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.Hu Shi, for one, was disturbed by the appeal of Marxism.For all the radicalism of Hu’s attacks on Confucianism, he favored working within the political status quo as much as possible.He continued to believe that the cultural regeneration of the Chinese people had to precede political activism.Hu Shi therefore tried to discredit Marxism with a plea for pragmatism, or what he preferred to call “experimentalism.” Instead of talking about general theories, abstract propositions – “isms” – people should deal with concrete problems amenable to specific solutions.Factory conditions and women’s rights should be approached separately, for example, and not treated as symptoms of some common, underlying problem.Hu thus wanted to find specific and gradual, even partial, solutions to China’s problems.Reforms, not revolution.He advocated his mentor John Dewey’s approach of using calm, scientific inquiry to solve social problems.Even democracy was simply a matter of practice.“The only way to have democracy is to have democracy,” Hu wrote as early as 1915.4 Many historians have pointed out the fragility of Hu’s hopes and the weaknesses of liberalism174Nationalism and revolution, 1919–37in the Chinese setting.Reformism implied the existence of a social consensus that in fact still needed to be built.Indeed, by the 1930s Hu’s was a marginal view.Calls for gradualism seemed pusillanimous and calls for calm seemed simply ignorant.Marxism, meanwhile, claimed to be entirely scientific, but not gradualist.Justifiably or not, Hu’s calls for patient optimism seemed to lack a certain sympathy for the horrendous conditions in which so many Chinese found themselves.None the less, Yan Yangchu (1893–1990) illustrates liberalism’s potential for social reform.Known as Jimmy Yen in the United States, where he received graduate training and maintained sources of support and fund-raising, he began his career with the YMCA.5 Yan was part of the “social gospel” movement in the 1920s, whereby Christian missionaries began spending more time providing social services than worrying about conver-sions.Spearheaded by the American Protestants who dominated the Chinese missionary scene by this time, effort went into such programs as hospitals, schools, orphanages, career-training for beggars and prostitutes, and sanitation campaigns.Yan worked on literacy programs, vastly enlarging adult education with networks of schools, volunteer teachers, student-teachers, and what can only be called savvy marketing to attract students after their long day’s work.New night school classes might be advertised with marching bands, for example.Yan’s attention was soon directed toward rural issues, and his organization founded an experimental project in Dingxian, Hebei.There Yan built schools, an agricultural extension program, a health-care system, and farmers’ cooperatives.The Dingxian project did not bring in outside money and experts so much as it mobilized local resources, including the enthusiasm of ordinary villagers.Agricultural reforms, for example, resulted from working closely with local farmers to find appropriate and practical technology; they did not depend on importing costly scientific machines that did not fit local conditions anyway.Yan’s cadres worked closely with farmers to find usable hybrids, fertilizers, breeding techniques, pumps, and insecticides to raise productivity.Cooperatives both to provide credit and to aid marketing were important tools where peasants were often in debt to middlemen.Yan’s dream was to move from educational reforms to economic improvement and local mobilization, to cooperatives to free the farmers from the problems of price manipulation and credit squeeze, to light industrialization, and finally to true village democracy.Indeed, Yan wanted to turn the peasants into full citizens.But local and national political leaders put limits on reform – land distribution was not on the agenda.The new political operas that Yan’s cadres wrote, dealing with such village problems as indebtedness, had to draw back from revolutionary implications lest officials shut them down.So, while audiences might be chanting “kill the usurer,” actors on stage resolved the plot by organizing themselves to hold the usurer for official arrest.In the eyes of more radical intellectuals, the reformism of Hu and Yan was doomed.Li Dazhao replied to Hu’s critique of “isms
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