Lu Xun, ARA Lu Hsun, is considered to be the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th century. He was born September 25, 1881 in Chejiang province, died October 19, 1936, in Shanghai. He studied in to be a doctor, but he decided to become a writer, publishing his first short story, "A Madman's Diary," in 1918. It was inspired by the famous Russian story by Nikolai Gogol but demonstrated two of Lu Xun's trademarks: it was written in a colloquial style with a Western structure, and it was harshly critical of Confucian society. His most famous piece, though, was "The True Story of Ah Q" (1921), which coined the phrase Ah Qism, which refers to the Chinese habit of treating defeat as a moral victory. "Ah Q" also included the barbed wit that marked much of his work. Lu Xun was instrumental in rousing Chinese patriotic sentiment and stirring China out of its defeated apathetic state at the beginning of the century. His writings were required reading well into the Communist era, and remain classics.