Biography of Lao Shê

Name: Lao Shê
Birth Date: 1899
Death Date: September, 1966
Place of Birth: Peking, China
Nationality: Chinese
Gender: Male
Occupations: novelist

Lao Shê

Lao Shê (1899-1966) was the pen name of the Chinese novelist Shu Ch'ing-ch'un. The prolific output of this humorist, patriot, and realist also included poetry, several volumes of short stories, and many plays.Of Manchu descent, Lao Shê was born in Peking (now Beijing). His family could not have been well off, since he was never formally enrolled in a college, though for a short period he registered for courses at Yenching University. In 1924, after teaching Chinese for some time at Nankai Middle School in Tientsin, he left for England to teach his native language at London University's School of Oriental Studies.Once abroad, Lao Shê studied English novels primarily to improve his command of the language; Dickens so appealed to him that he wrote a comic novel in imitation of Nicholas Nickleby, entitled Lao Chang ti chê-hsüeh (The Philosophy of Lao Chang). The …showed first 150 words…

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…showed last 150 words…wrote many plays, of inferior merit, about the reformation of Chinese land and people under Communist benevolence. He gave every indication of being a loyal supporter of the Peking government, but his egregious form of flattery, so exaggerated in its denunciation of the state's enemies, may have been a form of oblique satire. In any event, by the summer of 1966, when the cultural revolution began with the massing of Red Guards in Peking, Lao Shê was one of the first writers and intellectuals to meet their fury. He ended his life in September of that year. Further Reading C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957 (1961), gives an excellent account of Lao Shê's career as a novelist. Also worthy of attention is Zbigniew Slupski, "The Work of Lao Shê during the First Phase of His Career (1924-1932)," in Jaroslav Prusek, ed., Studies in Modern Chinese Literature (1964).

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