Lu Xun is easily the most recognizable face of 20th century Chinese literature. The image of Lu as a 50-ish, scruffy-haired, square-jawed and imbued man with a steely gaze has endured for 100 years. The role he played in public life has often taken precedence over his writing, feeding into his iconic aura.

He snipped off his queue (the braid Chinese men wore as a token of deference to Manchu rule from 1644-1911) as a young language student in Tokyo. He openly defied his boss, the minister of education, when several of his students were killed by the warlord government at a peaceful demonstration in Beijing in 1926.

Lu’s actions were a public example of extraordinary courage and moral rectitude.

He was feisty, a somewhat controversial lover who walked out of his marriage to be with a woman 16 years his junior, a firm believer in the politics of the Left, who fought relentlessly with orthodox members of the Communist Party of China, and a totally dedicated writer, driven by a restless moral anxiety about the country’s present state and its future.

But that was then. China had been ravaged by 150 years of foreign aggression since the Opium War (1839-1842) and riddled with internal strife. There was no decent literature to connect people, let alone inspire them to work toward building a national identity.

The scene was set for the arrival of a Lu. He threw away his surgeon’s scalpel and returned from medical school in Japan to respond to that call.

The rather dramatic turnaround came about after he saw an image from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), of a Chinese man, a suspected Russian spy, being beheaded by Japanese soldiers as a crowd of Chinese stood by, watching passively.

Even 100 years after his death, he is a role model for aspiring writers. Earlier this year, when asked if she shared similar moral concerns as Lu about the nation’s future, 20-something best-selling author Zhang Yueran said she was engaged with different themes.

Not so, says the writer Li Er, whose unsparing, often jarring descriptions of the macabre and predilection for fantasy are reminiscent of Lu’s style. Li said he imagines Lu’s diction when he writes.

Li sees Lu as a repository of pain. “He was the most pained person in modern China”.

Dogged as he was by “pain, depression and nihilism”, Lu “never gave up hope”, Li hastens to add. “This is what is worth emulating today.”

Lu’s skepticism, says Canaan Morse, a prolific translator and a publishing consultant with Paper Republic, might be a useful tool for writers, especially now.

“Lu was a thoroughgoing skeptic, which is one reason why his insight was so penetrating and his literary acumen so sharp,” he says. “Nothing was sacred and no one was spared. That he also had the guts to put his insights into print was commendable.”

A lot of that cynicism was, in fact, directed at himself. As Julia Lovell points out in her succinct introduction to The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics), Lu “draws himself and his audience into the crowd of numb spectators”, who seem to be in passive collusion with the ineffectual government that might be held responsible for people’s suffering.

“Reading Lu is actually a way of interrogating ourselves,” says Sun Yu, former director of Beijing Lu Xun Museum and dean of College of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China.

Lu gained a wider reach with an English-speaking audience after the Penguin translation of his works came out in 2009.

“I’ve received letters from English professors, who have added Lu to their canon of great 20th-century writers of short fiction,” says Lovell, the translator.

Chinese youth often connect with Lu at a different level. Young people often end up naming each other after the archetypal characters in Lu’s fiction — Ah Q, the bumbling and mischievous village idiot, Xianglin, the whining, long-suffering, exploited housemaid, Kong Yiji, a hard-drinking wastrel and a thief, forever waiting to pass his imperial examination.

“My mother used to call me ‘Aunt Xianglin’, mocking me for repeating words and talking too much,” says Dai Anmei, a second-year student at a senior high school in Chengdu, Sichuan province. “I always wanted to know who Xianglin was.”

When she did discover her in the story New Year’s Sacrifice, it wasn’t a particularly happy experience. Following the listless death of the poor woman, a victim of ruthless social apathy, was anything but pleasant.

“I feel lucky to be born and brought up in a new time. Chinese society has become more open and developed. We’re way better than in the past,” Dai says. “Lu Xun’s works make us aware of the value of the life we have, and teach us to respect the progress this country has made.”

Her classmate, Li Wei, agrees that Lu offers an invaluable key to decode China’s history. “By exposing darkness in the society of the past and the ignorance of people at that time, Lu guides us as to what we might keep and what ought to be abandoned.”

Li Shi, who has been teaching Lu at the school for 26 years, has tried adapting new-age teaching methods, moving in sync with the times.

“I played a movie based on New Year’s Sacrifice to complement the teaching. While previously students would giggle and get taken up with irrelevant details, they showed a strong emotional involvement while watching this movie. They understood the struggle of the hapless woman Xianglin and were fully engaged by the story.”

It’s a gift they are learning to appreciate early on.