Zhou Zuoren: The Brother Who Chose the Occupier
He co-translated stories with his older brother in Tokyo as young men, helped found the vernacular essay as a serious modern Chinese literary form, and then, three decades later, took a government post from the Japanese puppet regime occupying his own country — a decision that got him imprisoned as a traitor by the Nationalists, then placed under house arrest for seventeen years by the Communists, and finally beaten to death in all but name by Red Guards who drove him to suicide. Zhou Zuoren's brother is one of modern China's most sanctified writers. Zhou Zuoren himself remains one of its most unresolved.
A Brother's Shadow, and His Own Path
He was born on January 16, 1885, in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, the second of three sons of Zhou Boyi and Lu Rui — the middle brother of Zhou Shuren, who would take the pen name Lu Xun and become the most revered writer in twentieth-century Chinese letters. Zhou Zuoren first trained at the Jiangnan Naval Academy, then followed his brother to Japan around 1906, where the two collaborated on translating foreign short fiction into Chinese as *Overseas Collected Stories* — an early sign that Zhou's gift, unlike his brother's, would run toward transmission and translation as much as original invention. In Japan he studied Ancient Greek with the specific goal of eventually translating biblical and classical texts, attended philology lectures at Rikkyo University while officially enrolled in civil engineering, and married a Japanese woman, Habuto Nobuko — a marriage that would later be floated, without confirmation, as a factor in the rupture with his brother.
He returned to China in 1911 and by 1917 was teaching Greek and Roman literary history and European literature at Peking University, where he founded and chaired the Department of Eastern Languages and Literature. As a leading figure of the May Fourth Movement and New Culture Movement, he published the 1918 essay "Human Literature" in *La Jeunesse*, arguing that any custom or convention running against human instinct and nature should be rejected or corrected — a humanist manifesto that helped define the movement's literary ambitions. Through the 1920s and 1930s he became, by most accounts, one of the most influential prose stylists of Republican China, essentially establishing the personal essay (*xiaopinwen*) as a serious vernacular literary genre in its own right, distinct from both classical forms and his brother's more polemical fiction.
The Silence Between Brothers
In 1923 the two brothers had a rupture so complete that they never spoke again. Neither man's diary explains it directly — tellingly, the pages of Lu Xun's diary from the year leading up to the break are missing entirely — and scholars have never settled on a cause beyond informed speculation. Zhou did not attend his brother's funeral in 1936, an absence that, given Lu Xun's stature by then, would have been impossible to read as anything but deliberate.
Alongside his own essays, Zhou built one of the era's most substantial bodies of literary translation, rendering Sappho, Euripides, and Lucian from Greek, and Japanese classics including the *Kojiki* and the work of Sei Shōnagon and Shikitei Sanba into Chinese. He came to regard his late-life translation of Lucian's *Dialogues* as his single greatest achievement. Beyond translation he wrote on mythology, folklore, and what he called *ertongxue*, the study of child development, and compiled collections of Chinese humor and satire, including *Jokes from the Bitter Tea Studio*.
Collaboration
The defining, and most damning, chapter of Zhou's life began after Japan occupied northern China. Rather than flee south with much of the intellectual establishment, Zhou stayed in Beijing and, beginning in 1939, accepted positions under the Japanese-backed government of Wang Jingwei — serving as Peking University's library curator, later as dean, and eventually as an education inspector, and briefly even as chancellor of the occupied university. Some Japanese officials at the time reportedly counted him among the very few modern Chinese figures who "truly understood Japan," a description that reads very differently depending on whether it is taken as cultural insight or collaborationist convenience.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Nationalist government arrested Zhou for treason over his role in the occupation administration, and in 1947 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released on bail in January 1949, just months before the Nationalist government itself collapsed on the mainland.
Seventeen Years Under Watch
The People's Republic that replaced it did not rehabilitate him. Mao Zedong personally labeled Zhou a "cultural traitor" and judged that house arrest was the appropriate punishment — reasoning, according to accounts of the period, that Zhou had not personally killed anyone and so did not merit execution or formal imprisonment. For roughly seventeen years Zhou lived under state confinement in Beijing, continuing to translate Japanese and classical Greek literature, writing memoirs, and quietly assisting scholars researching the legacy of the brother who had cut him off decades earlier. During the brief political opening of the Hundred Flowers Campaign he regained limited permission to publish.
The Cultural Revolution ended even that limited tolerance. The People's Literature Publishing House stopped paying him royalties, his sole remaining income, and Red Guards subjected him to physical abuse as part of the broader campaign against pre-revolutionary intellectuals. Zhou Zuoren died by suicide on May 6, 1967, at eighty-two, still formally under house arrest.
Why Zhou Zuoren Is Called a Genius
The case for Zhou's genius rests almost entirely on the essay form itself: contemporaries and later scholars credit him with establishing the personal, discursive Chinese prose essay as a vehicle for serious literary and philosophical thought, a genre distinct from his brother's fiction and one that shaped how an entire generation of Chinese writers approached nonfiction prose. His command of classical Greek, Japanese, and English literature, and a body of translation spanning Sappho to the *Kojiki*, gave modern Chinese readers direct access to texts that had previously reached them, if at all, through secondary retellings — genuine scholarly and literary labor sustained even through years of house arrest.
The honest complication cannot be separated from that record: Zhou accepted real administrative power from an occupying government during a war that killed millions of his countrymen, and no assessment of his literary talent in contemporary China, or outside it, proceeds without confronting that fact first. Mao's own verdict — cultural traitor, deserving confinement rather than death — has effectively set the terms of his reputation ever since: a writer whose prose is still studied, but whose politics are never set aside to do it.
Legacy
Scholarly interest in Zhou Zuoren revived substantially from the early 1980s onward, and most of his essays and translations have since been reprinted and anthologized in China, read now as major literature by a country willing, decades later, to separate the prose from the politics more than his own era ever could. He remains the permanent counterexample in modern Chinese letters to his brother's uncomplicated sainthood — proof that talent and betrayal can share a household, and a bloodline, without canceling each other out.
