“Chinese interest in socialism, as we know from scholarly research, did not begin with the May Fourth Movement. It was in the months after the Versailles Peace Treaty, however, that there was an extraordinary outburst of interest in socialism, and discussions of it nearly acquired the status of an intellectual fashion. A wide variety of European socialist theories, ranging from trade unionism, liberal socialism, and Marxism to anarchism, Communism, and histories of socialist revolutions, were presented in the pages of Shanghai’s new-style publications. By 1921, even the conservative monthly ‘Eastern Miscellany’ featured selections from Marx’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. Among the New Culture publications, ‘New Youth’ was the first that devoted considerable space, in May 1919, to the subject of Marx (1). This coverage, however, did not attain the sort of profundity that passed muster with later theoreticians, nor did the journal have much to say about the October Revolution. Thus when Dai Jitao’s attention was caught in September 1919 by Leo Karakhan’s July 25 announcement on behalf of the Bolshevik government renouncing all previous czarist claims of treaty privileges gained in China, Dai became the first among his contemporaries to draw attention to the new government. In his essay Dai spoke of the sharp contrasts between the czarists and the “labor-peasant government” (‘laonong zhengfu’) in their attitudes toward China. He also turned his attention to the writings of Japanese Marxists. In November 1919, Dai Jitao printed his own Chinese version of Karl Kautsky’s ‘Commentary on Das Kapital’, which was based on Takabatake Motoyuki’s Japanese translation. When Shi Cuntong and his friends moved into the office of ‘Weekend Review’ in April 1920, they found themselves exposed not only to daily conversations about conditions in Russia, but also to journals and publications by Taisho socialists”. “[(1) The articles featured in the May 1919 (vol 6, n° 5) issue of ‘New Youth’ were Gu Zhaoxiong, “Makesi xueshuo” [Marx’s teaching]; Huang Lingshaung, “Makesi xueshuo piping” [Critique of Marx’s teaching]; Liu Binglin, “Makesi luezhuan” [Biographical sketch of Marx]; and the first half of Li Dazhao’s two-part essay “Wo de Makesi zhuyi guan” [My views on Marxism]. Huang Lingshuang was a leading anarchist in Beijing at this time. The same issue of the ‘Edinburgh Review’. The translated piece was titled “Eguo geming de zhexue jichu” [Philosophical foundation of the Russian revolution]. The essay discussed the Decemberists and Aleksandr Herzen. Another essay, by Keshui, contained a biographical sketch of Bakunin]” [Yeh, Wen-Hsin, Provincial Passages. Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism, 1996]