Zhou Zuoren

Early life Zhou was a younger brother of Lu Xun. Born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, Zhou Zuoren was educated at the Jiangnan Naval Academy as a teenager before moving to Japan in 1906, following his brother's footsteps. During his stint in Japan, he began studying Ancient Greek, with the aim of translating the Gospels into Classical Chinese, and attended lectures on Chinese philology by scholar-revolutionary Zhang Binglin at Rikkyo University, although he was supposed to study civil engineering there. He returned to China in 1911, with his Japanese wife, and began to teach in different institutions. During the May Fourth Movement Writing essays in vernacular Chinese for the magazine La Jeunesse, Zhou was a figure in the May Fourth Movement. He was also a leading figure of the New Culture Movement. In 1918, Zhou Zuoren, then a literature professor at Peking University, published an article titled "Human Literature", insisting on mutual understanding and sympathy between each other, and required a "recognition of the existence of the same kind". In the article, he attacked specifically such thematics in literature as children sacrificing themselves for the sake of their parents and wives being buried alive to accompany dead husbands. Meanwhile, Zhou made a distinction between "democratic" and "popular" literature by identifying the former as literature that studies human life rather than written for the common people to read. Zhou condemned elite traditional performances like the Beijing opera. He called it "disgusting," "nauseating," "pretentious" and referred to the singing as "a weird inhuman sound." In 1923, Zhou and his brother Lu Xun became estranged and never spoke to each other again. In 1945, Zhou was arrested for treason by the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, stemming from his alleged collaboration with the Wang Jingwei government during the Japanese occupation of north China. He was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 1947. In January 1949, the Nationalist government under acting president Li Zongren released Zhou Zuoren on bail, and he returned to Beijing. The People's Republic of China retained Zhou on house arrest, with Mao Zedong describing him as a "cultural traitor" for whom house arrest was appropriate because he had not killed anyone. Over the next 17 years, Zhou continued to translate Japanese and classical Greek literature into Chinese. While on house arrest throughout the rest of his life, Zhou also worked on his memoirs and provided scholars studying his deceased brother Lu Xun's writing with materials and research assistance. During the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Zhou published some of his own work again. During the Cultural Revolution, the People's Literature Publishing House stopped paying Zhou his royalties, which were his sole source of income. Zhou was also physically abused by ultra-leftists during the Cultural Revolution. In 1967, Zhou killed himself. In the early 1980s, literary interest in Zhou's works re-developed in China and overseas. In contemporary China, he is often regarded as a major literary figure and most of his works have been reprinted and anthologized. The Chinese scholar Qian Liqun (錢理群) in 2001 published an extensive biography of Zhou Zuoren entitled "Biography of Zhou Zuoren" (周作人传). == Literature Interests ==

He called his studies "miscellanies" and penned an essay titled "My Miscellaneous Studies" (我的雜學). In Tokyo, Zhou developed interests in mythology, anthropology, and what he called ertongxue (兒童學; the study of children development). He later became a translator, producing translations of classical Greek and classical Japanese literatures, including a collection of Greek mimes, Sappho's lyrics, Euripides' tragedies, Kojiki, Shikitei Sanba's Ukiyoburo, Sei Shōnagon's Makura no Sōshi and a collection of Kyogen. He considered his translation of Lucian's Dialogues, which he finished late in his life, as his greatest literary achievement. He was also translated (from English) the story Ali Baba into Chinese (known as Xianü Nu 俠女奴). During the 1930s he was also a regular contributor to Lin Yutang's humor magazine The Analects Fortnightly and wrote extensively about China's traditions of humor, satire, parody, and joking, even compiling a collection of Jokes from the Bitter Tea Studio (''Kucha'an xiaohua ji''). He became chancellor of Beijing University in 1939. == Philosophical Stance ==

In his early work, Zhou Zuoren denied the legitimacy of violence as a force for modernizing China, but rather sought social change and intellectual engagement through nonviolence. Before the 1920s, his literary and philosophical views agreed with the essential aspects of Romanticism, which impulses set him apart from other major literary and intellectual figures as his motives in participating in the New Culture Movement had much less or little to do with any apocalyptic vision or transcendental aspiration. After the May Fourth Movement, Zhou sought to retreat from the nation-building project into individual and ordinary life. Between 1940 and 1943, Zhou used Confucianism as a guise to argue that the Chinese never had any "thought problem," as the Japanese so claimed. By comparing the Confucianism development in China to a tree, he asserted that "the tree can grow up again if there was no outside interference through either restraint or artificial cultivation." In 1944, he explained: "According to my own observations and experience, I have an opinion that is incompatible with the time, which is my two not-to-be-isms. First, I don't want to be a follower; second, I don't want to be a leader. Although I labeled myself a Confucian, this attitude actually belongs to Daoism. However, since I cannot retreat fully, I still have no way to avoid conflicts". ==References==