Lao She was a writer whose life span covered all stages of modern China: the Qing dynasty, the Republic and the Communists.

Born during the end of the Qing dynasty, Lao She was from the Manchu Sumuru clan and experienced the Boxer Rebellion first hand as well as the atrocities committed by the Eight-Nation Alliance, a scarring experience for him.

[2][3] Lao She was born Shu Qingchun (舒慶春) on 3 February 1899 in Beijing, to a poor Manchu family of the Šumuru clan belonging to the Plain Red Banner.

His father, who was a guard soldier, died in a street battle with the Eight-Nation Alliance Forces in the course of the Boxer Rebellion events in 1901.

[5] Between 1918 and 1924, Lao She was involved as administrator and faculty member at a number of primary and secondary schools in Beijing and Tianjin.

[6] During his time in London, he absorbed a great deal of English literature (especially Dickens, whom he adored) and began his own writing.

Lao She was a major popularizer of humor in China, especially through his novels, his short stories and essays for journals like Lin Yutang's "The Analects Fortnightly" (論語半月刊, Lunyu Banyuekan, est.

The purpose of this organization was to unite cultural workers against the Japanese, and Lao She was a respected novelist who had remained neutral during the ideological discussions between various literary groups in the preceding years.

In March 1946, Lao She travelled to the United States on a two-year cultural grant sponsored by the State Department, lecturing and overseeing the translation of several of his novels, including The Yellow Storm (1951) and his last novel, The Drum Singers (1952; its Chinese version was not published until 1980).

Half a month after the marriage, Lao She brought his wife to Jinan and continued to teach at the university, while Hu Jieqing taught in a middle school.

Condemned as a counterrevolutionary, he was paraded and struggled by the Red Guards through the streets and beaten publicly at the door steps of the Temple of Confucius in Beijing.

According to the official record, this abuse left Lao She greatly humiliated both mentally and physically, and he committed suicide by drowning himself in Beijing's Taiping Lake on 24 August 1966.

[12] His second novel, Zhao Ziyue (1927) is set in the same Beijing milieu, but tells the story of a 26-year-old college student's quest for the trappings of fame in a corrupt bureaucracy.

He also wrote Crescent Moon (Chinese: 月牙儿; pinyin: Yuè Yár), written in the early stage of his creative life.

[14] From "Mr. Ma and Son", Lao She pointed the stereotype included appearances and spirits and he hoped to get rid of these dirty impressions.

[15] Cat Country is a satirical fable, sometimes seen as a Chinese science fiction novel, published in 1932 as a thinly veiled observation on China.

Lao She wrote Cat Country in direct response to Japan's invasion of China (Manchuria in 1931 and Shanghai in 1932).

It describes the tragic life of a rickshaw-puller in Beijing of the 1920s, and revealed the tragedy of lower classes at that time through the narration of the rickshaw boy's story.

Xiangzi is a stereotype of a social phenomenon: a peasant coming to the city and then turning to an urban tramp, experiencing spiritual crises of all kinds.

As the All-China League of Resistance Writers leader, he found he needed to abandon the use of classical Chinese for a more accessible modern style.

Some of Lao She's plays have also been staged in the recent past, including Beneath the Red Banner in 2000 in Shanghai, and Dragon's Beard Ditch in 2009 in Beijing as part of the celebration of the writer's 110th birthday.

The People's Republic of China expelled all foreign missionaries in 1950, and in 1954 forced the Protestant churches to merge into a single body, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of Protestant Churches in China, and break ties with foreign money, influence, and leadership.

Critics charged that the movement was actually designed to train leaders in patriotism and to facilitate communication between the government and the Christian community.

On a more positive note, it has helped foster the sense that the contemporary Chinese Protestant church is an indigenous body and no longer a branch of a foreign institution.