Western Theory and Chinese Reality

Lu Xun, fiction writer, essayist, and foremost iconoclast in modern Chinese history, whose observations of the Chinese national character strike us today as no less shrewd and insightful than they were half a century ago, once caricatured the Chinese resistance to anything "foreign." The Chinese, he wrote in 1934, developed a strong enmity against what they called an ostentatious foreign air [yang qi]-that is, things or attitudes that seemed un-Chinese and therefore were to be shunned by all Chinese patriots: