Scholar Xu Zidong: Why, 100 Years On, Does Lu Xun Still Sound Like He's Talking About Today? (Part One)

This is the first part of our interview with Professor Xu Zidong, mainly about the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun, and enlightenment.

On the evening of June 15, 2018, at an event in Beijing, Xu Zidong talked about what he had felt rereading Lu Xun.

"It's been a hundred years, and Lu Xun's words sound like they were spoken yesterday. I'm astonished — I've never seen a writer whose sentences could double as commentary on today's newspaper. Those of us in this line of work have a duty we can't pass off: this is our expertise, and it's our social responsibility. A hundred years after the May Fourth Movement, we have to look back and reflect," Xu said at the event.

Xu Zidong is by trade a scholar, working on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and on Hong Kong literature. He is a professor in the Department of Chinese at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and the author of A New Study of Yu Dafu, The Literary-Historical Significance of Eileen Chang, and the three-volume Lecture Notes of Xu Zidong.

He made his name early. At 29, on the strength of A New Study of Yu Dafu, East China Normal University promoted him to associate professor as a special exception, making him the youngest associate professor in any Chinese department in the country. Back then he was counted alongside Huang Ziping, Zhao Yuan, Chen Pingyuan, Wang Xiaoming, and Cheng Depei as one of the "young critics of the 1980s." All of them have since become major scholars of literature.

Chen Xiaoming, a professor in the Chinese department at Peking University, recalls: "Mr. Zidong was a towering figure in the 1980s. He was the first to approach Yu Dafu through romanticism, the first to catch a new theme out of literary experience — out of a writer's personal temperament and spiritual sensibility — and in doing so he opened a new path for the study of modern Chinese literature at the time. That was remarkable. It was his earliest contribution to literature, back in the 1980s."

Most intellectuals of Xu Zidong's generation were shaped by Lu Xun. Practically speaking, Lu Xun was one of the few writers they could read systematically at the time, and his standing was always high — always "correct." Personally, Xu was doing farm labor in the countryside when he first read Lu Xun, and he says Lu Xun hammered at his young worldview on five big questions: past versus present, China versus the West, high versus low, men versus women, and the individual versus the world. Now, rereading Lu Xun, he feels he is rereading himself.

Xu Zidong's scholarship tracks his own life closely; his own shadow falls across his research. But most people know him for the Phoenix TV program Three People Talking (《锵锵三人行》).

In 2000, the cultural commentator Liang Wendao called Xu Zidong to say that Three People Talking wanted to interview him once, on whatever topic he liked. Xu agreed. It turned into something much larger: by the time the show went off the air in 2017, he had been a guest for 17 years and had taped more than 2,000 episodes, on a program with considerable social influence. Of all the lineups the show tried, his conversations with Dou Wentao and Liang Wendao were probably the most entertaining, and viewers took to calling the three of them the "Iron Triangle."

In his book, discussing how intellectuals broke into factions in the 1920s and 1930s after New Youth, he uses that trio as a half-joking example: "Just watch Three People Talking and you'll see. Liang Wendao sits on the left. He's someone who stresses equality and is always concerned about the disadvantaged. I sit on the right — I care most about the value of freedom, that's my own inclination. Dou Wentao, of course, is universal love. He sits in the middle, balancing both sides, comfortable with both sides, and torn between both sides. So the three of us basically embody the three spirits of the French Revolution, and split left and right accordingly."

In 2011, Xu Zidong collected his media commentary into a book, Crossing the Line: Lecture Notes of Xu Zidong (Volume Three). "'Crossing the line' means two things. First, crossing from academic research into television media, from scholarly work into civic argument. Second, the views in this book may well challenge, jar against, or violate certain boundaries. … Commentary can 'cross the line' because 'the line' keeps shifting, and I neither can nor want to cater to it — so the only way left to keep a clear conscience is to be stubbornly out of step with the times," Xu wrote.

In May 2018, Xu Zidong went to Istanbul, where he and his old friends Dou Wentao and Zhou Yijun visited the writer Orhan Pamuk and talked with him at his home. That trip became an episode of the new program Traveling the World with Three People (《锵锵行天下》), which began airing this September.

In June 2018, Xu Zidong published a new book, Xu Zidong's Course on Modern Literature. It comes from transcripts of the "Modern Chinese Literature" course he taught to first-year Chinese-department students at Lingnan University between September and December 2016. The course was livestreamed on Tencent at the same time.

The book follows a line of thinking Xu Zidong has held all along. Whether it is Three People Talking, Round Table (《圆桌派》), Letters Alive, or the literature courses he has recorded for Ximalaya and Tencent, he believes academic research can carry influence beyond the academy — and that this is simply part of a teacher's job. But when a scholar faces the public, he should stay within his own field when the topic falls inside it, and speak as an ordinary citizen offering common sense when it does not.

"The social impact of scholarship should be encouraged and protected at the institutional level. The mainland has the same problem, because the academic game inside universities keeps getting more closed off. It's a contradictory picture. On one hand, society intervenes heavily in universities — politics takes command, there are Marxist-Leninist programs, it all looks tightly controlled. On the other hand, people inside universities are fighting over research grants, and scholarship has come loose from society: the projects they do aren't meant to engage with society at all. I think this has to be changed at the institutional level. Hong Kong has seen a change like that — put simply, they've started counting a study's social impact in the assessment, and I think that's a good thing," he told QDaily.

On the afternoon of June 15, 2018, we met Xu Zidong in a hotel café in Beijing's Chaoyang District. He wore a dark suit jacket and light trousers. At 64, he was exactly as he appears on television: quick, animated, a superb talker.

Over nearly an hour and a half we talked about the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun, and enlightenment, and, starting from Xu's own life, about his scholarship and how his intellectual framework took shape. Because the interview ran long, we are publishing it in two parts. This is the first, mainly about the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun, and enlightenment.

"Lu Xun may be dead, but he is still living among us. If you want to understand men and women, you can read Eileen Chang; if you want to understand the Chinese, you have to read Lu Xun," he has said.

Q = QDaily

Xu = Xu Zidong

Of May Fourth's Three Ideologies, Evolutionary Theory Took the Deepest Root in China

Q: In your new book Xu Zidong's Course on Modern Literature, you write: "From May Fourth up to today, the theory of evolution has taken far deeper root than science or democracy. New equals good — that is May Fourth's modernity, and its mainstream ideology." Why do you think evolutionary theory took deeper root than science or democracy?

Xu: Take science. We do generally believe in science now; it has become a positive word. Leaders regularly meet with scientists, and we talk a lot about rule by experts — the previous generation of leaders in particular included many technocrats from Tsinghua. But science means doubting everything. And these days we all seem to feel that certain parts of science may not be doubted. So it's hard to say the scientific spirit has been carried through. That's from the standpoint of ideology. On the other hand, take a look at something like Kuaishou and you can see exactly what our real attitude toward science is. So it's hard to say we have reached what they were after back then — "Mr. Science" — or fulfilled May Fourth's hopes. At the very least, we still have a long way to go.

Democracy, even more so. Go ask someone what "democracy" means. To begin with, the translation itself is a problem. The English word is "democracy"; the Chinese word, minzhu, came in as a Japanese coinage written in Chinese characters. It joins min, "the people," with zhu, "master" or "ruler" — and putting those two together produces a very muddled meaning. The widespread misunderstanding today, or call it the shared assumption, is "you are the people, I am the master," or "I am the people, you are the master." What we demand of the "master" is that he serve "the people." What we demand of officials is: an official who won't be master for the people might as well go home and grow sweet potatoes. Turn that around and it means an official who can be master on the people's behalf is a wise ruler. See — "the people" and "the master" are still separate. So before we even get to what happens in practice, the concept behind the word minzhu is already difficult. And that is a long way from what Chen Duxiu and the others were advocating at the time. Never mind anything else — compare it even to the song the Communist Party itself promoted and sang in the late 1940s, "The Sky Over the Liberated Areas Is a Clear Sky." Even that falls short of the concept of democracy.

So I'm not saying there has been no progress. There has been a great deal of progress, but there is still plenty of room to develop. There is exactly one thing we have progressed on most thoroughly: progress itself, the idea of "progress." Right now, talking to you, I use the word "progress." See, that's already a good word. "The Three Represents" used "advanced," and "advanced" is a good word. "Forward" is a good word. Against them, "retreat," "backslide," "not progressing" — bad words. But here's the problem: progress toward where? Heading in what direction? If what lies ahead is wrong, if what lies ahead is bad, then the more you progress, the worse off you are, no? Nobody thinks about that.

And this has taken hold completely. Because pre-modern China had two concepts of time. One was reverence for the distant past. What counts as good? For thousands of years it meant the ancestors were good, the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors were good, and each generation is worse than the last. Inside a family, our grandfather and grandmother were good, and people today are inferior. The other was the cycle: fortune shifts from the east bank of the river to the west bank every thirty years, and the world's affairs turn like a wheel.

So once the theory of evolution arrived, Chinese people — nobody quite knows when — accepted this idea of developing forward. They turned their faces around. We used to speak of those who went before, and that meant Confucius. Picture time as Chang'an Avenue: those who went before are to the west, and my face was turned west. Now people say "vanguard," "forward guard," "forward, forward, forward" — they're already looking the other way. Toward what? Nobody knows. Communism, the Great Harmony, a bright future, that sort of thing. But one thing is certain: you have to keep heading forward, and that is what "tomorrow will be better" means. That is the theory of evolution.

It runs deep. Forget the mainland — I've noticed it right on the streets of Hong Kong: how many company names carry the character xin, "new"! Countless ones — Sun Hung Kai, Sun Hung Kai Properties, Xintiandi — from big corporations down to small shops, the streets are full of "new." Now go find me a shop called "old." Old Hung Kai? Old Tiandi? The word lao, "aged," still gets used; jiu, "old and outdated," doesn't. You already know this: "new society," "old society" — the terms themselves carry the flavor of evolutionary theory.

So of the three ideological shifts at May Fourth, all three did shift, but the most thorough was evolutionary theory.

Q: At the time of May Fourth, did they have a precise concept of democracy?

Xu: They were importing the concept themselves. I don't think they had any precise idea of what kind of democracy to build — which is why disagreements surfaced so quickly and everyone split fast into factions and parties. There were two open questions. First, what exactly should you build? They disagreed. Second, by what method — reform or revolution? They disagreed there too. But on one point they agreed: against autocracy, against monarchy. Think about what they all opposed together — after the 1911 Revolution, Yuan Shikai declaring himself emperor. Lu Xun and the rest thought it was terrible; Hu Shih thought it was terrible. Almost no cultural figure of the day backed Yuan Shikai's bid for the throne. So they disagreed on what they were after, and agreed on what they were against.

Q: In assessing the historical trend of evolutionary theory, you say: "This historical trend had a positive significance, because China's traditional social forms had been fixed in place for far too long, and correcting that required overcorrection." In your view, what were its negative effects? Social Darwinism, for instance?

Xu: The negative effects. First, because the country was weak back then and got beaten up, they drew a conclusion: fall behind and you get beaten, so we have to make ourselves strong. That's a real fact, but it shouldn't be taken as a law of the world. Think of a child who gets bullied outside and comes home, and a parent tells him: you're weak, you don't know how to fight, that's why you get bullied. What does that mean? That if I'm strong I get to beat people up? So this sense of national humiliation among the weak is a good thing insofar as it drives the will to make the country strong again. But extend the logic and you get exactly what you called the law of the jungle. And once you become strong: you bullied me before, and I remember. Isn't that why so many people online today talk about leveling Tokyo? The moment anything happens, it's, ah, our country is awesome!

Go one layer deeper and this is precisely what Lu Xun exposed as the mentality of the underclass — the mindset of the poor, the weak, the slave who wants to become the master.

Q: Now that China has risen, this problem might be even more serious.

Xu: Right. And then it's finally, at long last, my turn to bully someone else.

In a Major Social Transition, If the Ruling Class Won't Yield to Any Social Class, It Ends Badly

Q: In your book you mention Lu Xun's doubts about and reflections on May Fourth, and you say: "That we took the road of revolution rather than reform had a certain inevitability at the time; today, reflecting on revolution and reviving the idea of reform also has its own inevitability." I think this topic is very important but also very complicated — could you expand on it?

Xu: A few years back there was a debate in academic circles about why we took the French model rather than the British one. Russia and China both took the French model — revolution, which meant killing people, and it was miserable. Britain had constitutional monarchy, a peaceful transition. Japan took the British model. To some extent so did America: America had a brief revolution, but on the whole it inherited the British model.

I think this discussion, the way many people carry it on today, can't be separated from historical context. You can't just say, out of nowhere, that if Cixi had tripped and died, Guangxu would have become emperor, and China today would be like the British royal family — someone getting married and driving down Chang'an Avenue while we commoners cheer. It doesn't work that way. Chinese people wanted that road too, at the time. Just the other day someone dug up an old episode of Three People Talking from a few years back, one where Lei Yi and I discussed why the late Qing took the road of revolution. At the outset the situation was different: Sun Yat-sen and the others actually hoped the Qing could change. You were already this miserable, this weak, rotten through the middle, in a period of crisis — but you could still change, still preserve your clan, still extend your dynasty. The problem was that they refused to change, refused to yield. On the surface they said they would change; in fact they wouldn't give up anything, and they kept tightening their grip — suppression instead of an attitude of development and openness. And behind it was one idea: the realm belongs to me. My dynasty, my rivers and mountains — since when do you get a say? So in the end even the local merchants stopped supporting the Qing court and threw their weight behind the revolutionary parties, the Tongmenghui, the Guangfuhui …

In a major social transition, if the ruling class won't yield to any social class, it ends badly. To keep a society going you can't please every class, but you absolutely have to strike a balance: some classes have to benefit under your rule, or stand to lose a great deal if a new revolution comes. Those people will then stand on your side. That's how it has gone dynasty after dynasty. But if you leave even your main social classes unable to make a living, or leave them worse off, what are they supposed to do? That is what produces revolution.

So reform was in itself a good thing — the ideal Hu Shih and his circle held — and looking back now it was better than revolution. But at the time there was no way around it; things simply didn't work out. Hu Shih tried hard. Duan Qirui and his people set up a deliberative assembly and drafted the Republic of China's constitution, and Hu Shih took part, calling students who had studied abroad, like Xu Zhimo, back home — all in pursuit of constitutional government. But did the warlords want constitutional government? They were beyond help. Then in the 1930s the Nationalists started arresting and killing people, so revolution was forced into being. That's the inevitability at the start.

The later inevitability is simpler still. Just look at what revolution finally produced. What happened in the 1950s, all the way through an unprecedented calamity like the Cultural Revolution — the damage it did to the Chinese nation was, in a sense, greater than in any era before. The harm done to civil society, to folk culture, to ordinary Chinese people — not only economically but spiritually, in every dimension — was simply enormous.

Q: The damage was so great that we still haven't worked through it.

Xu: It isn't only today's problem — nobody knows how many more years it will take to work through. Why can't people make sense of it? You can change everything else, but if there's one thing that hasn't changed at all, you have this unprecedented calamity to thank for it. So, given consequences like those, of course you have to ask why they happened. Where did we go wrong at the start? Where exactly was the mistake? Take an everyday comparison: a marriage that ends in failure is a terrible thing. Of course you look back and ask — how did I ever fall in love with such a jerk? I clearly had another option; why didn't I love him instead, why did I like this one? That's reflecting on the past. And once you actually reflect, you find that falling for this person had its own inevitability — you had your reasons at the time. See, you weren't a fool; you chose him, and things only changed later. So I'd say both had their inevitability.

Q: But today the main task is really to reflect on revolution and revive the idea of reform.

Xu: Right.

The Topic of "Enlightenment" Is Highly Complex — as Big as the Fate of the Nation, as Small as One Person's Outlook on Life

Q: In discussing Lu Xun and Mao Dun, you take up the relationship between those who enlighten and those who are enlightened. What's your own view of that relationship? I often hear people say that once the so-called self-media era arrived, that relationship basically fell apart.

Xu: Here's how I see it. First, you have to recognize that for Lu Xun's generation, enlightenment produced tremendous results. In the Republican era only 20 percent of the population was literate. In other words, out of 400 million people, the literate population was maybe a few tens of millions — and of those tens of millions, 90 percent weren't reading the new literature. They were reading the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school, the province of country scholars. So the people actually reading the new literature were at most a few million: as a share of the population, 1 or 2 percent. But remember, the direction China later took — from the Republic of China to the People's Republic and on to today — was decided by that 1 or 2 percent. We may say they represented 95 percent of the population, but in fact it was still just that 1 or 2 percent. In that sense it's hard to imagine an alternative — hard to imagine China stuck in warlord chaos forever, or most of China's population reading nothing but Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction forever. Though of course most people today are still chasing something like that.

Either way, the mainstream ideology of society sits within the May Fourth New Culture tradition. From that angle, Lu Xun's work of waking the masses did bear fruit. To use his own image, he opened a window. My version of it: Lu Xun and his generation opened a window, and Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping opened a door — two different doors, granted. That's the first point.

But on the other hand you could also say the work was never finished at all. People have only switched to a different way of sleeping. The old way of sleeping was reading The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants or Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction; now it's watching Where Are We Going, Dad? and Day Day Up, scrolling Douyin, watching Douyu. Think about it: if most of China is on Douyin and Douyu, what was Lu Xun doing all that for? People are still asleep, just the same, amusing themselves to death — and every one of them is having a great time. On that level, the enlightenment was wasted. What did these hundred years accomplish? That's the second point.

Third is the question you just raised. Judged strictly by the spirit of Western Enlightenment thought, of the French Enlightenment, enlightenment is relative. In the book I quote a line from Kant that has influenced me a great deal: everything the French Enlightenment stood for comes down in the end to one sentence — however large the gap between one person and another (and people can differ enormously, a thousandfold, in intelligence, wealth, character, even race), that gap can never be large enough for one person to decide another person's fate. Every one-person-one-vote system in the West starts from exactly that premise.

Think about it: from where we stand, one person one vote is absurd — that Xu Zidong and Confucius should have the same single vote is completely unreasonable. Confucius ought to have 10,000 votes. You see what I mean? To Chinese eyes, one person one vote is ridiculous. Because, as I said, if Lu Xun's era had run on one person one vote, where would Lu Xun's way of doing things have gotten him? So China has never accepted one person one vote. It's a Western concept. Now apply that concept to the question we're discussing and a problem appears: what gives you the right to say we're "asleep"? What gives you, Xu Zidong, the right to say that publishing a book makes you "awake," while my watching Douyu makes me "asleep"? My Douyu is better to look at than your book — my Douyu has living, breathing, beautiful people in it, you old fogeys!

Once self-media arrived, this question of who's asleep and who's awake stopped being a thought and started being practice. When people click "like" online, a philosophy professor and a street sweeper and an angry young nationalist all click the same "like." We each get one vote. That's one person one vote on the internet. We never achieved that one person one vote in politics; we have achieved it in culture. You can't say 2,000 professors outweigh 20,000 ordinary people — that the 2,000 are "high-end population" and the 20,000 are "low-end population." That's wrong. And that is exactly the question you raised: who is qualified to enlighten anyone? It's now entirely open to doubt.

Q: Which of these do you lean toward?

Xu: They coexist. And of course there's a fourth possibility: you can never wake someone who is pretending to be asleep. That's another layer of complication. You think someone's asleep, you think they simply enjoy watching Where Are We Going, Dad? — and maybe they know more than you do and are only playing possum.

So the topic of enlightenment is now highly complex. It runs as large as the fate of the nation and as small as each person's own path of self-cultivation, family, and governance, and their view of life — it all connects back to this.

Q: Right. In fact, a lot of the arguments in popular-culture studies today are about exactly the points you just made.

Xu: On one hand you can look at it optimistically: wow, real democracy, everyone gets to be their own master. On the other hand you can also see a whole new kind of ignorance.

Q: I also saw that you once ran into Qian Liqun and asked him whether he followed what goes on online. He said he couldn't — that looking at it just deflated him and left him not knowing what to do.

Xu: He can't look at it (laughs). Back then I asked him to come on Three People Talking, and he said he couldn't do it — if he did, people would curse him out, and he couldn't take it. As a teacher, no one curses you; your students won't curse you, and even if they wanted to, they wouldn't dare. Once you go on television, it's strangers you've never met.

We Need Confucius, We Need Marx, and We Still Need Lu Xun

Q: In the book, after discussing the split within New Youth, you pose a question: "Looking back a hundred years later, what's the point of 'isms'?" You then bring up Gan Yang's "unifying three traditions" (inheriting the traditions of Confucius, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping all at once) and Chen Pingyuan's "unifying two traditions" (integrating the Confucian tradition with the new May Fourth tradition). What's your own view?

Xu: I think it should be "unifying three traditions," but not Gan Yang's three. If Chinese people today are to have a cultural inheritance, I'd say: first, traditional Chinese culture; second, every cultural tradition in the world that you consider valuable, which should count as our tradition too; third, the spirit of May Fourth, its basic pursuit of science and democracy. All three are needed.

Gan Yang's version is very practical — Mao, Deng, Confucius. But Deng doesn't amount to a cultural tradition; he is a political figure, at most representing vested interests, or representing certain views drawn from the Western market economy, that sort of thing. So he isn't a complete cultural tradition. Still, it's useful — it's realistic, it tells the truth. From a cultural standpoint, though, it does leave out something as important as May Fourth. May Fourth really was the core of twentieth-century Chinese thought. I think it's been left out.

As for Chen Pingyuan's version — yes, but I don't think it's enough. Put it this way: we need Confucius, we need Marx, and we still need Lu Xun, right? And Lu Xun stands precisely on the ground of the Chinese position. Don't be fooled by his surface criticism of Confucius — his whole Confucian spirit of saving the nation is obviously connected to Confucius. And Western concepts of democracy run all through Lu Xun. So if you ask me, those are my "three traditions."

Q: Looking back over these hundred years of May Fourth history, it seems you have a lot to say. There's a passage in the book: "Lu Xun's 'iron house' metaphor can be read three ways: first, the image is a metaphor for the entire liberation history of modern Chinese civilization; second, a hundred years past May Fourth, we still need to carry on the spirit of enlightenment; third, we need to use modern democratic concepts to reflect on May Fourth's enlightenment project." Are those three more or less your biggest takeaways from looking back at this hundred years? Is there anything you'd add?

Xu: Right. The first and second are what I just discussed — the first two senses of "enlightenment." Enlightenment succeeded, but it wasn't finished, and it has to keep going. The third is the third sense I mentioned: you also have to ask yourself — you woke other people up, but have you considered whether there are situations where you're half asleep yourself? Was Lu Xun himself in a kind of obsessive state? C.T. Hsia called it "obsession with China"; people give it the polished translation "concern for the times, worry for the nation," but the accurate translation is "obsessed with the nation." Is that national obsession something worth reflecting on too?

Q: Right. A lot of people also criticize May Fourth writers for weighing the interests of nation and state so heavily that they damaged the artistic and intellectual quality of their work. But you say explicitly that we should "use modern democratic concepts to reflect on May Fourth's enlightenment."

Xu: Right. For a modern democratic concept, I think Kant's formulation works. It's a solution of last resort. I once discussed this very question with Wang Yuanhua, Shanghai's former head of propaganda. As it happened, he was staying in a hotel at the time, and someone came in to clean the room. I said: suppose we're electing the mayor of Shanghai — you get one vote and she gets one vote. Is that reasonable? Mr. Yuanhua said, no, it isn't reasonable. But what better method do you have? What method could you propose for how many votes she should get and how many you should get? The moment you take the position that it shouldn't be one person one vote, you're in trouble. A lot of our problems today spin out from exactly that. Should she get 1 vote and you 10? 100? 1,000? The instant you reject the premise there, there's no way to run the system at all.

Push it to the other extreme: a very kind, very high-ranking, very important person kills another person who is humble and insignificant. What should happen when you kill someone? You still owe a life for a life; you still have to be punished. However great you are, you can't kill even the smallest person. Go back to the Qin dynasty and yes, a general could kill people as he pleased. Even if I killed by mistake, killed wrongly, you still can't take my life to pay for his — what use are you to our state of Qin? So humanity has already built this principle into the rules it sets. Call it the "negative line." If the "negative line" is drawn that way, why shouldn't the "positive line" be drawn the same way? That is what I mean by a modern democratic concept.

Why, 100 Years On, Does Lu Xun Still Sound Like He's Talking About Today?

Q: You say: "After May Fourth, Chinese literature, fiction in particular, had two most important schools: art for life's sake, and art for art's sake." Which do you prefer yourself? Why?

Xu: That depends on which level you're talking about. These two schools actually work on two different levels. To use an old-fashioned way of dividing it: one is the level of method, the other the level of spirit.

On the level of method, I lean toward "art for life's sake." Take a writer today who carves dragons and paints phoenixes, makes some ornate thing, pays no attention to anything happening in society, amuses only himself and plays games with words — I have no respect for that. By my own values at least, I find it pointless.

But on the spiritual level, I'd say an artist who creates in order to reform society will always stay at a limited altitude. For a great artist, reforming society is only the influence he has while alive, not the ultimate purpose of his work. What does a good writer look like to me? While he's alive, he throws everything he has into reforming the world. But after he dies, his work turns out to be about far more than reforming the world. Victor Hugo, as I see it, wasn't writing only for France — he was writing for us too.

So from that second angle, I'd say "art for art's sake" in the broad sense stands higher; in the narrow sense, "art for life's sake" is the more worthwhile pursuit. That's my personal view.

Q: Right. You've said scholarship works the same way — "narrowly speaking, it's for China; broadly speaking, it's for scholarship itself."

Xu: Right.

Q: What have you been thinking about most lately?

Xu: I've been making Rereading Lu Xun for Ximalaya — three episodes a week this summer, and it's left my head spinning. Talking about Lu Xun, the question I've thought about most is why his words still sound so useful today. Why, after 100 years, does what he said sound like something said today? That's the question I'm working on right now.

I've had this feeling before, but it keeps getting stronger. Lu Xun said it himself, of course: once the illness is cured, throw the medicine away. If the medicine still has value, the illness hasn't been cured. But even so, he was too accurate (laughs). Plenty of writers write things that transcend time and place, but none of them are as specific as Lu Xun. Too accurate!

A few years back there was that film The Flowers of War, remember? I read an essay by Lu Xun — "My Views on Chastity" — where he says that when a war is lost, instead of thinking through how it was lost, people go dig up a batch of chaste martyred women to commemorate (laughs). But here's the thing: when people commemorate them today, they are still just as cheerful, still having a fine time, without a thought spared for the fact that the men failed to protect the women, and in the end even had them pick up knives in place of the students and go fight the Japanese.

Banner image: a still from the film The Flowers of War, via Douban; lead image: Xu Zidong, via Imaginist.