The present paper attempts to dig out the real causes of the heated dabate between Lu Xun and Liang Shiqiu in 1929. On the surface, the quarrel was centred on the criteria for translation. Liang attacked Lu Xun for translating too literally, to a stage that the translations, which Liang called "dead translations", were totally unintelligible to any reader. Lu, while admitting that he was translating in a "hard" way , defended that he was just being faithful to the originals, hence to the readers. He, in return, accused Liang for sacrificing accuracy for fluency. Coming along with these arguments were ridicule, derision and malicious personal attacks. The present paper argues that there was no fundamental difference between the two. Both would like to have an accurate and yet readable translation. Their real difference lay in their political stances. Lu Xun, by 1929, had truned left. Supporting the Communist cause, he started to translate Marxist literary theories and works. On the other hand, Liang had become a close follower of Irving Babbitt, master of Neo-Classicism, after his Harvard years. He could not tolerate the political agenda behind Lu Xun's translation activities. The main body of the present paper consists of an analysis of the writings of both parties, attempting to explain how translation, in the last years of the 1920s and the beginning of 1930s, was related to the class struggle of the time.