Lu Xun

Born Zhou Shuren to a once-prosperous Shaoxing family fallen on hard times, he went to Sendai, Japan, to study medicine, and abandoned it after a lecture-hall slide showed Chinese bystanders watching apathetically as Japanese soldiers executed an accused spy. He decided the nation's sickness was spiritual before it was physical, and turned to writing.

'A Madman's Diary,' the first major story written in vernacular rather than classical Chinese, read Confucian tradition itself as cannibalism and helped launch the May Fourth Movement's assault on the old culture. The Real Story of Ah-Q followed, its self-deluding antihero turning every defeat into 'spiritual victory': an unsparing satire of national character that entered the language.

He spent his later years in Shanghai writing fierce polemical essays and mentoring younger radical writers, and died of tuberculosis in 1936, already claimed as modern China's literary conscience by factions across the political spectrum.