Zhou Zuoren

Zhou Zuoren (16 January 1885 – 6 May 1967) was a Chinese writer, primarily known as an essayist and a translator. He was the younger brother of Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren, 周树人), the second of three brothers.

Early life
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 as well as the New Culture Movement. He was an advocate of literary reform. 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."

Later life
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Zhou is seen as a collaborator with the Japanese occupation, and has been regarded by some Japanese as one of the three Chinese in modern times who "truly understands Japan". 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, shortly before the liberation, the Nationalist Party Government with the temporary President Li Zongren decided to release some people under detention. As one of them, Zhou Zuoren was released on bail and went back to Beijing.

In the next 17 years, Zhou continued to translate classical Japanese traditional and classical Greek literature. However, during the Cultural Revolution, the People's Literature Publishing House no longer paid royalty to Zhou Zuoren, which used to be his sole source of income. On May 6, 1967, Zhou Zuoren died of a sudden relapse of the illness. During the first decades of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Zuoren's writings were not widely available to readers due to his alleged treason. Only during the relatively liberal 1980s did his works become available again. 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. During the May Fourth era, he continued commitment to what he called “individualist humanism”, but eventually abandoned this ideology after witnessing increasingly violent tendencies that were out of the idealism of the May Fourth movement. As he wrote in 1926, “class struggle was not a Marxist invention but true as the Darwinian idea of competition for survival”. 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.” However, after the war, his profuse textual language and artistic attitude were also seen to align with the spirit of Daoism thoughts. 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”.