Lu Xun (1881--1936), whose hometown is Shaoxing , Zhejiang , is a great modern litterateur, ideologist and revolutionist. His family name is Zhou; his given name is Shuren; and his sobriquet is Yucai. “Lu Xun” is a pen name used after the May 4th new culture movement. Because writings under this pen name have a great influence, people are used to calling him Lu Xun.
　　 Lu Xun was born in a feudal scholar-bureaucrat family in Duchang Fang Kou in Shaoxing on September 25 th , 1881 . He began to study at the age of 7 and attended "Sanwei Study" at the age of 12. He was a diligent student, liked raising questions, had a very good memory and read many books. He liked to read alternative histories , notebooks, and folklores. He had a great interest in painting and art which developed into a solid cultural foundation. He not only read the “four books and five classics” but also many others after school to try to master historic cultural knowledge. He was greatly influenced by the long history and splendid culture of Shaoxing which included many moral essays of the previous scholars of the Yue district. When Lu Xun was a teenager, his grandfather was arrested and imprisoned because of a bribe in the official examination and his father passed away because of illness. Consequently the family fortunes declined and Lu Xun went from being the eldest son of a large, rich, feudal, scholar-bureaucrat family to becoming poor. Therefore young Lu Xun experienced the cruelty of society, got to know “the true face of people” and realized that the feudal society was decadent and on the decline.
　　 In the spring of 1898, with the hope of a life, Lu Xun left his hometown and enrolled in Nanjing Jiangnan Naval Academy . The next year, because he was not satisfied with the foul atmosphere of the Academy, he transferred to the School of Mines and Railways near Jiangnan Army Academy . He remained current with studies of western Natural Science and Social Science and read Liang Qichao's reformist journal Shiwu Bao and Yan Fu's translations of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, which influenced him tremendously. He was influenced by the thoughts of reform and evolutionism, and gradually formed the social idea that “Future is better than past and the young are better than the old”.
　　 In 1902, Lu Xun graduated with excellent marks and with a government scholarship, he went to Tokyo to attend the Kobun Gakuin to study Japanese. Later, he attended Sendai Medical School to study medicine. Lu Xun was deeply influenced by the bourgeois democratic revolution and took an active part in the anti-Qing Dynasty revolution. After school, Lu Xun often went to the assembly halls, the bookstores, the meetings and the lectures and swore his oath of “loving and respecting China with my blood”.
　　 In 1906, due to an incident, Lu Xun felt the stupidity and weakness of his fellow Chinese and realized the importance of changing the nature of Chinese people. This is when he decided to abandon medical studies and pursue literature. It was a decisive step in his life when he chose literature and art, using a pen as a weapon to save the country and the people. He participated in establishing a literary journal called Xinsheng (with the Dante-inspirited Italian title La Vita Nuova ) and wrote some important early essays, such as The History of Man , The Lesson of the History of Science , On the Aberrant Development of Culture , and On the Power of Mara Poetry. He thought that the serious problems of China rested with people, not with substance; rested with the personality, not with the mass. In order to build up the nation, we should educate the people first and the key to educating people is the arousal of personality and the stimulation of spirit.
　　 Befor e the first civil revolution against feudalism in China in 1911, Lu Xun came back to China . His first position was in Hangzhou , teaching chemistry and physiology at Zhejiang Normal College . Later, he went back to his hometown—Shaoxing, and assumed the office of supervisor and the Natural Science teacher in Shaoxing Middle School as well as dean (president) of Shaoxing Normal College. He taught students and at the same time he actively participated in the first civil revolution against feudalism in China . He led the literature organization—“Yue Society” in his hometown and supported the establishment of Yueduo Daily .
　　 At the beginning of 1912, Lu Xun was given a post by Cai Yuanpei, the head of the new Ministry of Education, and went to Nanjing to work for the Ministry of Education. After a short time, the Ministry of Education was moved to Beijing and he became the chief for the first section of the Social Education Department. He was also successively employed by some key schools such as Peking University , Peking Advanced Normal School , and Peking Female Advanced Normal School as a part-time lecturer.
　　 After the success of the 1917 Russian October Revolution, Lu Xun was highly inspired and together with many advanced intellects of that time, such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, he wrote essays and established journals which marked the beginning of the Chinese new culture movement. He was in the front lines of the anti- imperial and anti-feudal struggle actively advocating new culture, new ideas, new morals and severely criticizing the old culture, old ideas, and old morals which had existed for thousands of years in China . In 1918, he published the novel Diary of a Madman , which is the first vernacular novel in the history of modern Chinese literature. The novel adopted the symbolistic way to reveal the ferocious nature of the Chinese feudal society which had lasted for thousands of years and criticized the evils of feudal etiquette and the feudal patriarchal clan system. After that, Lu Xun never stopped writing and created many novels, scribbles, essays, and commentaries such as Kong Yiji, Medicine, True Story of Ah Q and so on. Thus he became the pioneer of the May 4th new culture movement and the founder of Modern Chinese Literature.
　　 In the summer of 1926, Lu Xun left Beijing , where the Northern Warlords were entrenched and headed for Xiamen to be a professor in the Chinese Literature and Chinese Department of Xiamen University . At the beginning of 1927, Lu Xun left for Guangzhou , the revolution center of that time, to be the dean of the Chinese Department in Sun Yat-sen University and the dean of the Teaching Affairs Office. While teaching and writing, he devoted himself to the new struggle. In April of 1927, the counterrevolutionary coup took place and Lu Xun experienced much tribulation. He resigned in anger after failing to rescue students. Due to the bloody lesson, Lu Xun's outlook on social development, which was formed in his early years, changed greatly. After seriously analyzing and reflecting upon his ideas, he corrected the past mistake of only believing in evolutionism, and thus the development of his ideas came to a new starting point.
　　 In October 1927, Lu Xun moved to Shanghai . He concentrated his energy on revolutionary literary and artistic movements. He took part in and led many revolutionary societies such as the League of Left-wing Writers, the China Freedom League and the Chinese Alliance for the Protection of Civil Rights. He was chief editor of many journals including the Outpost, Torrent, Meng Ya Monthly and so on . He united and led many revolutionary, progressive literary and artistic workers to fight against imperialism, feudalism, and the Kuomintang government and its writers measure for measure. With tenacity, he stuck to the struggle and wrote hundreds of essays, which made great contributions and were like daggers and guns in the anti-culture encirclement and suppression. He kept in close contact with party members of the CPC and firmly supported the National United Front of Resistance against Japan proposed by the CPC. He compared himself to “fire stealer,” committing himself to the Sino-foreign culture exchange and advocated the burgeoning woodcarving movement. He was concerned about young people, cultivated them, and dedicated much to the growth of young writers. Lu Xun died in Dalu Xincun flat in Shanghai on October 19, 1936 .
　　 Lu Xun once wrote a poem named self-mockery . The two famous sentences,
　　　　“ Serve the people with strong will and diligence,　
　　　　ignoring the overwhelming challenge of irrational reproaches"　
are a true portrayal of his life. During his lifetime, Lu Xun wrote and translated more than 8 million characters. Many of his works such as Outcry, Hesitation, Wild Grass, Morning Blossoms and Plucked at Dusk are reprinted again and again and have been translated into many languages which include English, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Esperanto and so on. The Complete Works of Lu Xun is a precious gift that he left to Chinese people and people all over the world.