Zhu Guangqian
Zhu Guangqian was a scholar and theoretician of aesthetics in 20th-century China.
History
Zhu was born in Tongcheng, Anhui in 1897 and graduated from the Anhui Province Tongcheng Secondary School. After earning his BA from Hong Kong University in 1922, he went abroad to study aesthetics at the University of Edinburgh and University College, London. He moved to France in 1931 and studied at the University of Strasbourg, where he earned his doctorate in 1933. Later, he returned to China to write The Psychology of Art, On Poetry, and A History of Western Aesthetics, Letters on Beauty.In the 1930s in Beijing, Zhu Guangqian hosted a literary salon that met monthly to recite prose and poetry, east and west. Regulars included Wen Yiduo, Chen Mengjia, Zhu Ziqing, Zheng Zhenduo, Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, Bing Xin, Ling Shuhua, Bian Zhilin, Lin Huiyin and Xiao Qian. These were pivotal figures in Republican literature, and it can perhaps be argued that the salon was important to the formation of the so-called Beijing style literature of the period.
Zhu was one of the earliest post-Cultural Revolution Chinese proponents of Marxist humanism and "aesthetic humanism," many of whom had previously been persecuted for their humanist writings.