Chinese Modernity, Irish Modernism: Ireland in Guo Moruo's Literary Imaginary, and the Representation of China by W B Yeats

Ireland was a central interest of intellectuals of the late nineteenth and of early twentieth centuries in the emerging Chinese nation-state. Ireland’s people and intellectuals were perceived as having suffered under, and stood up to, the same British imperialism that had wreaked havoc in what is now China in the nineteenth-century Opium Wars.
The awarding of the Nobel prize to RabintendrathTagore coincided with the Chinese revolution (1911) and the founding of the new Chinese Republic (1912). In the years that followed, young Chinese poets were striving to craft a new vernacular poetic language and Tagore provided them with much inspiration.
The Chinese interest in Yeats also dates from the pioneering efforts of writers in the new Chinese language and literature of the early twentieth century. Even before Yeats won the Nobel prize, he was introduced to the Chinese public, by the main literary magazine of the day, The Short Story Magazine.