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Although Charles Darwin never visited China, his ideas landed there with force. Darwinism was the first great Western theory to make an impact on the Chinese and, from 1895 until at least 1921, when Marxism gained a formal foothold, it was the dominant Western'ism'influencing Chinese politics and thought. The authority of Darwin, sometimes misiniterpreted, influenced reformers and revolutionaries and paved the way for Chinese Marxism and the thought of Mao Tse-tung. This study evaluates Darwin's theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. James Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino-Japanese War and the Republician Revolution. The story of Darwinism in China involves, among others, the most famous figures of modern Chinese intellectual history.

Lu Xun (1881-1936), China's greatest modern writer, remains important today both as an official icon and a patron saint of dissent. This book deals with Lu Xun's struggle to make sense of the'Darwinian Revolution.'It illuminates not only Lu Xun's thought, but also the current crisis in Chinese thought caused by the loss of faith in Marxism.This book studies one of the most important figures in modern Chinese intellectual history, China's greatest modern writer, Lu Xun (1881-1936). His trenchant criticisms of the China of his day still speak directly to what can be called, without hyperbole, the current crisis in philosophical and political thought in the People's Republic. It is also a study of a non-Western intellectual's struggle--in a time of crisis--to make practical sense of the'Darwinian Revolution,'a revolution not limited to the West.Although Lu Xun died more than sixty years ago, his work is still alive in China (more so than any American writer of the 1920s and 1930s is in the United States). He is viewed paradoxically as both an official icon and as a patron saint of dissent. This book is, therefore, about Lu Xun both in his lifetime and in his second lifetime--and it looks to his third. But it is not just about Lu Xun. It is about Lu Xun and evolution. As a philosophical critique of Lu Xun's thought, it looks to Lu Xun's struggle to make practical sense of evolution, a contradiction that forces'either/or'questions on the Chinese, and on us all.James Reeve Pusey is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Bucknell University. His previous work includes China and Charles Darwin and Wu Han: Attacking the Present Through the Past.