Lao She was perhaps the best-known writer in China behind Lin Yutang, and he captured the spirit of the age of revolution and of change in China. His novel Rickshaw is his most enduring legacy, and yet it would also become an annoyance to the angry students of the Cultural Revolution and would lead to attacks on Lao She, both verbal and physical, in the 1960s. Translator Jean M. James says of Lao that he was, like Charles Dickens, a social novelist and a chronicler of Peking as Dickens was of London:
The terrible life of the poor depicted in Rickshaw is hard to believe, but sociological studies conducted in Peking in the twenties describe the same conditions and worse (James vii).
An examination of the novel and the culture that produced it shows how Lao She developed his social commentary and some of the consequences this had for his society and for himself.
Lao She was the pseudonym of Shu Qingchun, born in 1899 and died in 1966, either murdered or driven to suicide by the Red Guard in his native Peking. He was born into an impoverished Manchu family and taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for five years, beginning in 1924. He was greatly influenced by Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad, and he set out on his writing career while still in England. He would become one of China's favorite writers. His novel Rickshaw was published in 1938 and traces the degradation and ruin of a Peking rickshaw puller. the novel came to be seen as a general study of China's social misery (Martin 267).
The rickshaw puller of this story is a representative of a class phenomenon in China, and it can be seen as a political reaction to the structure of Chinese society beginning in the 1920s. David Strand notes that there was political decadence at the center in Peking (Beijing) and it provoked a compensatory community activism representing new forces rising amidst the decay and decline of society. Observ...