Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛

Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛, the aesthetician. He was an influence on similiarly brilliant, romanticist minds like Ji Xianlin and Shen Congwen. On his experiences in the Cultural Revolution, Vera Schwartz has said,

Zhu Guanqian managed to hold back part of himself from the brutally intrusive Red Guards by practicing tai ji quan and by meditating on an old pavilion glimpsed from the window of the "ox pen." His former student Ji Xianlin, though given to deeper despair about the shared calling of intellectuals, insists that he was the author of his own fate. Recalling the painful times of the Cultural Revolution allows this sufferer to reclaim some freedom and dignity in the face of history.

She should know, because she came to know him well on her sojourn in China -- see her Long Road Home: A China Journal. Shen remembers Zhu in his 1981 preface. Zhu's own thoughts appear translated in Autobiography of a Chinese Historian.