Almost coincidentally with the turn of this decade, China entered a new period of intellectual ferment with a fervor not seen since the May Fourth Movement that began in 1919 and lasted into the 1920s. Then as now, China was seeking new ideas from abroad to help it in its own social and political reconstruction, and to develop its wealth and power. But with China falling apart at the seams, with a shaky republican government doing little to promote republican ideals, and with foreign imperial powers ravaging China, China's reaching out for foreign ideas in the 1920s had a sense of desperation about it. The willingness to explore almost any new idea was an important part of the May Fourth Movement, which let a flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend. Within carefully delineated boundaries, a similar, but recently attenuated, policy under the slogans emancipate the mind and seek truth from fact has been pursued in China since 1978. And today, as in the 1920s, there is again a sense of desperation among some Chinese, who fear the nation may soon be overwhelmed by the developmental problems of its system.