Xu Chi was closely related to modernism all his life. Although after 1949 he published a collection of his poetry ”War, Peace and Progress”, these poems proved less popular and artistically less mature than the poems he composed at his youth. The poet, known as ”politically progressive but artistically retrogressive”, had a sudden change of his view of art since the end of the 1970s. In the journal of ”Foreign Literature Studies”, Xu Chi wrote to call for the coming of modernism and modernization of Chinese literature. His masterpiece, ”Modernization and Modernism”, deals with a series of forward theoretical issues concerning the tolerance and the possibility of modernism in China. He was thus not accepted by the mainstream discourse for his sharp ideas and was severely attacked during the movement of purging spiritual pollution. Later, he had to commit suicide to leave this world, where he had been so long spiritually repressed and suffocated by an innate desperate gloominess.