Lu Town: Theme Parks and the Commodification of Literary Culture in China

Abstract

This essay investigates Lu Town, a theme park dedicated to the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) that was established in Shaoxing, China, in 2003. The theme park is a recreation of a fictional town that is an amalgamation of settings from some of Lu Xun’s short stories. The essay seeks to answer the following questions: What happens when the works of a complex and serious writer get popularized in the three-dimensional form of a themed space? Why would one build a theme park around this kind of writer, and how would you capture in a theme park the trenchant critique of rural or small-town social life and traditions in his works? What meanings are invested in this ‘leftist’ writer in a neoliberal ideological climate in which notions of class exploitation and class struggle have all but disappeared? In the process the essay presents a detailed description of the park, based on visits in 2004 and 2018, and an overview of recent changes undertaken to make the park more profitable in the competitive domestic tourist market. The authors argue that Lu Town, driven by commercial concerns, presents a positive, nostalgic representation of small-town Jiangnan life, one that is starkly at odds with the ironic and sardonic attitude Lu Xun often took towards it in his stories.