LAS HUELLAS DE UN GRAN RECORRIDO CONCLUSIONES

the queue that had been for the past two hundred years, attached to the back of the head of every Chinese male. (It is interesting to note in passing that some

scholars, such as Hou Wai-lu, argued otherwise. Hou suggested that the letter Q stood for ‘Question’. 13 Therefore, the whole story of Ah-Q should be regarded as "a big question" posed by Lu Hsiin in the latter’s attempt to draw his fellow Chinese attention to such a question.) At any rate, the problem of the queue was for Lu Hsiin just as great as for Chang, despite their different conceptions of it.

With the benefit of hindsight, Lu Hsiin was in a better position than his teacher to realize that the mere recovery of the political soveignty of the Han Chinese did not solve the problem. After the overthrow of the Manchu regime, the queue could be quickly cut off once and for all and cease to be a visible entity, but it was the invisible queue that was the most troublesome. Ghost or a shadow, it would continue to haunt every Chinese mind unless genuine reforms were effected.

In the eyes of Lu Hsiin, the 1911 Revolution in which Chang had played a prominent role was at best a premature occurrence, if not a complete failure. If what it had achieved was the mere removal of the queue, this was no more than a cosmetic change. The fundamental problem, as was clear from the post-

Revolutionary situation, had not changed. He became aware that the root of China’s illness lay far deeper and further back in her tradition than the recent corrupt Manchu regime had exposed. For him, the queue was no longer a symbol of the struggle against Manchus and foreign imperialists, as Chang Ping-lin saw it. Rather, it was a symbol of the struggle between the old and the new, between tradition and modernity - a struggle in which the whole Confucian tradition, like the queue, needed to be sheared off.

In this sense, Lu Hsiin surpassed his teacher by progressing from anti-

13. See Hou Wai-lu, "Ah-Q ti nien-tai wen-ti" (In What Times Does Ah-Q Live ?), in Chung- Su wen-hua (Sino-Russian Culture), Chongqing, 1941, vol.9; issue number and page number not clear. I am grateful to Hou’s daughter, Ms Hou Ch’ung-ch’u, for sending me a hand-written copy of this article.

Manchu nationalism to a new critique of China’s cultural past. This difference in their approach can also be discerned in their response toward the notorious execution of Hsu Hsi-lin, another of their well-known provincials. After his capture in an abortive military coup in Anhui province, it was reported at the time that government soldiers had tom out his liver, following his execution, and fried it for food. Chang’s reacted to the report with a condemnation of this Manchu outrage, whereas Lu Hsiin, the writer, wove it into a vivid image of the

cannibalistic nature of the whole Confucian tradition - the basic theme of his "Diary of a Madman", a theme he had picked up and developed from Chang’s exposition of Tai Cheng’s thesis, that neo-Confucianism strangles the nature of man.

Medicine

Lu Hsiin’s critique of the 1911 Revolution was similarly revealed in his short story "Medicine", which describes the naive medical notion, practised by the masses, of eating a bun soaked in human blood as a cure for tuberculosis. The patient in the story was the sick child of Hua ta-ma, while the blood was taken from an executed convict named Hsia Yii. The choice of names by Lu Hsiin (who was, after all, something of a philologist, thanks to his teacher Chang Ping-lin) is significant here: the two surnames Hua and Hsia, are traditionally understood as alternative designations for China or the Han Chinese. ‘Hua ta-ma’ means literally Nanny Hua, or Grandma China. 14

Lu Hsiin’s nomenclature was intended to be sufficiently pointed for

14. Yet another meaning of hsia is ‘summer’. As the name of the convict in the story, this is an oblique reference to the revolutionist Ch’iu Jing (the noun chiu meaning ‘autumn’). Ch’iu Jing, also from Chekiang province, was a close associate of Hsu Hsi-lin, put to death as mentioned above for assassinating a provincial governor. Ch’iu (one of the earliest female activists in modem China) was subsequently executed for her involvement and died a martyr. It is said that the only request she made was that she not be stripped naked while on public parade before her execution. On more than one occasion Chang Ping-lin paid tribute to her extraordinary courage. Lu Hsiin was inevitably involved emotionally in the incident since the plot by Ch’iu Jin and her fellow-conspirators against the government was hatched in and operated from his home town, Shao-hsing.

nobody to miss the symbolism of his story. His message behind the chilling scenario was therefore doubly clear: if even blood (the sacrifice of the

Revolution) failed to cure Grandma China’s sick child, better remedies must be sought elsewhere, but not from indigineous sources, either traditional or

contemporary.

To take the problem of medicine metaphorically, Lu Hsiin’s rejection of tradition was largely a result of his diagnosis of the social ailment of the time. His own distrust of traditional medicine was mainly derived from the personal

experience he had had in the early days. Many of his writings recalled how he was fooled by the herbal medicine practitioners who failed to save the life of his own father. Such medicine, he concluded, was not only impotent, but based on superstition and even murderous. It was this bitter experience that subsequently led him to study Western medicine in Japan, and left him with a distrust of traditional Chinese medical practice for the rest of his life. One of the reasons underlying his respect for Sun Yat-sen in fact, was Sun’s refusal to resort to herbal medicines even on his death-bed. 15 Given that a dying man will normally try anything, Sun’s refusal was, to Lu Hsiin, all the more indicative that he was a rational man who believed only in science. Scientific rationality, as we shall see, would become the sort of virtue that Lu Hsiin embraced in his campaign against the obscurantism inherent in classical learning.

In contrast to Lu Hsiin’s disillusionment and distrust, Chang Ping-lin never lost confidence in Chinese medicine. His interest in the Chinese medical art was mainly due to his family legacy, both his father and grandfather having been amateur doctors. His sporadic reading of certain Western works on biology, genetics and anatomy most likely also enhanced his medical knowledge. Despite the lack of any formal training, he seems to have been able to diagnose and

15. Incidentally, one such prescription presented to Sun at the time was from the amateur