ALTHOUGH THE success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the anti-
imperialist sentiments of the May Fourth Movement helped to
convert many Chinese radicals to Marxism, the conversion was
not just an emotional affair. It involved an intellectual commit-
ment. The 1919 debate between Li Ta-chao, the Marxist, and
Hu Shih, the pragmatist follower of John Dewey, revealed some-
thing of the appeal of Marxist solutions to Chinese problems.

Both men were then opposed to the solutions offered by the
Kuomintang (KMT), but they disagreed on how China should
approach its pressing problems.

In the summer of 1919, during Professor Dewey's lecture tour
in China, Hu Shih issued a call for "more study of problems
and less of isms." From the pragmatic perspective of his former
professor at Columbia, Hu Shih urged Chinese intellectuals to
direct more attention to individual, practical social problems.
Foreign "fanciful, good-sounding isms" might not fit the Chinese
context, he warned, and doctrines that advocated all-embracing
and fundamental solutions were irrelevant and might even hinder
the finding of real solutions to China's social problems. ¹

Li Ta-chao picked up the gauntlet in defense of his own Bol-
shevik and Marxist beliefs. In a long letter to Hu, Li strove to

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