Letter to Li Jinxi136 (September 5,1919)
Mr. Shaoxi,
Your instructions have been respectfully received. Your encouragement is greatly
appreciated. The Xiang River Review was banned and stopped publication after issue
no. 5. Issue no. 5 has already been mailed to you, and I assume you have received it
by now.137 Meanwhile, Xin Hunan (New Hunan), from issue no. 7 onwards, will be
edited by your younger brother.138 Right now it is being reorganized, and in half a
month or so the issue will be published, at which time I will submit a copy to you for
your suggestions. Issue no. 6 of Minduo (The People’s Tocsin)139 contains your brilliant
article, “Research on National Language Studies.”1401 have read it, and benefited in no
small measure. Together with the “Brief Survey of Trends in Russian Literary Thought”
published in the same issue, it may be considered among the few important articles of
the last several


136 This is clearly a reference to the famous controversy about “problems” (wenti) and “isms” (zhuyi),
launched by Hu Shi’s article “More Study of Problems, Less Talk about Isms,” published on July 20,
1919. Hu Shi (1891–1962), zi Shizhi, was a native of Anhui. After undergraduate studies at Cornell, he
was influenced by the thought of John Dewey, under whom he took his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1917. While
still a student in New York, he wrote an article in New Youth advocating the use of the spoken language,
and following his return to China in July 1917 he played a leading role in the intellectual controversies
of the May Fourth period. In 1919–1921, he served as Dewey’s intepreter during his lecture tour to
China. Understandably, divergences opened up between him and the more radical members of the New
Youth editorial board, such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who had comitted themselves to Marxism.
In the controversy evoked here, Hu’s view was that the most important task of Chinese intellectuals
was to study concrete problems; Li Dazhao and other future Communists argued that without theory
or ideology, it was impossible to understand problems. The term “ism” (zhuyi) recurs in subheadings I
through 9 below, but because this reads oddly with some of the adjectives, we have preferred to translate
it as “theories.” As will be obvious from the name of this society, and the whole thrust of the statutes,
Mao was much influenced by Hu Shi at this time, but clearly he had some sympathy with Li Dazhao’s
view as well.


became prominent in the language reform movement at Beijing University. See the note to Mao’s letter
to him dated November 9, 1915.
138 Issue no. 5 was, of course, confiscated, so neither Li nor anyone else ever received it.
139 Xin Hunan was the organ of the schools commonly known as “Yale in China,” located in Hunan.
(For details regarding the links of these institutions to Yale, see the note to the extract from Students’
Society Records dated May 29, 1918.) On Mao’s editorship of it, see Li Jui, Early Mao, p. 118. The full
text of Mao’s editorial in no. 7 (one of the four he edited before this periodical, too, was shut down by
Zhang Jingyao) appears on p. 418 of this volume. By “your younger brother,” Mao means, of course,
“my humble self.”
140 Minduo was founded in 1916 in Tokyo by the China Academic Research Society f Zhonghua
xueshu yanjiuhui), an organization of Chinese students studying in Japan. In principle a quarterly, it
appeared in fact approximately twice a year. In May 1918, beginning with the fifth issue, it was moved
to Shanghai. No. 6, to which Mao refers here, appeared in 1919. In addition to Li Jinxi and Yang
Changji, it numbered among its contributors many celebrated scholars, including Zhang Binglin, Cai
Yuanpei, Liang Shuming, Li Dazhao, and Gu Jiegang.