Lu Xun’s novella The True Story of Ah Q appeared in installments in a Beijing newspaper supplement from December 1921 to February 1922. The village idlers grab Ah Q by his queue and knock his head against a wall four or five times. They walk off satisfied. Ah Q thinks: “I have been beaten by my son, after all. The world today really is not as it should be.”
Then he too walks off satisfied and victorious. Lu Xun writes that Ah Q has “this kind of spiritual method of victory” (精神上的胜利法).