Wu Yu (1872-1949), scholar and poet whose intensely anti-Confucian writings contributed to the revolution in Chinese thought at the time of the May Fourth Movement. He taught at Peking and Szechwan universities.

Little is known about Wu Yü's family background or early life. In his youth he apparently received a traditional education in the Chinese classics. After the death of his mother, Wu married in 1893 and took up residence apart from his father. Part of the time he lived in his own establishment in Chengtu, which he named Ai-chih lu; at other times he resided on part of the family estate situated in a secluded area some 15 miles north of the city. In the years that followed, he devoted himself to supervising the farm tenants and to pursuit of literary and historical studies, becoming particularly interested in poetry and in the philosophy of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. Wu came to know the scholar Liao P'ing (q.v.) and became familiar with the teachings of the celebrated Hunanese scholar Wang K'ai-yün (q.v.), onetime head of the Tsun-ching Academy in Chengtu.

Stimulated by the new ideas that spread throughout China during the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, Wu Yü's attention turned to the world outside of China. Late in 1905 he left Chengtu to study law and political science in Japan. By this time he had grown impatient with certain aspects of Chinese social life, particularly the family system, which were still governed by Confucian ethical sanctions. In 1906, while in Japan, he composed a series of verses entitled Chung-yeh pu-mei o-ch'eng in which he expressed criticism of the traditional Confucian political and social order in China. After he returned to China, Wu Yu continued his studies privately in his native province. Under the influence of such Western authors as Montesquieu, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Edward Jenks, and of the Japanese scholars Endo Ryukichi and Kubo Tenzui, Wu devoted himself to a comparative study of the legal institutions of China and the West. He examined the classical Chinese texts of the books of rites and the law codes of the T'ang and Ch'ing dynasties, as well as the literature available in Chinese dealing with Western constitutions and penal codes. As a result of these comparative studies, he concluded that, in contrast to the liberty and freedom existing in the West, inequality and rule by force had been the principles governing the state and society of China for 2,000 years. In Wu's opinion, the responsibility for the unfortunate conditions in twentieth-century China rested entirely upon Confucius and the Confucians.

Although Western concepts were important in the shaping of Wu Yü's attitudes, those concepts served more to confirm than to inspire his deep opposition to Confucianism. Essentially his thinking remained rooted in Chinese philosophical traditions. To support his anti- Confucian convictions, he relied largely upon the traditional Chinese opponents of the Confucians—Mo Ti, the Legalists Shang Yang and Han Fei-tzu, and particularly the Taoists Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. Wu also sought confirmation for his views in the arguments of later critics of Confucianism, such as the later Han sceptic Wang Ch'ung and the T'ang dynasty critic of historiography Liu Chih-chi. Most important for Wu was the heterodox late Ming scholar Li Chih. During his lifetime, Li Chih had enjoyed fame and popular favor, but toward the end of his life his writings had been banned as "heretical" by the statesupported Confucian orthodoxy. Few of his works survived the literary inquisitions of the eighteenth century. In Li Chih, Wu Yü found a kindred spirit whose arguments could be used to buttress his own anti-Confucian position. Not long before the 1911 revolution, a newspaper in Chengtu published some of Wu's writings in which there appeared quotations from Li Chih. The Ch'ing government ordered Wu's writings banned and ordered his arrest. He escaped arrest by leaving Chengtu and hiding in a nearby rural area.

Late in November 1911. when the government officials in Chengtu threw their support to the republican revolution, Wu Yü returned to the city and again published some of his writings. In his poetry as in his prose, he continued to express anti-Confucian sentiments. In 1911, for example, he published a collection of 96 poems, Hsin-hai tsa-shih, which clearly revealed his antipathy toward orthodox Confucianism. The forces of tradition remained powerful in the remote and relatively isolated province of Szechwan, and the anti-Confucian tone of Wu's writings aroused the antagonism of conservative and influential scholars of the region. In 1913 a periodical which had published some of Wu's works was banned, and for several years thereafter no local newspapers or magazines in Chengtu ventured to print articles disparaging the Confucian doctrines. Although denied publication, Wu persevered privately in elaborating his arguments against the traditions of Confucianism. During the early years of the republic he composed a number of essays attacking Confucianism as the perpetrator of the evils of autocratic government and a fixed class sysem. Among his works of this period was a biography of Li Chih, Li Cho-wu pieh-chuan, which Wu was eventually able to publish in 1916 in the Chin-pu tsa-chih at Shanghai. By drawing public attention to the life of Li Chih, Wu was in part responsible for a revival of interest in this long-forgotten figure. Li Chih's tomb outside the north gate of T'ungchou, east of Peking, was refurbished ; some of his works later were reissued; and he became the subject of a series of scholarly studies in China, Japan, and the West.

In 1916 Wu came upon a series of anti- Confucian articles published by Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) in the Hsin ch'ing-nien [new youth]. These articles had been written in response to the proposals of the Confucian scholar K'ang Yuwei (q.v.) that the republican government adopt Confucianism as the state religion of China. Wu Yü wrote to Ch'en about the writings that he had been unable to publish in Chengtu. In this way Wu became a contributor to the Hsin ch'ing-nien, and his articles appeared in five successive issues of this magazine in March- July 1917. The climax of Wu's attack on Confucianism was reached in November 1919, at the height of the May Fourth Movement, when his essay "Ch'ih-jen yü li-chiao" [cannibalism and the doctrine of ritual propriety] appeared in the Hsin ch'ing-nien.

In 1917, at the invitation of Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei (q.v.), Ch'en Tu-hsiu had become dean of the College of Letters of Peking University. In 1919 Wu Yü also accepted a call to join the university's faculty of literature. He remained there until 1925, when he returned to Chengtu. About 1926, he became a member of the faculty of Chengtu University, one of the three institutions which merged to form National Szechwan University in 1931.

After his return to Chengtu, Wu maintained his uncompromising attitude toward Confucianism. In 1928, in an essay entitled "My Opinions on the Question of Confucian Worship," he accused such intellectuals as Chang Ping-lin and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (qq.v.) of softening their former anti-Confucian views. In 1932 he urged the graduates of National Szechwan University to disregard the Confucian humbug of "virtue" and "righteousness" and to undertake such useful pursuits as enriching the nation, strengthening the country's military power, and protecting the common people. Wu was often a thorn in the flesh of the ultraconservative Confucian scholars who, because of their connections with local military leaders, were able to exert considerable influence upon the educational policies of the universities in Szechwan. In the face of such opposition, Wu retired to a private residence, which he named the I-yin-t'ang, situated in the former Manchu quarter of Chengtu. There, until Wu's death in 1949, a visitor would find the rooms of his small establishment crowded with books arranged in meticulous order; and would see Wu Yü himself, a gaunt figure with white hair and a thin white beard, leaning on a tall bamboo staff, his outward appearance calling to mind the Taoist hermits of old. Inwardly, too, Wu's thinking had been molded by the Taoist philosophy, but his pugnacious opposition to Confucianism indicated that he did not interpret Taoism as a purely passive philosophy. Wu Yu wrote his many essays attacking Confucianism and the traditional moral values in a simple but eloquent style. He held that Confucius and Confucianism should be judged pragmatically by the political and social consequences of the Confucian doctrine, not theoretically by the ethical principles articulated in the Analects. The essence of the Confucian doctrine, according to Wu, lay not in the Analects but in the code of ritual propriety (li), which separated members of society and of the family into two classes; those who ruled and those who obeyed. Confucianism was based upon a system of inequality and lack of freedom, whereby the head of the state and the head of the family possessed absolute authority over those under them. In his essay entitled "Shuo hsiao" Wu was particularly severe in his condemnation of the Confucian virtue of obedience towards the elders: "[The Confucians] teach obedience toward the elders and hence they teach loyalty, too. This means that they instruct people to be humble and meek; to let themselves be led about by the nose by their superiors and to be loath to rebel against those above them. They have converted China into a 'huge factory to manufacture docile people.' This has been the function of the word, obedience toward the elders." Wu Yü inveighed against the past 2,000 years of China's history as an age which, under the influence of Confucius, had been characterized by barbarous cruelty and rule by force. In one passage he compared Confucius with the robber Chih, a famous figure of the Chuang-tzu: "The robber Chih was a menace to only one period; the robber Confucius has been a source of suffering for ten thousand generations." Wu sought to show that the lofty ethical precepts of the Confucian teaching often served merely as a cloak to hide unbridled selfishness: the august majesty of the emperor and the awesome authority invested in his officials afforded excellent opportunities for self-aggrandizement in wealth and power; the reverence for elders, esteemed as the foundation of the traditional family system, allowed the family patriarch to oppress and exploit the younger members of his family; and the general assumption that women were inferiors of men, illustrated in the institution of concubinage, opened the door to concupiscence on the part of the male. Wu Yü's attack upon what he regarded as the falseness of the traditional social system and its moral values reached its peak intensity in his 1919 essay "Ch'ih-jen yü li-chiao." Drawing inspiration from "A Madman's Diary," a famous short story by Lu Hsün (Chou Shu-jen, q.v.), Wu argued that beneath the cloak of Confucian decorum, the upper classes of China had been living off the flesh of the common people. Citing several historical sources, Wu sought to reveal how Confucius's teachings of ritual propriety had led to actual instances of cannibalism among his followers.

Through his writings published in the Hsin ch'ing-nien, Wu Yü helped turn the minds of Chinese students and younger intellectuals against the Confucian traditions, then still held in high esteem by many of China's government leaders and military rulers. Hu Shih (q.v.) compared Wu to the Peking street-cleaners who wet down the dusty streets with water ladled from water-carts, only to have the dust stirred up again when the water dried. To Hu Shih, Wu was the "street-cleaner of the Chinese world of thought," who tried to lay the dust of Confucian refuse with water of enlightenment; for this unrewarding task he was berated by the people of the old school because he failed to appreciate the delectable fragrance of Confucian refuse. Tired and discouraged, Wu Yü wanted to give up his work as hopeless, when suddenly at the other end of the street he saw another group of street-cleaners (Ch'en Tu-hsiu and his followers) performing the same task, and from this he gained fresh courage to continue his work. A collection of Wu Yü's essays was published in 1921 in Shanghai as the Wu Yü wen-lu; in 1936 this collection was republished in Chengtu by Wu himself in a traditional woodblock edition. Also in 1936 he printed a woodblock edition of a small collection of writings, Wu Yü wen pieh-lu. In 1937 a collection of his essays and other writings was published as Wu Yü wzn hsü-lu. Although a great many of his essays were written in pai-hua [the vernacular], Wu's poems were all in the classical style. A collection of his verse, Ch'iu-shui chi, appeared in 1913. In 1893 Wu Yu married Tseng Lan (18761917; T. Chung-shu; H. Hsiang-tsu), a daughter of a chü-jen in Chengtu. She shared her husband's interest in literature and Taoist philosophy, as well as his anti-Confucian leanings. She wrote many essays, one of which, "Nü-ch'uan p'ing-i," on the subject of equal rights for women, appeared in the Hsin ch'ingnien in June 1917; other essays were published in the Fu-nü tsa-chih and the Hsiao-shuo yüeh-pao. Her collected writings were published as the Ting-sheng-hui-shih i-kao. The marriage resulted in one son, who died as a child, and four daughters. Wu Yung-ch'üan, the younger brother of Wu Yü, studied law in Japan and was a professor and dean of the faculty of law at National Szechwan University during the 1930'sand 1940's.