3 The “Crime” of Lu Xun, Anti-Enlightenment, and Chinese Modernity: A Critique of Liu Xiaofeng’s “Christian Theology”

Abstract

This chapter examines Liu Xiaofeng's study of Lu Xun. His condemnation of Lu Xun grew stronger from the first publication of Deliverance and Dalliance in 1988 to the revised edition of 2001. As Liu sees it, Lu Xun's greatness lay in cold, awake eyes that only proved his Western dalliance; furthermore, the fact that Lu Xun became a fellow traveler of Western modern nihilism was the result of his own reevocation of the arrogant aloofness, wildness, and absurdness of the Wei and Jin culture, and the heartlessness of Cao Xueqin's stone. In Liu Xiaofeng's view, Christianity is greater than enlightenment humanism, because the fire of enlightenment that Lu Xun stole from the West is unable to solve the problem of human nihilism. The Great Cultural Revolution was a social movement of modernization; it was a concentrated and extreme expression of the issue of modernity in China. Keywords: Chinese Modernity; Christian theology; Christianity; Eschatology; human nihilism; liberalism; Lu Xun