From a Purely Literary Standpoint, Ten Thousand Zhou Shurens Cannot Compare to One Zhou Zuoren.

From a purely literary standpoint, ten thousand Zhou Shurens cannot compare to one Zhou Zuoren. This will undoubtedly enrage many people, but truth has never cared about people's feelings.

Zhou Shuren (Lu Xun) was a great thinker and fighter, but as a pure literary figure, his brother Zhou Zuoren surpassed him by far. Zhou Zuoren's prose has an elegance, a refined ease, a subtle flavor that Lu Xun's combative writing could never achieve. Lu Xun wrote with a dagger; Zhou Zuoren wrote with a paintbrush.

Of course, Zhou Zuoren's political record is shameful -- his collaboration with the Japanese occupiers is an indelible stain. But we are discussing literature here, not politics. If we judged literature solely by political record, then most of world literature would need to be thrown away.

The tragedy of Chinese culture is precisely this inability to separate literature from politics. A man's political shame does not negate his literary achievements, just as a man's political glory does not automatically confer literary talent. This is the most basic common sense, yet it is precisely what Chinese people find hardest to accept.