crises became intense: peace was threatened and war was at hand. In the light of the Comintern's adoption of the united front policy, the Chinese Communist party changed the emphasis of its struggle from class struggle to national defence. Zhou Yang, who was in charge of the League of Left-Wing Writers representing the Communist Party, disbanded it in accordance with Party policy. This decision to do away with the League was made on the grounds that it was too political, too closely identified with the Party and frightened away sympathisers with the united front. The slogan "National Defence Literature", which was adopted by Zhou Yang at the same time,

83 LXSW, IV, p. 144.

93 expressed a desire to cast the net of alliance more widely and to displace the emphasis in left-wing literature from class struggle to anti-imperialism. However, Lu Xun held different opinions from those of Zhou Yang and thought it unnecessary to disband the League, which might still continue to serve as the core of a united literary front; or, if the League had to be disbanded, this should be done by means of an open prior declaration of the reasons that made this action necessary. Lu Xun's suggestion was disregarded and the League of Left-Wing Writers was silently terminated at the end of 1935.

Lu Xun was further troubled in the following year by his involvement in the debate on Zhou Yang's slogan "National Defence Literature". He and other dissident left-wing writers including Mao Dun (one of the most famous Chinese contemporary writers) and two important communist writers, Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, raised an alternative slogan "Mass Literature of the National Revolutionary War". Lu Xun explained that the formulation "mass literature of the national revolutionary war" is intrinsically clearer, more profound and more significant than that of "national defence literature", and that it was put forward in the main for those progressive writers usually known as Left-Wing, in the hope that they would strive to make further progress.84 Thus, Lu Xun was criticised and accused by Zhou Yang and his group of disrupting the united front because Zhou Yang's group considered that only they could represent the Communist view and policy, and writers should only be united under their slogan. In short, they wanted to be "orthodox" and their group to dominate the literary circle. Though very ill at that time, Lu Xun still fought back with a public letter "Reply to Xu Maoyong and On the United Front Against Japanese Aggression." In this letter, Lu Xun

84 Ibid., p. 292.

94 pointed out sharply that the key point and cause of the debate was sectarianism:

The sectarianism of Xu Maoyong and others was also revealed in their attitude

towards this slogan. They dub it "an attempt at being original," and also an attack

on the "national defence literature". Little did I think they could, carry

sectarianism to such extremes. As long as "mass literature of the national

revolutionary war" is not a slogan of "national betrayal" then it must serve to

strengthen the resistance. Why call it "an attempt at being original"? What

evidence have you that it is an attack on the "national defence literature"? What is

excluding friendly forces and insidiously undermining the strength of the

resistance is your own narrow-mindedness, in which you surpass the "white­

gowned literator" Wang Lun. 85

The debate on "national defence literature" was in fact a reflection of the struggles between Mao Zedong's political line and that of the "International School" headed by the former party boss Wang Ming.86 Wang Ming was trained in Russia and was living in exile in Moscow at that time. Wang Ming and his followers claimed themselves to be "one hundred percent Bolsheviks" which meant that their policy was to follow the Comintern as closely as possible. In the late thirties, because of the rise of fascism, the Comintern switched its attention from fomenting revolution to forming united fronts. In Soviet Union,

85 Ibid., pp. 290-91. 86 See Tang Tao, "Huiyi Lu Xun ji sanshi niandai wenyijie liang tiao luxian douzheng" (Recollecting the Struggles Between Two Political Lines in the Literary Circle in the Thirties and Lu Xun); Mao Dun, "Wo he Lu Xun de jiechu" (My Contacts With Lu Xun); Hu Yuzhi and Feng Xuefeng, "Tan youguan Lu Xun de yixie shiqing" (A Few Things About Lu Xun), in Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao, Vol. 1 (1976), pp. 49-97.

95 the stress upon world revolution was replaced by self defence against the fascist threat. Zhou Yang's urge to dissolve the League and other left-wing organizations and to promote "national defence literature" was in fact drawn from his reading of the news from the Comintern and Russia. (At that time, the Chinese Communists in Shanghai were cut off from their central committee by the Kuomintang, therefore, they were acting on their own.) By contrast the dissent expressed by Lu Xun, Feng Xuefeng and Hu Feng was based on the policies from Yan'an, the communist "capital" headed by Mao Zedong after he rescued the party from the influence of Wang Ming and the Comintern, which had in fact led to the destruction of nearly all the communist controlled areas in central and southern China. F.eng Xuefeng was sent from Yan'an to reestablish broken links with the communists in Shanghai. Because of his previous disagreement with Zhou Yang about literary theory and some other personal reasons, he was received coldly by the communist writers when he arrived. The only thing he could do was to ally himself with his former instructor Lu Xun and deliver messages through Lu Xun from the central committee of the CCP in Yan'an to the public. Feng Xuefeng collaborated closely with Lu Xun and in fact drafted the sections concerning the CCP's policies in Lu Xun's open letters to Xu Maoyong and to the Troskyites. As is nowadays realised, the Chinese communist movement has suffered from the leadership of Comintern which had become Stalin's tool since the late 1920s. The fact that the Chinese Communists survived was because they chose as their own leader Mao Zedong who drew his plans according to reality rather than on the basis of a remote order from Moscow. Therefore, the policies of Chinese communism, especially after the Long March, have never been in harmony with Stalin's policies. The seeds of the rift between Chinese and Russian communism in the sixties were already sown in

96 the thirties. They were so very different in theory and practice that Maoism should not be considered as any kind of "orthodox" communism in this thesis.87

The similarities in their experience of orthodox communism had a profound impact on Lu Xun and Orwell in their late political and literary development. It was the attacks on them by those of the same revolutionary camp that caused their disillusionment. Also it was the internal strife within the revolutionaries that helped them to form a new view of human nature and to develop in their minds deeply pessimistic perspectives.

Orwell's Spanish experience became a turning point in his political and literary development. Even he himself admitted later that, after the Spanish Civil War all his serious writings had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. 88 In Spain, Orwell not only saw that the dream of a socialist society came into reality, but also how easily such a dream could be broken. As he began to conclude that there was something in human nature that sought violence, conflict, power over others, his perspective upon revolution became gloomier. Although in Homage to

Catalonia Orwell insisted that: "the whole experience left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings," 89 in reality the Spanish War generated despair rather than hope for the future. In a letter to a friend in July

87 See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will. Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse­ tung's Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), pp. 60-73. 88 CEJL, I. p. 28. 89 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, op. cit., p. 220.

97 1937 he wrote, "What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim."90

Orwell's political development directly affected his late literary writing.

Animal Farm, which is about the failure of the Communist revolution in Russia, reflected Orwell's view of what had happened in revolutionary Bacelona. One of the purposes of the book is to expose the "Soviet myth" as Orwell called it, because he saw that what Stalin did in the name of socialism was in fact destructive to socialism. Orwell's last novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, represented the nightmare of the future of a totalitarian society, in which "the

Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the leader says of such and such an event, 'it never happened - well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five - well, two and two are five."91 This is one of the major themes of the book and O'Brien, the spokesman for the Inner Party, does in fact make his victim, Winston Smith, believe that two and two are five. The notion that a ruling elite could control the past by conscious manipulation of the news, first occurred to Orwell in connection with Spain where he was sickened by Communist false propaganda. He wrote in " Looking Back On the Spanish Civil War":

I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete

silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought

bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who never seen a shot

fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories ... I saw, in fact, history being

90 CEJL, I, p.313. 91 CEJL, II, p.297.

98 written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened

according to various 'party lines'. 92

And the political scapegoating process implicit in the persecution of the

POUM in Spain is further refined in Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm: the Party finds it necessary to create the mystique of Goldstein and the Brotherhood, and Napoleon needs to contrive the threat of Snowball in the farm.

Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, attack totalitarianism, which became the main target in Orwell's later writings. He wrote in an essay in 1946:

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at which he

nodded in immediate understanding, We were both thinking of totalitarianism in

general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War.93

After Spain, Orwell was so deeply disturbed by the growth and acceptance of totalitarian ideas and the totalitarian potential in some centralised governments, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union, that he was determined to warn the world of the danger of it. All his major post-Spain works show his attempts to achieve this aim. In explanation Orwell spoke of

his motives for writing Nineteen Eighty Four in a letter to Mr. Francis A. Henson of the United Auto Workers that:

My recent novel 1984 is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British

Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to

92 Ibid., p. 294. 93 Ibid., p. 294.

99 which a centralised economy is liable and which have been largely realised in

Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe

necessarily will arrive, but I believe ... that something resembling it could arrive. I

believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals

everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical

consequences ... and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph

anywhere. 94

Lu Xun's pessimism went even deeper with the coming storm of the war against the Japanese invasion, the tightening of government censorship, the persecution of dissidents, and the divisions and betrayals within the leftist camp. Although he was convinced of socialism and believed in its potential, he could never talk about how beautiful and bright the future would be. On the contrary, Lu Xun was quite doubtful about China's future. According to Chiu-yee Cheung's study of Lu Xun's late development, there are two reasons for Lu Xun's anxiety about China's future. One is that Lu Xun felt that the work of liberating the oppressed people could not be carried out by the people themselves but by "progressive elements" among the masses. But these elements were so rare in China that Lu Xun was conscious of his repeated failure to discover them. 95 The internal strife among the revolutionaries disappointed him in this respect. Indeed, after being stabbed in the back by those from the same camp, Lu Xun's attitude towards the cause of communism began to change. He said in a letter:

94 CEJL, IV, p. 564. 95 Chiu-yee Cheung, "Lu Xun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927", Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, Vols 18-19, (1986-1987), p.21.

100 The enemy does not make me afraid, but what makes me bitterly disappointed are

the hidden arrows shot by allies, and the joyful smiling faces of those in one's own

barracks after you have been hurt ... this is a terrible situation. I am not really

discouraged ... , however, it seems that I have been affected, not only in my

writings but also in my attitudes. Most of the time recently I am aware that I have

grown "cold". 96

Actually, Lu Xun's relationship with the orthodox communists Zhou Yang and his group almost came to an end in his last years because of the debate on national defence literature and the dissolution of the League of the Left-Wing Writers.

Lu Xun 's pessimistic view of the result of a Chinese revolution was based on his observation of the weakness of human nature. His comrade of the Guangfu Hui, Wang Jinfa (1882-1915), who had been actively involved in the 1911 Revolution, became a war-lord after the Revolution succeeded. Similar changes occurred to the secretary of the League of Left-Wing Writers Xu Maoyang, a young writer corrupted by political power in the 1930s. Lu Xun wrote that:

I always consider the people of the lower classes are better than those of the

higher classes and that the young people are better than the old .... But I realize

that as soon as gains and losses are involved, they will usually act just like those of

96 LXQn, XIII, p.116.

101 the higher classes or old people. However, this is inevitable within such a social

structure.97

Furthermore, he witnessed Jiang Kai-shek's betrayal of revolution and heard of the suicides of two Russian writers because they were disillusioned by the October Revolution. Lu Xun came to feel the inevitability of the power struggle in society and the inability of human beings to deal with it. Thus, Lu Xun's pessimistic perspective is not surprising. This view eventually affected his writings. A careful examination of the end of his historic short story "Curbing the Flood" will show the author's view that the revolution would lose its original meaning as it increased in power, which makes it comparable to the central theme of Orwell's Animal Farm.

The similarity between Lu Xun and George Orwell lies in their similar views of socialism. As discussed before, their socialism was originally based on their humanism. The differences of their attitudes towards communism, however, are also very great, because of the differences of their cultural traditions and the social and historical situations of their home countries.

Neither Lu Xun nor Orwell's view of socialism was to any great extent the result of a study of political or economic theory. In Orwell's case, socialism had a clear trace of the influence of the English socialist tradition. He has in fact often been treated as essentially an English socialist, as "in the tradition of Owen and William Morris. "98 The typical characteristics of the English

97 Lu Xun quanji (Collected Works of Lu Xun), IV, Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe 0973), p. 107. 98 John Atkins, George Orwell- a Literary Study, London 0954), p.13.

102 socialist tradition are its libertarian and egalitarian tendencies. Orwell's anti­ totalitarianism was obviously nurtured in this libertarian and egalitarian tradition which made it impossible for him to tolerate the Soviet way of revolution.

Orwell's characteristic English socialist views could be found in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism;

justice and liberty. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath

later after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-baked

'progressivism' until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung. The job

of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that

have got to ring like a bugle across the world. 99

All his life, Orwell hated and rejected class-distinctions and any form of privilege, which can be traced to his unhappy years in his snobbish preparatory school, his guilt at having associated himself for five years with British imperialism in Burma, the experience in living among the poor in the slums of Paris and London and his observations of unemployment in the mines of Northern England. He came to despise the forms of hierarchy the world had invented, whether of birth, wealth, race, or even talent. Therefore, he expected that socialism would bring about a classless and egalitarian society, as he

expressed in Homage to Catalonia:

99 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, op. cit. pp. 189-90.

103 The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk

their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality: to the vast

majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at

alt.100

The foundation of Orwell's socialist faith was mainly the egalitarianism that he very much enjoyed in the hardship of the Aragon trench with the Spanish militia. His egalitarianism could have been influenced by the William Morris quotation, "NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH TO BE ANOTHER MAN'S MASTER", emblazoned by the workers in Major Barbara on the walls of their church.101 According to Orwell, "Socialism, if it means only centralised ownership and planned production, is not of its nature either democratic or equalitarian."102 Thus Orwell's vision of socialism is also libertarian. He had an intense suspicion of any form of leadership and believed that all power may tend to corrupt. In "The Lion and the Unicorn", he warned:

Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of people are

living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the

government. 'The State' may come to mean no more than a self-elected political

party, and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. 103

Although he devoted much of his energy to attacking the totalitarian tendencies which seemed to threaten the future of human society, Orwell did

lOO George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, op. cit., p. 112. 101 Alex Zwerdling. Orwell and the Left, London: Yale University Press, p. 17. 102 George Orwell, "Revolot in the Urban Dessert", Observer 00 Octoberl943), p. 3. Cited from, Orwell and the Left, op. cit., p. 36. 103 CEJL, II, p.101.

104 not elaborate any socialist plans. Probably, he shared the feeling of many libertarian socialists that we have no right to plot the future which others may live, and he felt that excessive planning in any case carried the danger of creating a rigid society in which the evils of power would be inescapable.104 He rejected the totalitarian state based on a single-party, whether it exists in Russia, Germany or in the future of England. He disliked the police. He repeatedly pointed out the dangers of censorship, propaganda and the controlled literature. Orwell cared a great deal about individual freedom rather than about political expediency. Owing to his libertarianism, Orwell was sympathetic towards anarchism, and in fact, when he was in Spain, he had great respect for the anarchist forces and wrote to a friend that he would have joined them if he had understood the internal conflicts of the Left better when he arrived.105 Yet, he was certainly not an anarchist because as the passage above demonstrates he did not denounce government in general.

It was impossible for Lu Xun' s views of socialism to develop similar characteristics. First of all, China has no libertarian tradition. Furthermore, China was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country at that time and had little room for the consideration of the liberation of individuals: the survival of the country and the people had paramount importance, without liberating the country from the oppression of imperialism and feudalism, any effort for self emancipation was doomed to fail. Therefore, even a profound thinker like Lu Xun who highly valued the freedom of the individual would consciously submit himself to the Chinese Communist Party, the only social organisation promising a practical reform. Whereas the fact that Britain was one of the most

104 George Woodcock. The Crystal Spirit, America: Minerva Press, (1966), p. 285. 105 CEJL, I, p. 323.

105 politically sophisticated and powerful countries at that time, meant that Orwell had no need to submit himself firmly to any political party. Thirdly, as the above analysis has shown, the Chinese Communist Party was different from its Russian counterpart. Although Lu Xun was sceptical about the future of the revolution, he was not as critical as Orwell of the Soviet Union, and moreover, he had a number of admirable Chinese communist friends and disciples.

106 Chapter Four Their Political Scepticism in Literary Form - A Comparison of Animal Farm and "Curbing the Flood"

Orwell and Lu Xun actively involved themselves in politics and consciously employed their literary works in the service of social reform. This means that their literary works have direct and/or oblique political implications which reflect their special social commitments. In particular, their scepticism about communism is reflected in their literary works. A comparison of their famous satires, Orwell's Animal Farm and Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood", reveals the similarities of their late political and literary development.

However, whilst the political implications of George Orwell's Animal Farm are obvious, the theme of Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood" is oblique and ambiguous. To understand it, we need first to examine the purposes and the meaning of the two stories.

THE MAKING OF ANIMAL FARM AND "CURBING THE FLOOD"

1. Animal Farm and its theme

Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, at the time of the first Allied victories and of a growing solidarity with the Russians, who were regarded as heroes in the war against Hitler. The British public greatly admired the Russian defence of Stalingrad; indeed, this later

107 proved to be the turning point of the war. The public consensus of the time deemed it necessary to praise Stalin, who symbolised the Russians' heroic resistance to Nazism. Orwell, who throughout his career was impelled by an honesty which often made others uncomfortable, felt that it was morally and politically wrong to pretend that Stalin was admirable. He also felt that the English in 1943 were allowing their infatuation with the military heroism of the Russians to blind them to the faults of the Communist regime. 1 Animal Farm was meant to set his countrymen thinking again. In his essay "Why I Write" (1947) Orwell said, "[it) was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose in one whole." 2 Orwell's aesthetic purpose - to write a book that would attract attention by its style and structure as much as its content - was well justified by Animal Farm's success. Since its original publication, Animal Farm has sold upwards of ten million copies in hardback and paperback editions in Britain and the United

States and has in addition been translated into many foreign languages. It has established itself as a classic of modern fiction, and within his life time it turned Orwell from a well-known writer into a world famous one.

Orwell's intentions in Animal Farm are quite clearly stated, particularly in his preface to the Ukrainian edition (1947). There he wrote:

1 George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit -A Study of George Orwell, op. cit., p.193.

2 CE.JL, I, p.29.

108 It was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see

the Soviet regime for what it really was ... 3

From 1917 through to the 1940s, Russia had provided a model of socialism which excited the admiration of the many thousands of people all over the world who placed their hopes for social justice in radicalism and revolution.

Animal Farm asked, allegorically, why the Russian revolution failed and whether a morally successful revolution is ever possible. In "Why I Write" (1947) Orwell expressed his desire to make political writing an art. At the origin of all his books was the same "sense of injustice", the force which compelled him to write:

I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to

draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. 4

It is quite clear that one of the purposes of Animal Farm is to expose the lie which Stalinist Russia had become.

The idea for this book had been in the back of Orwell's mind since his return from Catalonia. Orwell wrote again in the preface to the Ukrainian

edition that:

The man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR

and were a sort of supplement to them ... Nothing has contributed so much to the

3 CEJL, III, pp.457-459.

4 CEJL, I, p.28.

109 corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist

country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for

the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth

was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement. 5

In Orwell's view, socialism had been corrupted by the false notion that Russia was a socialist country. He had realized the falsity of this notion in republican Spain, where communism operated not as a revolutionary force but as a reactionary one; he had also experienced its power to distort the perception of left-wing intellectuals in countries other than Spain. Orwell was convinced by his own experiences that the Soviet Union in fact damaged the cause of true socialism. It was on his return from Spain to England in 1937, six years before he actually wrote his allegory of the Bolshevik revolution, that Orwell had the creative impulse that led to the writing of an animal fable about the revolution:

One day ... I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along

a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such

animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and

that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the

proletariat. 6

It is clear from this that the idea of expressing his disillusionment with Stalinist communism in the form of an animal fable was in his mind for a long time before he found the opportunity to write it.

5 CEJL, III, pp.457-458.

6 Ibid., pp. 458-459.

110 Just before finishing Animal Farm, Orwell described it to a friend as "a little squib," but one that was "so not OK politically that I don't feel in advance that anyone will publish it."7 Orwell was right to be doubtful: the book was rejected in turn by three publishing houses - Gollancz, Jonathan Cape, and

Faber & Faber. The social climate of the time was highly unfavourable to the publication of Animal Farm which would have been viewed as an anti-Soviet satire. T. S. Eliot, a director at Faber & Faber at the time, summed up the cause of the publishers' unwillingness to accept the story with the following: " [We] have no conviction ... that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. "8 The book was eventually published in August 1945 by Secker and Warburg, but not before Orwell had seriously considered the use of a vanity press. But the book enjoyed a wider sale than any of Orwell's previous works, perhaps ironically, because it eventually harmonised with the attitudes of the Cold War period. The rapid transition of Stalin from heroic ally to major enemy of democratic Europe and the United States had already begun by that time and this change in circumstances made Orwell's views more acceptable.

Animal Farm was widely reviewed but the reception of the book was mixed. Most English reviewers noticed it warmly and nearly all praised its style,

comparing it to Swift's. In the New Yorker (1946) Edmund Wilson praised the

book highly, calling Animal Farm "absolutely first- rate", and he declared that

7 CEJL, III, pp.118-119.

8 Bernard Crick, George Orwell - A Life, op. cit., p.458.

111 it was time to begin thinking of Orwell as a major author. 9 But there were extremely conflicting views on the content of the book. Some saw it simply as anti-Soviet polemic, and praised it on those grounds. Others, in particular

Communists and their sympathizers, condemned it on the same grounds. It received unexpected praise in the New Statesman from its editor, Kingsley

Martin who described Animal Farm as "beautifully written, amusing and ... a fair corrective of much silly worship of the Soviet Union" .10 Isaac Rosenfeld of

Nation however, asserted that the book "can only be called a backward work" .11

Orwell was quite disturbed when his book was accepted in conservative circles. Some conservative reviewers read it as a criticism of the Soviet Union from the right; because the book was set in England and the animal hymn

"Beasts of England" was modelled on the Internationale, they welcomed it not only as anti-Stalinist but also as anti-socialist. Orwell reportedly told Stephen Spender that he "had not written a book against Stalin in order to provide propaganda for capitalists." 12 There were also misgivings from friendly reviewers; in Horizon, for instance, Orwell's friend Cyril Connolly reviewed the

9 New Yorker (7 September 1946). Cited from Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), George Orwell-The

Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1975), p. 205.

10 New Statesman and Nation (8 September 1945). Cited from in Jeffrey Meyers (ed),

George OrweU-The Critical Heritag,e op. cit., p.197.

11 Nation, (7 September, 1946) Cited from Jeffrey Meyers (ed), George Orwell-The Critical

Heritage, op. cit., p.204.

12 John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation-The Making and Claiming of'St.

George' Orwell, New York: Oxford University Press (1989), p. 24.

112 book warmly but criticised the suggestion that Stalin like the boar Napoleon on the farm, ruled the Soviet Union by terror. He said that the thesis of "the betrayed revolution" in Orwell, as well as in Koestler, missed the fact that "every revolution is 'betrayed' because the violence necessary to achieve it is bound to generate an admiration for violence which leads to the abuse of power". 13

The controversy surrounding Animal Farm did not abate with Orwell's death. Perhaps the main focus of controversy is whether Animal Farm is to be interpreted as an attack on Stalinism or an analysis of a "revolution betrayed" or both. Tom Hopkinson said that the book "can be read as a lament for the fate of revolutions." 14A. E. Dyson commented that, Animal Farm "is by no means about Russia alone. Orwell is concerned to show how revolutionary ideals of justice, equality and fraternity always shatter in the event". 15 B. T. Oxley cautioned against concentrating too closely on the parallels with Russia: "you may miss the wider implications of Orwell's fairy-tale." 16 However, Patrick

Reilly argued in his study of Orwell that "Animal Farm attacks Stalin but not revolution" .17 In his Authorised Biography of Orwell Michael Shelden writes

13 Horizon (September 1945). Cited from Jeffrey Meyers (ed), George Orwell-The Critical

Heritage, op. cit., p.200.

14 Tom Hopkinson, George Orwell, London: Longmans, Green & Co 1965, p. 27-8.

15 A. E. Dyson, "Orwell: Irony as Prophecy", The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony, London

(1965), p.206.

16 B.T. Oxley, George Orwell, London: Evans Brothers Limited (1967), p81.

17 Patrick Reilly, George Orwell-The Age's Adversary, England: Macmillan Press (1988), p.

266.

113 that "It is too narrow to say that Animal Farm is anti-communist". He quotes Orwell's words in a preface for the English edition that "The enemy is the gramophone mind," by which Orwell pointed out that any ideology - communist or otherwise - could encourage such a state of mind. 18 Opposing the use of

Animal Farm for many years during the Cold War by 'anti-Communists' as a propaganda weapon claiming Orwell as an ideological ally, he said that "this was a gross misrepresentation of the book and a violation of the spirit in which

Orwell wrote it". 19

In brief, Animal Farm, as a commentary on the history of the twentieth century and the significance of one of its most important events - the Russian revolution - still remains controversial.

To understand this story, it is worth mentioning Trotsky's The Revolution

Betrayed published in England in 1937. Orwell learned a great deal from the book because it was an analysis of the Soviet state written by someone who knew it from the inside. But he also criticised Trotsky for the fact that, he " in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much

responsible for it as any man now living". 20 This book helped Orwell to connect his own experience in Spain with what was happening in the Soviet Union. According to Trotsky's theory, the revolution in Russia was unavoidably betrayed because it took place in an economically backward country and thus, the injustice, poverty, forced industrialisation, and tyranny

18 Michael Shelden, Orwell-The Authorised Biography, London: Reinmann (1991), p. 400.

19 Ibid., p. 404.

20 CEJL, I, p. 419.

114 of the Soviet society were historically inevitable. 21 Apparently much of Trotsky's book haunted Orwell's imagination and was finally to produce

Animal Farm.

In the story, the tragic development of the animal revolution was described through the episode of the conflict between Napoleon(Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), the stark reality of Napoleon's hunger for power and the cruelty of the allegory of the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. In chapter seven of the story, after being warned by Napoleon that Snowball's secret agents were still among them, the animals were ordered to assemble in the yard to witness an attack upon four of the other pigs by the dogs trained by Napoleon:

Presently the tumult died down. The four pigs waited, trembling, with guilt

written on every line of their countenances. Napoleon now called upon them to

confess their crimes. They were the same four pigs as had protested when

Napoleon abolished the Sunday Meetings. Without any further prompting they

confessed that they had been secretly in touch with Snowball ever since his

expulsion, that they had collaborated with him in destroying the windmill, and that

they had entered into an agreement with him to hand over Animal Farm to

Mr.Frederick. They added that Snowball had privately admitted to them that he

had been Jones' secret agent for years past. When they had finished their

confession, the dogs promptly tore their throats out, and in a terrible voice

Napoleon demanded whether any other animals had anything to confess. 22

21 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New York: Pathfinder Press (1977), pp. 105-14.

22 George Orwell, Animal Farm - A Fairy Story, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1986), p.

73.

115 Three hens come forward and admit to having heard Snowball speak to them "in a dream". They are slaughtered. A goose confesses to pilfering six ears of corn, followed by a sheep who, "urged to do this" by Snowball, has urinated in the drinking pool. And so the tale of confessions and executions goes on, until "there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown there since the expulsion of

Jones".23 The cold violence Napoleon used to treat his opposition obviously shows that he had become the new oppressor of the animals. He lends force to Orwell's political theme that power tends to corruption and tyranny. The animal rebellion and the overthrow of the old cruel master did not bring the animals the better life that they had dreamed of, but more terrors under a new tyranny. The implications are clear that the Russian Revolution had been betrayed by Stalin's eagerness to establish his dictatorship. In this scene, the basic theme of Animal Farm - that revolutionary ideals collapse and give way to tyranny - is clearly expressed.

Totalitarianism is the main issue that Orwell exposed and condemned in

Animal Farm; as he himself stated "[the book) is intended as a satire on

dictatorship in general."24 Stalin's Russia is the immediate example. From his own experience in Spain and knowledge of the change of the Russian Revolution, Orwell realized that fascism and Stalinist Communism were simply different forms of Totalitarianism. But the destruction caused by

23 Ibid., p. 74.

24 "MS letter to Leonard Moore". Cited from Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left, op.

cit., p.90.

116 fascism was far better known to the world than that of communism. Orwell even considered the exposure of the Soviet myth a test to the honesty of a writer.25 His last two fictions Animal Farm and 1984 show how the changes in Orwell's later political development managed to generate a satiric vein that formed a powerful weapon with which to attack Totalitarianism26.

Following the horrible scene of the slaughter, the animals huddle about Clover on the hillside. A melancholy spring evening balances the joyous summer morning that marks the beginning of the start of their revolution:

As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have

spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had

aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the

human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked

forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she

herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set

free from hunger and whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the

strong protecting the weak... Instead - she did not know why - they had come to a

time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed

everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after

confessing to shocking crimes. 27

25 CEJL, III, p. 237.

26 For my interpretation of "Totalitarianism" see Chapter 3.

27 George Orwell, Animal Farm - A Fairy Story, op. cit., p. 75.

117 This paragraph clearly recalls Orwell's experience in Spain - the euphoric atmosphere of Bacelona in the summer of 1936 and the horrible days of the city several months later. Again, the feeling of a betrayed revolution is felt. The animals start to sing the song that epitomized the egalitarian ideals Major had expounded in "Beasts of England", when Squealer, the propagandist pig, appears to announce that "by a special decree of Comrade Napoleon, 'Beasts of England' had been abolished." Squealer tells the astonished animals that the reason is that "in 'Beasts of England' we expressed our longing for a better society in days to come. But that society has now been established. Clearly this song has no longer any purpose."28 The powerful irony is that Squealer talked about "the better society" whilst the animals sat in the shadow of the heap of freshly slaughtered corpses.

After the revolution most of the animals work very hard. Indeed, they work harder than they did under the former owner's, Mr.Jones', rule. Production is said to have improved, but milk starts to disappear instead of being equally apportioned. Early after the rebellion it is also discovered that the windfalls in the apple orchard are not being shared out. Squealer pacifies the doubts of the animals. "Comrades!" he cried:

You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and

privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our

sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this

has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary

to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brain-workers. The whole management and

28 Ibid., p. 77.

118 organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your

welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat apples. Do you know

what would happen ifwe pigs fail in our duty? Jones would come back'. 29

For Orwell, this manipulative speech by Squealer was a key passage of Animal

Farm.30 It demonstrates both the greed and the hypocrisy involved in the lust for power, which disguises itself as sacrifice for the common good. Gradually, the pigs move into Jones' house. It becomes known that they are eating in the kitchen and sleeping in beds. Remembering injunctions against such behaviour, the animals rush to read the Commandments. The Fourth Commandment, contrary to their memory, now reads: "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets".31 Later, after the savage killing in Chapter Seven, "No animals shall kill any other animals" is modified by the addition of

"without cause".32 The corruption inherent in the Rebellion is manifest in the corruption of language as each of the Commandments is successively betrayed, until nothing of the original revolutionary idealism remains.

Orwell's consideration of the weaknesses of human nature made him sceptical about communism, and therefore his view on a revolution is pessimistic. The outcome of the novel is obvious: years pass and Jones dies in an inebriates' home; all the animals forget Boxer and Snowball, for a new generation of animals has grown up. The situation on the farm is unchanged

29 Ibid., pp.32-3.

30 Bernard Crick, George Orwell - A Life, op. cit., p.490.

31 George Orwell, Animal Farm -A Fairy Story, op. cit., p.60.

32 Ibid., p. 78.

119 for most of the animals. The farm is more prosperous now, but the fruits of prosperity never pass beyond Napoleon and his pigs. And the attempt to judge whether the present situation is better or worse than it had been under Jones is fruitless. "Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones' expulsion was still recent, things has been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing to which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go upon except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better" .33 Clover and Benjamin walked around to the barn to read the last

Commandment. It turned out to be: "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME

ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS". 34

After this, it is not strange that pigs become indistinguishable from the humans they had resented in the Revolution, and that the farm reverts to its original name. The book has come full circle and everything is as it once was. Benjamin, the donkey, who is the representative of cynicism, believed "that things never had been nor ever could be much better or much worse - hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life". 35 His judgement, which the end of the book seems to validate, might be taken as coinciding with Orwell's own views. As early as 1938, Orwell had expressed the uncertainty about revolution which eventually produced Animal Farm :

33 Ibid., pp. 110-11.

34 Ibid., p.114.

35 Ibid., p.111.

120 "It would seem that what you get over and over again is a movement of the

proletariat which is promptly canalised and betrayed by astute people at the top,

and then the growth of a new governing class. The only thing that never arrives is

equality. The mass of the people never get the chance to bring their innate

decency into the control of affairs, so that one is almost driven to the cynical

thought that men are only decent when they are powerless". 36

Communism is neither better nor worse than capitalism or fascism and all revolutionary idealism is inevitably corrupted because of the weaknesses of human nature. The target of Animal Farm is not a simple satire of Russian communism but rather of the inability of humans to overcome problems that have their essential basis in issues of power relations. At the conclusion of the book the reader's sense of horror at the human-faced, whip-carrying pigs is outweighed by his despairing pity for the animals who are doomed to be slaves forever under the new oppressors. Animal Farm is thus a profoundly pessimistic fable.

2. "Curbing the Flood" and Its Theme Lu Xun's scepticism is well represented by the ambiguous ending of his historical story "Curbing the Flood" (Li shui, 1935). Lu Xun finished writing the story in November 1935. Before its inclusion in his collection of historical stories Old Stories Retold, it had never been published. The story was loosely based on a mythologised historical event in ancient China.

36 CEJL, I, p. 372.

121 According to Sima Qian's Records of an Historian (Shi ji), there was a big flood during the reign of Emperor Yao, some four thousand years ago. The Emperor appointed Gun to curb the flood but he achieved little after nine years' work. After Emperor Yao died, Emperor Shun came to the throne and sent Gun into exile, or executed him according to a different interpretation of the text, for his failure. Yu was then appointed to the job. Yu spent eight years working very hard together with the people. His devotion to his work was demonstrated by his leaving home just three days after marriage and not visiting his family even when he passed by his home three times.37 He worked very hard: "with his own hands he piled the bucket and dredger" to make all streams flow to the sea, "until his calves and shins had no hair left upon them. "38 After the flood was curbed, Emperor Shun abdicated, leaving the throne to Yu whose son Qi later succeeded to the throne and established the first hereditary dynasty, the Xia Dynasty, which marked the end of the period of tribal alliance in Chinese history. Yu has been described as a god-like figure who possessed magical powers which he employed to curb the flood. Apparently, the story has little to do with revolution and the situation in China during Lu Xun's time, but, through Lu Xun's imagination and creative literary treatment of the theme, the historical event is transformed into a political fable of profound meaning.

37 See Sima Qian, "Shiji. Xia benji", in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (eds.), Gushi xin

bian yanjiu ziliao, Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe (1984), pp. 78-82; Mencius, tr. D. C.

Lau, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1976), p. 102.

38 Zhuang Zi, Chuang Tzu. Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, tr. Herbert A. Giles,

London: Bernard Quaritch (1926), p. 442.

122 In his/her discussion of the story, Ding Yi quoted a Soviet Sinologist L. D. Pozdneeva arguing that the story "Curbing the flood" shows Lu Xun 's admiration for the Chinese Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Zhu De and their Red Armies who took part in the heroic "Long March" through two thousand and five hundred Chinese miles of no-man's land from the middle of China to the north-western part of the country. This argument is weakly based on the fact of the timing of the book's composition, one month after the Chinese communists successfully broke through the blockades of Kuomintang armies and reached the northern part of Shanxi province and on the telegram that Lu Xun and Mao Dun sent to the Red Armies to congratulate them upon their success.39 However, Ding Yi still considers that "Curbing the Flood" reflects the influence of the Long March on Lu Xun:

The event of great historical significance must have been a tremendous

encouragement to Lu Xun and must have spurred him to write something.

However, he was not at the centre of the revolution and could only express his joy

by describing the two great historical figures who loyally served the people. 40

39 See the opinion of a Soviet sinologist quoted in Ding Yi's Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shiWe (History of Modern Chinese Literature), pp. 195-96; cited in He Jiahuai '"Li shui

zaji," in his Gushi xin bianji qita, Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian Chubanshe 0957), p. 8; see

also Wu Ying, "Ruhe lijie Gushi xin bian de sixiang yiyi," in Gushi xin bian de sixiang yiyi

he yishufengge, Shanghai: Xinwenyi Chubanshe 0957), p. 12; Qinwen, "Lu Xun 'Li shui'

zhongde Yu taitai," Lu Xun yanjiu wencong, III (1982), p. 253.

40 Ding Yi, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shilue (History of Modern Chinese Literature),

Beijing: Zuojia Chubanshe 0955), p. 196.

123 Ding Yi's view is further elaborated and supported by Ma Hua who produces additional historical "evidence".41 Some time between July and August in 1932, he argues, Lu Xun met a famous Red Army general Chen Geng (1903-1961) when the latter was staying in Shanghai for medical treatment after breaking through the blockade of the Kuomintang armies. Chen Geng described in detail to Lu Xun how people in the guerilla base resisted the Kuomintang army and how the communists were building a socialist society. The communists in Shanghai also sent Lu Xun material about the struggles of the Chinese Red Armies, hoping that Lu Xun would write something about them.42 Moreover, a map which Chen Geng drew for Lu Xun to explain what was happening is still kept amongst Lu Xun's papers; and after meeting Chen Geng, Lu Xun does indeed seem to have been thinking of writing something about the struggles that were taking place. Lu Xun told Feng Xuefeng that he might write a story about the Chinese Red Armies that would be similar to A. S. Serafimovich's

Iron Flood. However, he never did write this book; it would seem, because of a lack of material and experience.43 Although Ma Hua thus provides more evidence to try to prove that the writing of "Curbing the Flood" was related to the struggles of Chinese Red Armies, he also considers that Lu Xun had other purposes in the story, and

41 Ma Hua, "Du 'Li shui"', in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (eds.), Gushi xin bian yanjiu

ziiiao, op. cit., pp. 488-89.

42 Ibid; Zhang Jialin, "Chen Geng jiangjun tan he Lu Xun xiansheng de yi ci huijian," in

Lu Xun huiyitu, I (1978), pp. 50-52.

43 Feng Xuefeng, Xuefeng wenji (Collected Works of Feng Xuefeng), Vol. 4, Beijing:

Renmin Chubanshe (1985), pp. 194-95.

124 that one of them was to expose the darkness and ugliness of society.44 Ma Hua's argument is more balanced than He Jiahuai's which perhaps goes to another extreme in his doubt about the over-simplified conclusion of the Soviet Sinologist Pozdneeva and its exclusive emphasis upon Lu Xun's intention to expose a darkness in society.45 But in the end the question of Lu Xun's motive - to express his admiration for the Red Armies or to expose the darkness in society - is of minor importance in this thesis. Lu Xun certainly praised Yu and his followers in the story and they were obviously the people whom Lu Xun called the "backbone" of China.46 There should be no doubt about the fact that the Chinese communists were in Lu Xun's eyes the same "backbone" in China at that time. But what would happen after these people ascended to positions of power? This is where the ending of the story is worth pondering:

Before long the merchants were saying that Yu's ways were an excellent example

to all, and Gao Yao's new laws were not bad. Then such peace reigned throughout

the world that even wild beasts danced and phoenixes flew down to join in the

fun.47

44 Ma Hua, "Du 'Li shui"' (Reading "Curbing the Flood"), in Meng Guanglai and Han

Rixin (eds.), Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao, op. cit., pp. 489-90.

45 He Jiahuai, '"Li shui' zaji" (Notes on "Curbing the Flood"), Gushi xin bianji qita,

Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian Chubanshe (1957), pp. 8-9.

46 LXQ, VI, p. 118.

47 Old Stories Retold, tr. Yang Xianyi and Galdys Yang, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press

(1972), p. 50; LXQn, II, p. 386.

125 It has been argued that the story is a comedy and that it has a happy ending, 48 but this is not congruent with Lu Xun 's thinking. A c I ose r examination of Lu Xun's thinking and his expectation of a social and "spiritual" reform in China negates this wishful conclusion. First of all, Yu's change in the story is clearly reminiscent of Wang Jinfa (1882-1915), a revolutionary who later degenerated into a warlord. The scene of Yu and his followers marching into the capital depicted by Lu Xun, is parallel to Wang Jinfa's army marching into Shaoxing, Lu Xun's home town, after the success of the 1911 Revolution. In "Curbing the Flood", Lu Xun wrote:

As word had long since spread of Yu's return to the capital, every day a crowd

would gather in front of the pass to watch for his cortege. But it never came. News

of him, however, coming thick and fast, began to sound more and more authentic.

And at last on a morning neither cloudy nor clear he entered the Imperial City in

Jizhou through a milling crowd of thousands. He was preceded by no regal

insignia, only by a great band of beggarly-looking followers. He came last, a hulk

of a man with huge hands and feet, a swarthy face and brownish beard. Rather

bow-legged ... Calling out repeatedly: "Make way there, please!" he pressed

through the crowd to the Imperial Palace.

At the palace gates, the acclamations and comments of the people sounded like

the roar of the waves of the River Zhe.49

48 Han Rixin, "Cong Gushi xin bian kan Lu Xun aiguozhuyi sixiang de fazhan", Yi ge weida

aiguozhuyizhe qianjin de zuji, Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe (1984); Li Zhengping, "Lun Gushi

xin bian de xingzhi yu yishu tezheng", Wenxue pinglun congkan, VIII (1981).

49 Old Stories Retold, op. cit., p. 48; LXQn, II, p. 385.

126 Lu Xun's younger brother Zhou Jianren recollects similar rumours of Wang Jinfa's arrival before his troops finally came to Shaoxing; crowds of people had been waiting for them for several days. Eventually, they arrived and were welcome by crowds of people. Zhou Jianren wrote:

Wang Jinfa's soldiers were not tall and their faces were engraved with the

hardships they have gone through ... [people gathered outside the barrack) and

shouted slogans such as "Long live the revolution" and "Long live China". People

were in high spirits and excited. Before long, some people came and asked people

to make way and a group of people carried wine and meat into the barracks for the

soldiers ... so

The obvious resemblances between the two scenes suggest that Lu Xun had Wang Jinfa in mind when he was writing the story. Unfortunately, the historical figure Wang Jinfa was surrounded by a group of old officials in the government and later accepted bribery like every warlord.51 Lu Xun and Wang Jinfa were members of the revolutionary organization Restoration Society and it was Wang Jinfa who appointed Lu Xun as the chancellor of the Shaoxing Teachers College.52 The later degeneration of Wang Jinfa had delivered an important message to Lu Xun: a revolution could be defeated by the old system even after its military success. In "This and That"

(Zhege yu nage, 1925), Lu Xun recalled how Wang Jinfa became corrupted:

so See Qiaofeng, Luehjiang guanyu Lu Xun de shiqing, Hong Kong: Eryashe 0978), p. 18.

SI Ibid.

S2 Ibid.

127 During the 1911 Revolution, a military governor arrived in S. He was rather

public-spirited and willing to pay attention to public opinion. But then everyone,

from the gentry to the common folk, started raising him up with their traditional

tactics. Some paid ceremonial calls, others flattered him; one day he received a

gift of silk and brocade, the next a sumptuous banquet; until he lost his bearings

completely, and became like any old bureaucrat, starting to squeeze the people on

every pretext. 53

Lu Xun later was even forced to leave Shaoxing because of his criticism of

Wang Jinfa who in return threatened to kill Lu Xun. 54 According to Lu Xun, there are three reasons for the defects in Wang Jinfa's character. First, although their influence fluctuated and was in gradual decline, the old degenerate customs were still very much alive in daily life in Lu Xun's time and might easily turn a revolutionary governor back into a reactionary bureaucrat. Second, this danger would become more serious when the revolution's influence increased. In "The Other Side of Celebrating the Recovery of Shanghai and Nanjing" (Qingzhu Ning Hu Kefu de na Yibian, 1927), Lu Xun said:

As the power of the revolution increases, more and more people are bound to be

in favour of it. After the unification of.the whole country, I fear even the Research

Group will be talking of revolution too .... I used to have a biased view of Buddhism,

thinking the ascetic Hinayana sect was genuine Buddhism; later, rich men who

drank wine and ate meat could, if they fasted just once, call themselves Buddhists

53 LXQn, III, p. 141; LXSW, II, p. 223.

54 LXQn, VIII, p. 361.

128 and count as true believers. The fine name Mahayana was given to the religion

and it spread even more widely, because it was so easy to join this sect; it became

emasculated, and may finally have come to nothing. The same applies to

revolution. The strict revolutionaries who fight on march forward, leaving behind

them wide areas which have had revolution, so that we can relax, sing and cheer

and appear in revolutionary colours too whereas actually we have nothing at all to

do with revolution. Once there are many people of this sort, the revolutionary

spirit may grow emasculated and tenuous then gradually fade away, to be followed

by retrogression.SS

And third, there is the fundamental weakness of human nature. In principle, Lu Xun was favourably disposed towards people from the lower classes of society. Before the 1911 Revolution, he considered that the Chinese peasants retained the finest aspects of the national character;56 in the May Fourth era, he wrote numerous essays and short stories expressing his feelings towards these people. The high praise he accorded the rickshaw puller in his short story "A Small Incident" (Yi jian xiaoshi, 1919), was unprecedented among Chinese intellectuals. However, this did not mean that he had no reservations about them:

I always consider the people of the lower classes are better than those of the

higher classes and that the young people are better than the old, .... But I realize

that as soon as gains and losses are involved, they will usually act just like those of

SS LXQn, VIII, pp. 162-63; LXSW, II, 344-45. The Research Group was a political group

supported by the reactionary N othern warlords.

56 LXQn, VIII, p. 27.

129 the higher classes or old people. However, this is inevitable within such a social

structure.57

He had witnessed such changes in Wang Jinfa after the 1911 Revolution, and similar changes in the secretary of the League of Left-Wing Writers, Xu

Maoyong in the 1930s. 58 And so Lu Xun became sceptical about the communist revolution;59 the story "Curbing the Flood" modelling itself upon the case of Wang Jinfa, can hardly be regarded as "story with a happy ending. "

Now let us re-examine the end of "Curbing the Flood":

[The Emperor Shun issued a special edict] ordering everyone to follow the

example of Yu or they would suffer the penalty. That threw the merchants into a

panic at first. But fortunately after his return to the capital Yu's attitude

underwent a little change ... So business was not affected, and before long the

merchants were saying that Yu's ways were an excellent example to all, and Gao

Yao's new laws were not bad. Then such peace reigned throughout the world that

even wild beasts danced and phoenixes flew down to join in the fun. 60

57 LXQ, IV, p. 107.

58 LXQ, II, pp. 423-26; LXQn, XIII, p. 416.

59 Chiu-yee Cheung, Nicai yu Lu Xun sixiangfazhan, Hong Kong: Qingwen Shuwu (1987), pp. 91-96; Chiu-yee Chueng, "Lu Hsun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927",

Journal of the Oriental Society of Asutralia, Vols. 18/19 (1986-87), pp. 19-25.

60 Old Stories Retold, op. cit., p. 50; LXQn, II, p. 386.

130 The analogies of the phoenix and beasts clearly remind us of Lu Xun's concern that the revolution would lose its original spirit as it increased in power and gained more disciples.61 The ending obviously implies that the old order and institutions would win the final victory. If we interpret it as a happy ending, it would appear to be in contradiction with what ~have seen of Lu Xun's warnings about human nature.62 He of course did not want the Communist · revolution to fail; neither did Orwell, who never questioned the validity of the animals' uprising or "social revolution". And the ending of Lu Xun's story may be explained as a warning to the new revolutionaries,63 reflecting too Lu Xun's concern about the supposed "future golden world" of communism. Even though Lu Xun had tried to learn Marxism, his scepticism and anxiety went beyond the concerns of Marxism-Leninism. It involved problems of culture and the habitual customs and weaknesses of human nature which could hardly be solved by the dominating mechanical Marxism of his time.

THEMATIC COMPARISON

Both Animal Farm and "Curbing the Flood" expressed their authors' pessimism about communism. Because George Orwell and Lu Xun were proponents of socialism and at different stages close "fellow travellers" with

61 LXQn, VIII, pp. 162-163.

62 Chiu-yee Cheung, Nicai yu Lu Xun sixiangfazhan, op. cit., pp. 95-96; Chiu-yee Cheung,

"Lu Hsun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927", op. cit., pp. 24-25.

63 Li Sangmu, Gushi xinbian de lunbian he yanjiu, Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe 0984), p.

125.

131 the communist movement, their pessimism had many similar characteristics despite their different cultural backgrounds and political situations. And so in analysing the two stories, one can find similarities between them on at least three levels. First, there is danger of the original ideals of a revolution being betrayed. As indicated by Lu Xun, a revolution will be in danger when it increases in power and influence. The dangers come from three directions: the leader who abuses his power, the followers who fail to remain true to the revolutionary ideals and finally the people, including the leader and his followers themselves, who are still under the spell of old customs which continue the influence of the old society, and continue to regard past values as acceptable norms. In Animal Farm, this message is more concretely expressed in the development of the story because, unlike "Curbing the Flood" which Lu Xun had written before the dark side of the communist revolution had been exposed to the outside world, Animal Farm is a story devoted to the analysis of the development of a revolution. Napoleon's hunger for power alone cannot be blamed for the failure of the animal revolution. His abuses of power must be supported by the submissiveness of the other animals and supported by some followers who are willing to suppress other animals. For example, Squealer is an important helper in Napoleon's dictatorship.

Examining the problem from another perspective, it is evident that the failure is not accidental. It is not because of a Napoleon or a Yu who betrayed the revolution. It is the quality of the people (the "national character" in Lu Xun's thinking, the weaknesses of human nature in Orwell's), which is not capable of a new system or new way of life. The end result is totalitarianism and the arrested development of the revolutionary process. In this perspective,

132 Animal Farm cannot be solely interpreted as a satire on the Soviet Union. It is clear from many indications that Orwell had wider purposes in mind. The book raises questions not just about political systems, but about human nature itself. The fact that Orwell called the main figure of the book Napoleon, reminding us of other historical dictators, indicates that he was thinking not just of modern Russia but of a basic tendency in human nature. Orwell expressed his view in his essay on "Arthur Koestler" that "All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure". 64 Orwell felt that there was a flaw in human nature ("weaknesses" in Lu Xun's words), because human beings have a tendency towards corruption and tyranny. Animal Farm as an allegory is a powerful representation of that tendency. Like Lu Xun, Orwell did not confine his exposure of human weakness to the leaders of revolution. His followers also have fatal flaws: Boxer is a good example of this. He is strong, hard working and respected by the other animals; his personal mottos are "I shall work harder", and "Napoleon is always right".65 When the slaughter is over, he retreats to work, thinking the fault must lie with the animals. Boxer exhausts himself for the revolutionary cause. When his great strength gives out, he is cheated of the promised retirement he has earned, as previously mentioned. It is one of the darkly pessimistic aspects of the book that the animals are unable even to recognise their new oppression. And here we encounter the second level of the relationship.

64 CEJL, III, P.282.

65 Ibid., p.107.

133 As mentioned above, Orwell was pessimistic about the bureaucratic institutions that have to be established after the revolution: these can, and often do, give way to totalitarianism. After the initial excitement and enthusiasm of the revolution, the basic necessities of life begin to make themselves felt again. Human beings have to organise to produce food; to organise, administrators are needed; administrative authority becomes power and power leads to tyranny. In Animal Farm, Orwell was thinking of the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War as well as the Bolshevik Rebellion of 1917, and he criticised something inherent in all revolutions. He seems to believe that after revolutionaries take power, they become as tyrannical as their oppressors, partly because of the way power corrupts but also because the only previous examples of leadership have been tyrannical. At the end of Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood", we find that Yu was in a similar situation - he could find no alternative but to follow the old ways.

The insights of Orwell and Lu Xun into the dilemma of a revolution seem to be prefigured in Max Weber's sociological theory. According to Weber, bureaucracy is a necessary evil in modern society, and revolution will eventually undergo processes of routinisation and rationalisation to establish a bureaucratic administration system to enable society to operate smoothly after the rule by a charismatic leader.66 Furthermore there will be no further room for any revolutionary ideals under this form of bureaucratised society, a

66 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr. A. M. Henderson and

Talcott Parsons, New York: The Free Press (1964), pp. 363-73, 386-92. Max Weber, Essays

in Sociology, tr. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: A Galaxy Book (1958), pp. 196-

244.

134 modern form of totalitarianism under which people are controlled and manipulated not by a dictator nor a party but by a bureaucratic administrative system.67 It is the real tragedy of the hope for socialism in Orwell and Lu Xun. Their tragic perspectives might be further discussed in the context of the problem of modernity which will unfortunately go beyond the scope of this thesis.

ARTISTIC COMPARISON

1. Form Beside the similarities of their political implications, there are resemblances in the forms and styles of "Curbing the Flood" and Animal

Farm. Neither Lu Xun nor George Orwell followed their previous realist modes in writing the two stories which are totally different in form and conception from anything they had written before. The obvious reason is because of the social situation, repression and censorship affecting many people, and not merely writers. In certain situations, historical stories or fables become the only means whereby writers can express themselves on political circumstances, highlighting and emphasising them in a way that might have more impact than a straightforward recital of facts. Moreover, it was necessary for Orwell and Lu Xun to adopt these forms because they had not direct personal experience of their subjects - the lives and struggles of the Chinese Red Armies or the Soviet revolution (Orwell had never been to the Soviet Union

67 See Herbert Marcuse, "Industrialization and Capitalism", in Otto Stammer (ed.), Max

Weber and Sociology Today, New York: Harper & Row (1971), pp. 133-51.

135 and Lu Xun never visited the "Red Area" controlled by the Communists). For Lu Xun, there was probably another reason for using this method: he had to avoid legal action from the scholars he ridiculed. The choice of the form of historical story or fable provided more room for their imagination to express their opinions and feelings.

The strength of Animal Farm lies in its success as a beast fable, which owes something to the author's love of animals throughout his life and understanding of their ways and foibles. In "Such, Such were the Joys", Orwell wrote: "Most of the good memories of my childhood and up to the age of about twenty are in some way connected with animals" .68 As a "great lover of animals", Orwell had kept at Wallington, where he lived in the country, some hens, a goat (whose name, Muriel, he used for the goat in Animal Farm), and a dog. For a period he even tried to keep a pig, whom he found disgusting later because of its greediness, and who might have sparked Orwell's brilliantly imagined portrayal of Napoleon, the boar who "always ate". So, it seems not so surprising that Orwell should have provided a great animal fable. At this point, one fact should not be neglected: as a form the animal fable has a long and distinguished history - Aesop's Fables, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's

Tale, La Fontaine's Fables, Kipling's animal stories and so on. Indeed, it may be

that Kipling's Jungle Book provided the immediate model for Animal Farm.

Throughout the book the animals are vividly portrayed, each possesses the traits of its species. In the opening chapter, for example, when the animal gathered in the barn,

68 CEJL, IV, pp.395-96.

136 At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones'

trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near

the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red

ribbons it was plaited with. 69

The animals are characterised in a way that highlights features that are recognisably human, some of them capable of arousing sympathetic chords in the reader - Clover's motherliness, for instance. These features do not conflict with their animal natures, for motherliness can appeal in a horse just as much as in a human. The animal fable afforded Orwell a powerful vehicle to express his ideal of "human decency". In a human story, where the analysis of the complexities of character and motive is necessary, words like "human decency" may simply appear inert; but to describe animals attempting to attain a society based on it seems a skilful way of expressing a minimum political goal. When they are frustrated in their attempt to achieve 'human decency' the reader's is invoked. In chapter 9, where Box is carried off in the knacker's van, Orwell perfectly combines the political implication (he is describing the betrayed proletariat) with the story's narrative logic (we have here a horse

treated with cruel ingratitude). This is how and why Animal Farm can touch its readers deeply. Orwell fused his artistic and political purposes so well that the animals are convincing on the literary level.

As for Lu Xun, his use of historical figures in Old Stories Retold was not accidental. A world acclaimed scholar in the literary history of the Chinese

69 Ibid, p. 7.

137 novel and short story, Lu Xun was familiar with classical literature, and his pioneer work A Brief History of Chinese Stories and two volume collection of ancient stories have remained classics in that field. In ancient times there had been no clear distinction between historical facts and legends and therefore Lu Xun had read widely in both the fields of history and mythology. In the tradition of Chinese literature historical events and figures have always been a major source of material for creative writing; The Stories of the Three Kingdoms, for example, one of the four classics in Chinese literature, is a historical novel. In fact, historical novels became a branch of the history of Chinese literature,7° and Lu Xun was clearly influenced by this tradition. However, Lu Xun also made his own contributions to the development of historical stories. He did not merely reproduce the historical figures and events but revitalised them. He opposed the pedantic method of writing historical stories which stuck to historical documents. As Lu Xun said: "I have not made the ancients out as even more dead than they are".71 Lu Xun gave his characters passions and liveliness.72 Also, he managed to merge historical settings with current affairs and modern issues. In other words, his historical stories were both historical and current,73 as we shall see in the following section about their symbolism.

70 LXQn, IX, pp. 127-49.

71 Old Stories Retold, op. cit., p. 4.

72 He Ganzhi, "Lishi xiaoshuo" (Historical Stories), in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin

(ed.), Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao, Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe (1984), p. 138-43.

73 See Mao Dun "'Xuanwu Men zhi bian' xu" (A Preface to "The Incident of Xuanwu

Gate"), in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (ed.), Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao, Jinan:

Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe (1984), p. 137.

138 2. Symbolism

Both Orwell and Lu Xun employed a symbolic method which reduces actual historic events and figures into a concise, easily observable form.

The symbolism of Animal Farm, is remarkably detailed and the figures of the story are symbolic of Soviet history and Marxist theory. The Old Major represents Marx; Napoleon is Stalin and Snowball is Trotsky; the self­ sacrificing but rather stupid Boxer represents the proletariat; Squealer is

Pravda; Moses represents the Russian Orthodox Church; Mollie represents the those Russians who fled the country after 1917. Orwell stated that, "Although various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed."74 Thus, the Battle of the Cowshed corresponds to the counter-revolutionary war which raged in Russia until 1920, Trotsky was in charge of the Red Army, just as in the Battle of the Cowshed Snowball leads the animals. The revolt of the hens corresponds to the sailors' uprising of 1921 at the Kronstadt naval base. And the failure of crops corresponds to the collectivisation of 1929-33. Two of the most important battles between Trotsky and Stalin are allegorised in the book through the disagreements on the construction of the windmill and the principles of Revolution between Napoleon and Snowball. Just as Trotsky fought for the priority of manufacturing over agriculture, accelerated industrialisation and the defence of his idea of "Permanent Revolution"

74 CEJL, III, p.459.

139 against Stalin's theory of "Socialism in One Country", so did Snowball and

Napoleon interact.

In "Curbing the Flood", almost all the scholars in the Cultural Mount have their prototypes in real life. Even the flood itself was not a purely imaginative construct. In 1931, there had been a big flood which affected seventeen provinces and more than a hundred million people in China. While the people were suffering and the government was doing little to relieve their hardship, some servile scholars obsequiously praised the authorities instead of criticising them. The flood is probably also a symbol of the invasion by the Japanese imperialist forces who occupied Manchuria in 1931. The Chiang Kai­ shek government adopted the policy of "Pacifying internal strife before resisting foreign invasions" and did not stand up to the Japanese. In 1932, when Peking was under the threat of Japanese occupation, thirty scholars absurdly petitioned the Kuomintang government to de-militarize the city and make it a "city of culture" to avoid war in the name of protecting China's precious cultural heritage. However, their proposal merely played into the hands of the Japanese; in reality, it meant handing over everything to them without firing a shot. Most of the scholars in Culture Hill in "Curbing the Flood" are in real life scholars in the "city of culture": for example, the scholar holding a stick is Pan Guangdan who had published a book that used genealogy to explain the heredity of the noble and wealthy family of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Mr Bird-head is Gu Jiegang who denied the existence of Yu only because the Chinese character "yu" looked similar to the character "worm". The essayist in the style of the time of Fuxi is Lin Yutang who promoted a kind of essay which avoided current affairs and talked about moods and feelings.

140 3. Irony

One of the most outstanding artistic achievements of Animal Farm and "Curbing the Flood" is the insistent dramatic irony which provides the stories with force and affectivity. In Animal Farm we may take as an example the episode in chapter two, where the animals come back from working on the harvest. Earlier that day the cows had been milked and someone had asked what was to become of the milk. Napoleon told them not to mind, and had placed himself between the milk and them. When the animals come back they are puzzled to find the milk is gone. But the reader is not the slightest bit puzzled and knows very well that Napoleon had taken the milk. The reader's awareness that power has begun to exercise its corrupting effect, that from now on the animals are to be fooled again and again, produces a sharp dramatic irony, highlighting the problem of "animal nature", or rather, human selfishness. Another example of Orwell's irony is the changing story of Snowball's part in the Battle of Cowshed. Soon after he is expelled Squealer prophesies to the animals that he believes "the time will come when we shall find that Snowball's part in it was much exaggerated" .75 Later on Squealer tells the astonished animals that Snowball had been in league with Jones all the time, and that in fact he had attempted to get them defeated at the Battle.76 Eventually they are told that he had "actually been the leader of the human forces, and had charged into battle with the words "Long live Humanity!" on

75 Ibid., p. 50.

76 Ibid., p.69.

141 his lips.77 But, the reader remembers clearly what had happened at the Cowshed. Snowball had bravely led the attack that won the Battle and had been wounded in the back by Jones. The animals' acceptance of what they are told by Squealer is ridiculous, and it is also pathetic because they have lost all sense of the objective truth of what had happened under Napoleon's thought­ control. Another ironic episode occurs after the battle of Windmill. Though the animals win, the windmill is destroyed and many are grievously injured. But Squealer declared that they have a "victory", "we have won back what we had before" .78 And so the animals celebrate the victory. Each animal is given an apple, two ounces of corn are allotted to each bird, and three biscuits to each dog, while Napoleon gets drunk. The surface irony is compounded by the inevitable falsification of the facts. And the next morning the animals discover that the fifth commandment did not read, as they had thought, "No animals shall drink alcohol," but instead "No animals shall drink alcohol to excess".79

It is not the threat of violence, nor the war, nor the social injustice that man is suffering that is the most dangerous problem to a society, but the loss of

"objective truth".

This loss of "objective truth" is also a target of Lu Xun's satire. Because of different historical backgrounds, the dark side of communism had not been fully exposed to the Chinese in the mid-1930s, when "Curbing the Flood" was written. Lu Xun directed his criticism at the ridiculous social phenomena of

77 Ibid., p.99.

78 Ibid., p. 90

79 Ibid., p. 93.

142 his time. First of all, Lu Xun targeted the scholars whose maxims were blatantly nonsensical and who distorted reality to serve their own needs or to whitewash the impotence and wrong-doing of the government. In the beginning of the story, there is a discussion among the scholars in the Mount of Culture who attack and even deny the existence of Yu (the communist movement):

"Yu will never succeed in curbing the flood, not if he's the son of Gun," declared a

scholar who walked with a cane. "I have collected the genealogies of many kings,

dukes, ministers and rich families. Long and careful study has led me to this

conclusion: all the descendants of the rich are rich, all those of the wicked are

wicked-this is known as 'heredity'. It follows that, if Gun was unsuccessful Yu will

inevitably heJunsuccessful to;i)or fools cannot give birth to wise men!"

"Th-that's all n-n-nonsense!" stuttered another scholar, his nose promptly

turning red. "You've been led astray by rumours. As a matter of fact, there is no

such person as Yu. Yu is a reptile. Can a r-reptile curb the flood? Gun doesn't

exist either. Gun is a fish. Can a f-flsh curb the fl-fl-flood?"80

When reporting the flood to the officials they minimise the sufferings of the people and even accuse the people of causing the flood, using their reputation to add weight to their words :

"The situation is not too desperate. There is just about enough to eat." A specialist

in the Miao dialect was spokesman for the scholars. "Bread is dropped once a

month from mid-air and there is no lack of fish which, though inevitably tasting of

80 Old Stories Retold, op. cit., pp. 32-3.

143 mud, is very fat, Your Honours. As for the lower orders, they have plenty of elm

leaves and seaweed. They 'eat all day without exerting their minds'-in other

words, since they do not have to use their heads what they have is quite enough.

We've tasted their food and it is not unpleasant, with quite a distinctive flavour ... "

"Besides," put in another scholar, an expert on the Materia Medica of Emperor

Shen Nong, "there is Vitamin Win elm leaves, and iodine which cures scrofula in

seaweed-both thoroughly nutritious."81

The comic scene of "flying chariots" delivering food and supplies to the Mount of Culture from an alleged Kingdom of Marvellous Artisans in the West and the scholars talking to the drivers of "flying chariots" in "English", indicate the peculiar political situation in China at that time. These scholars were supported by Western powers and the Kuomintang government and the imperialists were in alliance against the Chinese revolution.

Lu Xun's satire was also directed against the hypocrisy of government officials and the servility of the people. For example, two officials who were supposed to investigate the scope of the flood damage, spent most of their time />

C in retirement, sight-seeing and fishing. A man became famous and busy only because he was hit by a stone thrown by a guard for not getting out of the way of the minister's boat quickly enough. "Everyone rushed to look at the bump on

his head, nearly swamping his raft in the process. "82 The most tragic figure in the story is that of the unenlightened man who did not realize his pitiful situation and the irresponsibility of the government officials and continued to

81 Ibid., pp. 36-7.

82 Ibid., p. 35-6.

144 respect any officials unconditionally. Lu Xun's satire and irony are not confined to politics: like Orwell's animals, his characters also reflect the weaknesses of human nature.

The themes of both Animal Farm and "Curbing the Flood" have similar political implications: the failure of socialist revolution or indeed of any revolution. Revolutions fail not just because of the betrayal of their leaders but because of more complicated factors, such as weaknesses in human nature and in the social system. However, as analysed in Chapter 3, it must be emphasised that both Lu Xun and Orwell cherished the ideal of socialism and did not oppose revolution in principle. On the other hand, their clear and sober-minded realism helped them to perceive that socialism and its revolution were not nor could ever be perfect and therefore Lu Xun and Orwell were also doubtful of their ideals. It is this dilemma which creates the subtle pessimism in their stories. In Lu Xun's case, he nevertheless heroically chose to embrace that unknown ideal because of the desperate situation of his country and people. As for Orwell, he kept to his own ideal of socialism which he was never able to imagine satisfactorily nor could he take part in any activities to bring it about. As to the forms and styles of the stories, Orwell and Lu Xun employed similar artistic devices to avoid straightforward and realistic descriptions of something with which they were not familiar. The two stories are successful satires. The authors' insights into the weaknesses of human nature and social establishments give the stories a profound tragic sense. There seem to be no conceivable solutions in the future that either of them can possibly imagine.

145 Chapter Five Conclusion

In this conclusion, I would like to summarise the comparison made between Lu Xun and George Orwell in this thesis. It is not a study of influence since they did not read nor even know each other. It is a comparison of two famous left-wing writers whose writings reflected some typical characteristics of the intellectual trend of the 1930s. They share an opposition to the status quo and most importantly, a growing scepticism of communism. >

Both Lu Xun and George Orwell were born in declining upper class families. The situation of their families enabled them to witness and compare the differences between the wealthy and the poor, the privileged and the depraved. They were concerned about the life and suffering of the oppressed and the downtrodden. They had a strong sense of social responsibility. These constitute what I have called the "humanism" of their thinking. Because of their personal preference and temperament, they eventually took up literary writing as a career. Their social consciousness drove them to adopt a realistic approach to creative writing and to resort to a form of journalistic essay for its immediate response and effect. They were inevitably involved in the political struggles of their time.

Although George Orwell and Lu Xun lived in two culturally and politically very different countries, they both lived in a similar period. To a greater extent than before different areas of the world were bound together. It

146 was a period of disillusionment caused in considerable measure by further decline of capitalism and reactions against it in the form of the rise of socialism and fascism. The immense sufferings of the people at that time made them both radicals.

In Lu Xun's case, he was a radical long before he was attracted to communism. Lu Xun was a member of the Restoration Society, a nationalist revolutionary party whose aim was to overthrow the Manchu regime in Japan. He was also one of the leaders in the culturally iconoclastic May Fourth movement in 1919. Because China was a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country, imperialism and feudalism had been Lu Xun's main targets and ironically, in Lu Xun's view, only the Chinese communist party provided a palpable solution to China's desperate situation.

In 1926, he left Beijing for Canton to join the Kuomintang government which was regarded as communist at that time. Soon he was shocked by the bloody massacre of Communists and their sympathisers in the coup d'etat launched by the Kuomintang in 1927. This massacre led him to side with the real Communists. In 1930, the League of Left-Wing Writers was founded in Shanghai and Lu Xun was elected member of the executive committee. From this point on he sincerely supported and worked for the Communist course in his writings. Before he died in 1936, however, he sensed the factional conflicts within the Communist party.

The debate of "national defence literature" unveiled these factional

conflicts, which had an international background. It was a conflict between Stalinists and the other Chinese Communists who had learned from the disastrous instructions from Moscow in 1927 and during the five ''Bandit Extermination Campaigns" launched by the Kuomintang. Through his liaison

147 with Feng Xuefeng, Lu Xun learnt of the policies of those Chinese Communists who were led by Mao Zedong and supported them. However, under the veil of Lu Xun's support for Mao and his opposition to the Russian policy, there was a growing scepticism about the Communist party. His insight penetrated the facade of the conflicts of different political opinions and touched fundamental weaknesses in human nature: the lust for personal advantage, the greed for power. Lu Xun began to look at the Chinese Communists in a different light. However, Lu Xun still laid his hope on some sincere Communists because of the desperate situation in China. He died too early to witness the dark side of Stalinism as demonstrated in the Great Trials that began in 1936.

George Orwell started his career as a left-wing writer in the mid-1930s. Having served in Burma, Orwell realised the sufferings of the people in imperialist colonies. During the Great Depression, he further witnessed the sufferings of the poor working class people. He took part in the Spanish civil war with hope and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, as with Lu Xun's trip to the Kuomintang base Canton, he was soon shocked by the bloody internal strife among different factions on the left. Unlike Lu Xun's experience, he found it was the orthodox communists, or Stalinists, who were the executors and perpetrators of violence here.

One could argue that in a certain sense, Orwell's later career as a "fellow traveller" takes up the pattern of Lu Xun's at the point where the latter's life was cut short. Orwell's sincere belief in socialism and the same naivete about politics drove him to the battlefield in Spanish civil war where he was shocked by the brutal internal strife of the different f~ctions among the revolutionaries. Because of the time difference, Orwell had the advantage of witnessing the emerging dark side of Soviet Russia and Stalinism. In Lu Xun's

148 time, Soviet Russia was the hope of many famous intellectuals such as G. Bernard Shaw, Bertrand. Russell and even Andre Gide. Those times soon came to an end, however. Many of those who praised Soviet Russia became sceptical in the late thirties, especially after the Spanish civil war and the pact with Hitler. Orwell belonged to this growing trend. He did not abandon his hope for socialism, at least not his socialism. His criticism of totalitarianism in Animal

Farm and 1984 was not aimed solely at Stalinism and he did not regard Stalinism as representing socialism. But as with Lu Xun, Orwell insisted upon those weaknesses in human nature which caused the failure of a revolution.

In short, their "humanism", their sincere belief in the utopia of socialism and their naivete in real politics, led to George Orwell's and Lu Xun's involvement in the course of communism. But their sober and sophisticated minds and their penetrating insight into human psychology and society could never be blinded by their enthusiasm and wishful hopes. Lu Xun was aware of the dangers of the future; he was unwilling to express his scepticism too strongly only because the current situation of China was already dangerous or worse. Orwell on the other hand became more clearly disillusioned with Russian communism while still laying hope on a socialism of which he had only some very vague ideas. His socialism was largely an

adjusted ideal of "humanism". It was this conflict of scepticism and hope that Lu Xun and Orwell were motivated to transform into their fables.

Orwell's Animal Farm and Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood" represent the inner conflict between scepticism and hope. In both, the essential theme is the ultimate failure of a successful revolution. Because they did not have experience in a real revolution, !~_!1_a_

In Animal Farm, the revolution is betrayed by a handful of revolutionaries after its initial success. Their lust for power and personal advantage turned them into the opposite of their revolutionary ideal. The situation is not so direct and obvious in Lu Xun's "Curbing the Flood". The revolution fails when the revolutionaries fail to recognise that they have become corrupted by old customs, old institutions and old ways of life. They gradually lose the revolutionary spirit and unconsciously succumb to the old social order. Nothing will be changed.

Their writings provide a deep exploration of a number of questions which have been troubling the Left since the 1930. If the October Revolution failed to realise the original socialist ideal, was this a failure of the socialist revolution itself or just the result of particular circumstance and bad luck? Was totalitarianism, or Stalinism, an inevitable outcome of a socialist revolution? Was it possible that the revolution could continue to its ultimate success if it were led by a sincere and selfless leader? Was it possible to develop a rationalised system to maintain the revolution and at the same time to set the social apparatus operating smoothly? In the face of the disastrous failure of the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1960s and the dramatic collapse of Soviet communism in Europe in the 1990s, all these questions may,, appear to be out-dated and meaningless now. But if the insights of Orwell and Lu Xun are correct, it seems likely that the problems will persist and arise again in the foreseeable future and in whatever future revolution(s) there may or may not be. And that is why they are great writers of this century.

150 Appendix

Lu Xun and Orwell Chronology

* For Lu Xun's activities. • For Orwell's activities.

1881 * Zhou Shuren was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province of China.

1887-91 * Received traditional education.

1893 * Grandfather was jailed.

1896 * Father died.

1899-1902 * Enrolled in Jiangnan Navy Academy. Later enrolled in the School of Railways and Mines.

1902-09 * Sent by the government to study in Japan, first in Ko bun College, Tokyo, then in Sendai Medical College.

1903 • Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bengal, India.

1904 • Brought to England by his mother. Family settled in Henley-on­

Thames, Oxforshire.

1906 * After watching a slide showing the execution of several Chinese "spies" by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War, decided

to give up medicine and devote himself to literature. So left Sendan Medical College to carry out a plan of literary work with

Xu Shoushang.

1907 * Wrote essays "On the Demonic Poets," "History of Science," "Cultural Trends," etc. The plan of publishing a literary magazine

New Life failed.

1908-11 • Educated at Sunnylands, an Anglican convent school in Henley.

1908 * Joined the nationalist revolutionary party "Restoration Society".

1909 * Published two collections of translated short stories with Zhou Zuoren. Only twenty copies sold. Returned to China. Teaching physiology and chemistry in the Zhejiang Normal college,

Hangzhou.

1911 * 1911 Revolution overthrew the Manchu regime. Appointed by the revolutionary leader Wang Jinfa to be principal of Shanhui Teachers' College. Wrote his first short story "Reminiscences of the Past," published in 1913.

1911-16 • Boarder at St. Cyprian's preparatory school, Eastboune, Sussex.

1912 • Richard Blair (Orwell's father) retired from Indian Civil Service, returns to England. Family move to Shiplake near Henley.

* At the invitation of Cai Yuanpei, then Minister of Education, joined the Ministry of Education in Najing. Started compiling a collection of Tang and Song stories. Moved with the ministry to Beijing.

1914 • First work was published, "Awake Young Men of England"

(poem), in Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. 1915 * Began to collect and study rubbings of old inscriptions in his

spare time.

1917 October Revolution in Russia.

• Spent Lent term at Wellington College.

* "Zhang Xun Restoration". Resigned from the Educational

Ministry in protest. Discussion of cultural and literary reform

began in New Youth. Started contributing to New Youth.

1917-21 • King's Scholar, Eton College.

1918 * Published "A Madman's Diary" in New Youth. Used the penname LuXun.

1919 * "May Fourth Movement". Published short stories "Kong Yiji" and "Medicine" and essay "What is Required of us as Fathers

Today".

1920 * Lecturing in Beijing University and Beijing Normal University.

1921 * "The True Story of AH Q" was published.

1922 • Attended cramming establishment in Southwold, January to

June, to prepare for Indian Office examinations.

1922-27 • Assistant Superintendent of Police, Indian Imperial Police,

Burma.

1923 * First volume of short stories, Call to Arms, was published. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, Vol. I ,was published. This started teaching in the Beijing Women's Normal College. 1926 * "3.18 Massacre". Published a Serial of essays sharply criticising the war-lord government. Second volume of short stories,

Wandering, was published. Appointed Professor of Chinese

Literature at Xiamen University.

1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported in

1929.

• Came home on leave and hated imperialism. Then resigned from

Indian Imperial Police.

* Appointed Dean of the Chinese Language and Literature

Department at Sun Yat-sen University in Canton. Chiang Kai-shek

launched "4.12 Coup D'etat" against the Communists. In protest,

Lu Xun resigned from his post. Two collections of essays, Bad

Luck and Grave, and one collection of prose poems, Wild Grass, were published. Left Canton for Shanghai in September.

1928-29 • Lived in Paris, writing and later working as a dishwasher. In

H~pital Cochin, Paris, with pneumonia, February 1929.

* Chief editor of the magazine Tatler. Published collection of

reminiscences Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk and collection of

essays And That's That's. Joined the Revolutionary Mutual Aid

Society. Attacked by the young leftist writers of the Creation

Society and Sun Society in the debate of revolutionary literature.

1929 World Economic Crisis, 1929-1934.

1930 • Tramping and hop-picking in London and Home Counties area,

1930-1931. Wrote early version ("A Scullion's Diary") of Down and

Out in Paris and London. Began to contribute reviews to Adelphi. Earliest essays ("The Spike" and "A Hanging") was published in

Adelphi, April and August 1931, under his own name.

* Became a founding member of the Chinese League of Left-Wing

Writers and the China Freedom League.

1931 18 September Japanese troops invaded Manchuria.

* The first number of The Vangyuard, journal of the League of Left­

Wing Writers which was printed secretly, published Lu Xun's article "The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinses Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers" to protest against the Kuomintang's

secret execution of five young revolutionary writers.

1932-33 • Taught at the Hawthorns, a small private school in Hayes, Middlesex.

*Edited and published his collections of essays, Three Leisures

and Two Hearts

1933 Hitler came into power.

• First book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was published by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club. January. Pseudonym "George Orwell" used for this book and retained for future books.Taught at Frays College, Uxbridge, Middlesex, September to December. Hospitalized with pueumonia, December.

* Joined the China League for Civil Rights and was elected to its

executive committee. Published his collection of essays, False

Liberty.

1934 •Burmese Days was published. * Two collections of Essays, Mixed Dialects and Pseudo-frivolous

Talk, were published.

1934-35 • Worked as part-time assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a bookshop

in Hampstead. A Clergyman's Daughter was published in England,

June 1935.

1935 * Collection of historical stories, Old Tales Retold, was published.

1936 The Spanish Civil War broke out.

• In industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire, investigating working­

class life and unemployment at suggestion of Victor Gollancz,

January to March. Moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, April. Keep

the Aspidstra Flaying was published, June. Married Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Attended Independent Labour Party Summer

School, Letchworth, Hertfortshire, July. Left for Spain to support

the Spanish Republic.

* June, published an open letter "Reply to a Letter from the Trotskyies" expressing his support for Mao's Communist Party.

* August, published an open letter "Reply to Xu Maoyong and on the Question of the United Front Against Japanese Aggression".

* October, Lu Xun died in Shanghai.

1936- 37 Moscow Trials.

1937 7 July, Japan attacked China.

• In Spain, January to June. Corporal (late Lieutenant) with P .0. U .M. detachment on the Aragan fron. Involved in street fighting in Barcelona between government and Anarchist troops. Wounded in throat by sniper near Huesca. Honourably discharged

for medical reasons from POUM militia. Evaded arrest during anti­

POUM purge in Barcelona The Road to Wigan Pier was published, March. Left Book Club edition of more than forty thousand copies.

1938 •Homage to Catalonia was published, April. Joined Independent Labour Party.

1939 23 August Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and Russia. The

Second World War broke out.

• Coming Up to Air was published, June. Death of father.

1940 • Inside the Whale was published, March. Reviewing for Time and

Tide and Tribune. Joined Local Defence Volunteers (Home Guard), June. Made a sergeant.

1941 • The Lion and the Unicorn was published.

1941-43 • Talks Producer, Empire Department, British Broadcasting Corporation, in charge of broadcasting to India and Southeast Asia. Death of mother, March 1943.

1943-46 • Literary Editor of Tribune.

1945 • War correspondent for the Observer in Paris and Cologne, March

to May. Animal Farm was published in August.

1949 • Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.

1950 • Died in University College Hospital, of a hemorrhaged lung, 21 January. Abbreviations

CEJL: Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalsm and

Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1970).

LXQn: Lu Xun quanji (Collected Works of Lu Xun), 16 vols, Beijing: Renmin

Wenxue Chubanshe (1981).

LXSW: Lu Xun-Selected Works, tr. Yang Xingyi and Gladys Yang, 4 vols, Beijing:

Foreign Languages Press (1980).

158 Bibliography

"Zuo Lian" huiyilu (Recollections by the Left-Wing Writers in 1930s), Beijing:

Zhongguo Shehuikexue Chubanshe (1982).

Aldridge, A. Owen. "The Purpose and Perspectives of Comparative Literature",

in A. Owen Aldridge (ed.), Comparative Literature: Matter and Method,

Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1969).

- The Reeinergence of World Literature. A Study of Asia and the West, Newark:

University of Delaware Press (1986).

Alldritt, Keith. The Making of George Orwell - An Essay in Literary History.

Britain: Edward Arnold (1969).

Atkins, John. George Orwell- a Literary Study, London (1954).

Auden,W. H. Poem XXX "August for the people and their favourite islands",

Look, Strenger! London: Faber & Faber (1936 ), pp. 65-6.

Barker, Francis et al (eds). 1936: The Sociology of Literature. Volume 1: The

Politics of Modernism, University of Essex (1979).

- (eds). 1936: The Sociology of Literature. Volume 2: The Practices of Literature

and Politics, University of Essex (1979).

Beadle, Gordon. "George Orwell and Charles Dickens: Moral Critics of

Society", Journal of Historical Studies, 2 (1969-1970), pp. 245-55.

Beauchamp, Gorman. "Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamgatin'sWe and Orwell's 1984", Comparative Literature Studies, 10 (1973), pp. 285-301.

Bergonzi, Bernard. Reading the Thirties - Texts and Contexts, University of Pittsburgh Press (1978).

Buitenhuis, Peter (ed). Gerorge Orwell: A Reassessment, London: Macmillan Press (1988).

159 Bullock, Alan and Oliver Stallybrass (eds). The Fontana Dictionary of Modern

Thought, London: Collins (1977).

Calder, Jenni. Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George Orwell and Arthur

Koestler, London, 1968. Cao Juren. Lu Xun nianpu (Chronology of Lu Xun), Hong Kong: Sanyu Tushu

Wenju Gongsi (Oct 1970). - Lu Xun pingzhuan (A Critical Biography of Lu Xun), Hong Kong:

Xinwenhua Chubanshe (1956).

Caute, David. The Fellow-Travellers - A Postscript to the Enlightenment,

Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1973).

- The Fellow-Travellers - Intellectual Friends of Communism, New Haven:

Yale University Press (1973).

-The Left in Europe Since 1789, London: World University Library (1966).

Chambers, Harris Bayley. This Age of Conflict -A Contemporary World History

(1914-the Present), New York: Brace and Company (1943).

Chen Duxiu. "Jing gao qingnian" (To Young People, 1915), Chen Duxiu

wenzhang xuanbian, Vol. 1, Beijing: Sanlian Shudian( 1982).

Chen Mingshu. "Lu Xun yu Bailun" (Lu Xun and Byron), in Lu Xun yu Zhong­

wai wenhua de bijiao yanjiu (The Comparative Studies Between Lu Xun and

World's Culture),* pp. 328-335.

Cheung, Chiu-yee. "Lu Hsun and Nietzsche: Influence and Affinity after 1927,"

Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 18/19 (1986-87). pp. 3-25.

- Nicai yu Lu Xun sixiang fazhan (Nietzsche and the Development of Lu Xun's Thought), Hong Kong: Qingwen Shuwu (1987).

Chiang Mayling Soong. "Foreward" to New Life for Kainghsi and Chiang Kai­

shek, "My Religious Faith", in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (eds), Republican China,* pp. 151-58.

160 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in China,

Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press( 1960).

Clark, Jon, Margot Heinemann, David Margolies and Carole Snee. Culture and

Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, London: Lawrence and Wishart (1979).

Concannon, Gerald J. The Development of George Orwell's Art, New York:

Revisionist Press (1977).

Corstius, Jan Brandt. Introduction to the Comparative Study of Literature, New

York: Random House (1968).

Crick, Bernard. George Orwell - A Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1987).

Cunningham, Valentine. Spanish Civil War Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books (1983).

- Spanish Front.-Writers on the Civil War, Oxford: Oxford University Press

(1986).

-British Writers of the Thirties, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1989).

Cutforth, Rene. Later Than We Thought - A Portrait of the Thirties, Newton

Abbot: David & Charles (1976).

Ding Yi. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shilue (A Brief History of Modern Chinese

Literature), Beijing: Zuojia Chubanshe (1955). Dyson, A. E. "Orwell: Irony as Prophecy", The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony, London (1965).

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. "Orwell, Huxley, Pope", Revue des Langues vivantes, 23 (1957): 215-30.

Fearon, Peter. The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump (1929-1932). London: The Macmillan Press (1979).

Feng Xiaxiong (ed.). "Feng Xuefeng tan Zuo Lian" (Feng Xuefeng on the League

of Left-Wing Writers), Lu Xun yanjiu niankan, 1980, pp. 17-29.

161 Feng Xuefeng, Xuefeng wenji (Collected Works of Feng Xuefeng), Vol. 4,

Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe (1985).

Fyvel, T. R. George Orwell - A Personal Memoir, London: Hutchinson (1983).

Gloversmith, Frank (ed.). Class, Culture and Social Change -A New View of the

1930s, Sussex: The Harvester Press (1980).

Goldman, Merle (ed.). Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era,

Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1977).

Gollancz, Victor (ed.). The Betrayal of the Left, London: Victor Gollancz (1941).

Grant, Damian. Realism, London: Methuen (1970).

Greenblatt, Stephen. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell and Huxley,

America: New Haven( 1966).

Greenwood, Gordon, The Modern World-A History of Our Time, Vol. 1, Angus

and Robertson (1964).

Hammond, J. R. A George Orwell Companion.-A Guide to the Novels,

Documentaries and Essays, London: The Macmillan Press (1982).

Han Changjing. Lu Xun yu Eluosi gudian wenxue (Lu Xun and Russian

Classical Literature), Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe (1981).

Han Rixin. "Cong Gushi xin bian kan Lu Xun aiguozhuyi sixiang de fazhan"

(Viewing the Development of Lu Xun's Patriotism in the Light of Old Stories

Retold), in Yi ge weida aiguozhuyizhe qianjin de zuji, Tianjin Renmin

Chubanshe (1984).

Harrisson, Tom and Charles Madge. Britain by Mass-Observation, London: The

Cresset Library (1986).

Hassan, Ihab H. "The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes

Towards a Definition", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XIV No. 1 (September 1955).

162 Havighurst, Alfred F. Britain in Transition - The Twentieth Century, Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press (1985).

He Ganzhi. "Lishi xiaoshuo" (Historical Stories), in Meng Guanglai and Han

Rixin (eds), Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao, * pp. 138-43.

He Jiahuai. Gushi xin bian ji qita (Essays on Old Stories Retold and Others),

Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian Chubanshe (1957).

Holman, C. Hugh (ed.). A Handbook to Literature, Indianapolis: The Odyssey

Press (1976).

Hopkinson, Tom. George Orwell London: Longmans (1965).

Howe, Irving (ed.). Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich (1982).

Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1917-1957), New Haven: Yale

University Press (1961).

Hsia, Tsi-an. The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in

China, Seattle: University of Washington Press (1968).

Hu Yuzhi and Feng Xuefeng. "Tan youguan Lu Xun de yixie shiqing" (A Few

Things About Lu Xun), Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao, Vol. 1 (1976).

Huang, Sung-k'ang. Lu Hsun and the New Culture Movement of Modern China,

Amsterdam: Djambatan (1957).

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1955).

Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation -Literature and Politics in England in

the 1930s, London; The Bodley Head (1976).

Issacs, Harold. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stanford University Press

(1951, revised edition).

Johnson, Paul. A History of the Modern Worldfrom 1917 to the 1980s, London:

Weidenfeld & Nicloson (1983).

Kedward, H. R. Fascism in Western Europe 1900-1945, London: Blackie (1969).

163 Koestler, Arthur (ed.). The God That Failed - Six Study in Communism, London:

Hamish Hamilton (1950).

Koestler, Arthur. Bricks to Babel, New York: Random House (1980).

Krebsova, Berta. "Lu Hsun and His Collection Old Tales Retold", Archiv

Orientalni, 28 (1960), pp. 225-81, 640-56.

Kubal, David L. Outside the Whale: George Orwell's Art and Politics, Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press (1972).

Lee, Ou-fan Leo (ed.). Lu Xun and His Legacy, Berkeley: University of

California Press (1985).

- Voices From the Iron House. A Study of Lu Xun, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press (1987).

Lee, Mabel. "From Chuang-Tzu to Nietzsche: On the Individualism of Lu

Hsun", The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, Vol. 17 (1985), pp. 21-

38.

- "Suicide of the Creative Self: the Case of Lu Hsun", Austrina. Essays in Commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the Founding of the Oriental Society

of Australia, Oriental Society of Australia (1982), pp. 140-67.

Leong, S. T. "Sun Yatsen's International Orientation: The Soviet Phase, 1917-

1925", in J. Y. Wong (ed.), Sun Yatsen. His International Ideas and

International Connections, Sydney: Wild Peony, 1987, pp. 53-88.

Leys, Simon. Broken Images-Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, London:

Allison & Busby (1979).

Li Guotao. Stylist - Lu Xun yanjiu de xin keti (Stylist - A New Topic in Lu Xun

Studies), Xi'an: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe (1986).

Li Jiang. "Lu Xun yu Bi Lei" (Lu Xun and Bi Lei), Zhongguo xiandai wenyi yanjiu

ziliao, V (1980), pp. 211-41.

164 Li Sangmu. Gushi xin bian de lunbian he yanjiu (Discussions and Studies on

Old Stories Retold), Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe (1984).

Li Zhengping. "Lun Gushi xin bian de xingzhi yu yishu tezheng" (On the Nature

and Artistic Feature of Old Stories Retold), Wenxue pinglun congkan, VIII

(1981).

Lin Fei. Lun Gushi xin bian de sixiang yishu ji lishi yiyi (On the Meanings,

Aesthetics and the Historical Significance of Old Stories Retold), Tianjin:

Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe (1984).

Liu Yukun, Lu Xun xiaoshuo yanjiu shu ping (A Critical Account of the Studies

of Lu Xun's Short Stories), Emeishan: Xinan Jiaotong Daxue Chubanshe

(1989), pp. 189-220.

Lu Xun bowuguan Lu Xun yanjiushi (ed.). Lu Xun nianpu (Chronology of Lu

Xun), 4 vols, Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe (1981).

Lu Xun. Lu Xun quanji (Collected Works of Lu Xun), 20 vols, Beijing: Renmin

Wenxue Chubanshe (1984).

Ma Hua, "Du 'Li shui"', in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (eds.), Gushi xin bian

yanjiu ziliao, * pp. 488-89.

Mao Dun, "Wo he Lu Xun de jiechu" (My Contacts With Lu Xun),Lu Xun yanjiu

ziliao, Vol. 1 (1976).

- "'Xuanwu Men zhi bian' xu" (A Preface to "The Incident of Xuanwu Gate"),

in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (eds.), Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao, Jinan:

Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe (1984), p. 137.

Marcuse, Herbert. "Industrialization and Capitalism", in Otto Stammer (ed.),

Max Weber and Sociology Today,* pp. 133-51.

Mencius, tr. D. C. Lau, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1976).

165 Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin. Gushi xin bian yanjiu ziliao (Research Materials

for the Study of Old Stories Retold), Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe

(1984).

Meyers, Jeffrey. A Reader's Guide to George Orwell, London: Thames & Hudson

(1975).- (ed.). George Orwell - The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul (1975).- George Orwell-An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism.

New York: Garland (1977).

Mueller, William R. The Prophetic Voice In Modern Fiction, Anchor Books (1966).

Muggeridge, Malcolm. The Thirties (1930-1940) - in Great Britain, London:

Collins (1967).

Norris, Christopher. Inside The Myth-Orwell: Views from the Left, London:

Lawrence and Wishart 0984).

Oldsey, Bernard and Joseph Browne. Critical Essays on George Orwell, Boston:

G. K Hall & Co (1986).

Otto Stammer (ed.), Max Weber and Sociology Today, New York: Harper & Row (1971).

Oxley, B. T. Literature in Perspective - George Orwell, London: Evans Brothers Limited (1967).

Prawer, S. S. Comparative Literature. An Introduction, London: Duckworth (1973).

Qian Xuantong. "Zhongguo jinhou de wenzi wenti" (The Present Problem of

Chinese Language and Its Future), in Hu Shi (ed.), Zhongguo xinwenxue da

xi. Jianshe lilunji, Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935, pp. 142-44.

Qiaofeng, see Zhou Jianren ..

Qinwen. "Lu Xun 'Li shui' zhongde Yu taitai" (Mrs Yu in Lu Xun's Old Stories

Retold), Lu Xun yanjiu wencong, III (1982).

166 Rai, Al ok. Orwell and the Politics of Despair - A Critical Study of the Writings of

George Orwell, Cambridge University Press (1988).

Relly, Patrick. George Orwell. The Age's Adversary, London: Macmillan Press

(1988).

Ringbom, Hakan. George Orwell as Essauist - A Stylistic Study, Abo Akademi

(1973).

Rodden, John. The Politics of Literatary Reputation - The Making and Claiming

of 'St. George' Orwell, Oxford: Oxford University Press 0989).

Schurman, Franz and Orville Schell (eds). Republican China, Harmondswoth:

Penguin Books (1968).

Shan Yanyi. Lu Xun yu Qu Qiubai (Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai), Tianjin Renmin

Chubanshe (1986).

Shandong Lu Xun Yanjiuhui (ed.). Gushi xin bian xin tan (New Essays on Old

Stories Retold), Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe (1984).

Shanghai Shehukexueyuan Wenxue Yanjiusuo (ed.). Sanshi niandai zai

Shanghai de "Zhuo Lian" zuojia (Members of the League of Chinese Left-wing

Writers in Shanghai During the Thirties), 2 vols, Shanghai: Shanghai

Shehuikexueyuan Chubanshe (1988).

She Suizhi (ed.). Lu Xun shengping shiliao huibian (A Collection of Materials

About Lu Xun's Life), 4 vols, Tianjin: Tianjin Renmin Chubanshe (1981-83).

Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorised Biography, London: Heinemann (1991).

Sima Qian. "Shiji. Xia benji", in Meng Guanglai and Han Rixin (eds.), Gushixin

bian yanjiu ziliao, * pp. 78-82.

Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1977,

enlarged and revised edition).

Snow, Helen Foster. My China Years, London: Harrap 0984).

167 Song Shitang. "Shi lun Sun Zhongshan dui shehuizhuyi de tansuo" (A Tentative

Study of Dr Sun Yatsen's Exploration of Socialism), Xinhua wenzhai, 1991,

No. 1, pp. 66-69.

Spender, Stephen. The Thirties and After- Poetry, Politics, People (1933-1975),

Macmilan Press (1978).

Stanky, Peter and William Abraham. Orwell: The Transformation, London:

Con table (1979).- The Unknown Orwell, London: Paladin 0974).

Stephen Spender. Poe-ms, London: Faber & Faber 0933).

Stephen Wadhams (ed.). Remembering Orwell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

(1984).

Stevenson, John and Chris Cook. The Slump - Society and Politics During the

Depression, London: Jonathan Cape 0977).

Suchodolski, Bogdan. "Renaissance Humanism and Marxist Humanism" in

Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism, London: The Penguin Press (1967),

pp.28-37.

Sun Xizhen. "Lu Xun yu Riben wenxue" (Lu Xun and Japanese Literature), in

Lu Xun yu Zhong-wai wenhua de bijiao yanjiu (The Comparative Studies

Between Lu Xun and World's Culture),* pp. 391-403.

Symons, Julian. The Thirties -A Dream Revolved, London: Faber and Faber

(Revised, 1975).

Tang Tao (ed.). Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shi (History of Modern Chinese

Literature), 3 vols, Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe (1979-1980).

- "Huiyi Lu Xun ji sanshi niandai wenyijie liang tiao luxian douzheng"

(Recollecting the Struggles Between Two Political Lines in the Literary

Circle in the Thirties and Lu Xun),Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao, Vol. 1 (1976).

Taylor, A. J.P. English History (1914-1945), Oxford: The Clarendon Press 0965).

Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1984).

168 Thomson, David. Europe Since Napolean, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

(1966).

Trotsky, Leon. Leon Trotsky on China, New York: Monad Press (1976).

-The Revolution Betrayed, New York: Pathfinder Press (1977).

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. History and Will. Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse­

tung's Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973).

Wang Furen. Lu Xun qianqi xiaoshuo yu Eluosi wenxue (Lu Xun's Early Short

Stories and Russian Literature), Xi'an: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe (1984).

Wang, Guangyuan (ed.). Chen Duxiu nianpu (Chronology of Chen Duxiu),

Chongqing Chubanshe (1987).

Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, tr. A. M.

Henderson and Talcott Parsons, New York: The Free Press (1964).

- Essays in Sociology, tr. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: A

Galaxy Book (1958).

Wei Zhixin. Chen Duxiu sixiang yanjiu (Studies of Chen Duxiu's Thought),

Nanjing Daxue Chubanshe (1987).

Weiss, Ruth F. Lu Xun. A Chinese Writer for All Times, Beijing: New World Press (1985).

Weisstein, Ulrich. Comparative Literature and Literary Theory: Survey and

Definition, tr. William Riggan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1973).

Wenyi yuebao bianjibu (ed.). Gushi xin bian de sixiang yiyi he yishufengge (The

Ideological Implications and Artistic Styles of Old Stories Retold), Shanghai: Xinwenyi Chubanshe (1957).

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society (1780-1950), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1975).

-Keywords, London: Fontana/Collins (1979).

- Orwell, London: Fontana/Collins (1971).

169 Wittfogel, Karl A. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New

Haven: Yale University Press ( 1970).

Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit -A Study of George Orwell, Minerva Press

(1968).

Wu Ying. "Rube lijie Gushi xin bian de sixiang yiyi," in Gushi xin bian de

sixiang yiyi he yishufengge, Shanghai: Xinwenyi Chubanshe (1957).

Xia Yan. "'Zuo Lian' chengli qianhou" (The Founding of the League of Left-wing

Writers and After), Zuolian huiyilu, shang, Beijing: Zhongguo Shehuikexue

Chuabanshe (1982), pp. 35-59.

Yan Jiayan. "Lun 'Kuangren riji' de chuangzuo fangfa" (On the Mehtod of

Creation of "A Madman's Diary"), in Beijing Daxue xuebao, 1982, No. 1.

Yang Hansheng. "Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng chengli de jingguo" (The

Establishment of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers), Lu Xun yanjiu

niankan, 1980.

Yass, Maarrion. The Great Depresion, London: Wayland Publishers ( 1970).

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1983).

Zhang Jialin. "Chen Geng jiangjun tan he Lu Xun xiansheng de yi ci huijian"

(General Chen Geng Talks About His Meeting with Mr Lu Xun), in Lu Xun

huiyilu, Vol. 1, Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe (1978), pp. 50-52.

Zhang Zhaoyi, see Cheung, Chiu-yee.

Zhang, Kuitang. "Zhong Gong Zhongyang heping jiejue Xi'an Shibian fangzhen

de zhiding" (The Principle of a Peaceful Settlement of the Xi'an Incident of

the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party), Xinhua wenzhai,

1991, No. 1, pp. 71-4.

Zhongguo Bijiaowenxue Xuehui (ed.). Zhongguo bijiaowenxue (Comparative Literature in China), I-IV (1984-87).

170 Zhongguo Shehuikexueyuan wenxue yanjiusuo xiandai wenxue yanjiushi (ed.).

"Geming wenxue" lunzheng ziliao xuanbian (A Collection of Materials of the

Debates on "Revolutionary Literature), 2 vols, Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe

(1981).

Zhongguo Shehuikexueyuan wenxue yanjiusuo Lu Xun yanjiushi (ed.). Lu Xun

yu Zhong-wai wenhua de bijiao yanjiu (The Comparative Studies Between Lu

Xun and World's Culture), Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian Chuban Gongsi 0986).

Zhou Jianren and Zhou Ye. An Age Gone By. Lu Xun's Clan in Decline, Beijing:

New World Press (1988).

Zhou Jianren. "Huiyi Lu Xun zai Shanghai de ji jian shi" (Recollections of

Severals Things About Lu Xun in shanghai), in Lu Xun huiyilu, Vol. 1

Shanghai Wenyi Chubanshe( 1978), pp. 9-11.

- "Lue jiang guanyu Lu Xun de shiqing" (Brief Recollections About Lu Xun),

Aomen: Eryashe (1978).

Zhou Yueying. Gushi xin bian xin tan (New Essays on Old Stories Retold),

Shijiazhuang: Huashan Wenyi Chubanshe (1983).

Zhuang Zi, Chuang Tzu. Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, tr. Herbert A.

Giles, London: Bernard Quaritch ( 1926).

Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left, New Haven: Yale University Press (1974).

171