Who they were
Zhou Shuren wrote as Lu Xun. He studied medicine at Sendai in Japan and, by his own account after seeing a lantern slide of an apathetic crowd, abandoned it to heal spirits through writing instead.
What they did
“A Madman’s Diary” (1918, in the journal New Youth) was the first major modern short story in vernacular Chinese — its madman reads “eat people” between the lines of tradition. “The True Story of Ah Q” (1921–22) satirized self-consoling “spiritual victories”. His zawen essays made him the sharpest social critic of the era. He led the League of Left-Wing Writers from 1930 but never joined the Communist Party, and died in Shanghai in 1936.
Legacy
Canonized in the PRC curriculum, he remains a writer whose irony resists simple sainthood.