Zhou Shuren (Lu Xun)

Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), who wrote under the pen name Lu Xun, was studying Western medicine in Sendai, Japan, when a lantern-slide of the Russo-Japanese War showed a Chinese prisoner about to be decapitated while fellow Chinese onlookers stood apathy-stricken. Realizing that healing bodily disease was useless if the spiritual soul of the nation remained numb, Lu Xun abandoned medicine for literature.

In May 1918, in the revolutionary journal *New Youth*, Lu Xun published A Madman's Diary (Kuangren Riji)—the first modern story written in vernacular Chinese (baihua)—allegorizing four millennia of Confucian orthodoxy as literal cannibalism ('Save the children!'). In The True Story of Ah Q (1921), through a deluded peasant who interprets every humiliation as a moral victory, Lu Xun coined the concept of 'spiritual victory', permanently transforming Chinese self-awareness. At his 1936 funeral in Shanghai, his coffin was draped in a banner declaring him 'The Soul of the Nation'.