Hu Shih

Hu Shih (born Dec. 17, 1891, Shanghai, China—died Feb. 24, 1962, Taiwan) was a Chinese Nationalist diplomat and scholar, an important leader of Chinese thought who helped establish the vernacular as the official written language (1922). He was also an influential propagator of American pragmatic methodology as well as the foremost political liberal in Republican China (1912–49), advocating building a new country not through political revolution but through mass Chinese education.

Early life and education.

Hu Shih’s father was a scholar-official from Chi-ch’i county in Anhwei province. When Hu Shih was three years old, his father died. His mother, though uneducated herself, laid great emphasis on the education of her son, which alone would enable him to pass competitive civil-service examinations that led to a career as an official.

Since passing the examinations was the aim of education, the content of the examinations became almost exclusively the content of education. By the time Hu Shih began his schooling, traditional Chinese education had solidified into a rigid orthodoxy, remote from contemporary life and learning. It was based on the Confucian Classics and on a narrow interpretation of them introduced by the reigning Ch’ing (Manchu) dynasty to justify monarchical rule. Moreover, the emphasis had shifted from the study of the content of the Classics to the study—almost the worship—of their literary form. It became so important that a scholar’s writing conform to the orthodox literary style that, if his ideas could not be adapted to the style, they were often changed. The language itself hampered the development of new ideas, as well as the dissemination of those ideas to the masses. Although some writers had used the vernacular, the respected books were those written in the classical Chinese language. As remote from the living, spoken language as Latin is from English, it was so difficult to learn that it was largely responsible for the very widespread illiteracy in China.

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A Study of Poetry

Although the pressure for modernization was forcing educational orthodoxy to compromise with Western learning (and in 1905 was to force the Manchus to abolish the civil-service examinations), the compromise was not very great in 1895, when Hu Shih began his schooling at the age of four. Taught in Chi-ch’i by his uncle and cousin, the manifestly gifted child studied the Classics and the old vernacular stories and novels.

In 1904 Hu went to Shanghai for a “modern education.” In 1910, having won a scholarship, he went to the United States to study agriculture, and then philosophy, at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. After receiving his B.A. degree in 1914, he became a student of the philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University. Dewey’s philosophy discouraged the quest for absolute truths and recommended instead the acceptance as true of what works in any given set of circumstances; man should believe nothing, Dewey maintained, except that which has been subjected to the “test of consequences.” This philosophy had a profound influence on Hu Shih. It gave expression and direction to his rational, skeptical, liberal cast of mind and was to him a means of helping his country free itself from blind submission to ancient tradition.

Hu returned to China in 1917, after completion of his doctoral dissertation under Dewey. Despite the high hopes engendered by the Revolution of 1911, which abolished the monarchy and established a Western-style republic, Hu found a China not radically changed from the nation he had left seven years earlier. Only nominally a republic, the country was overrun by warlords (provincial military rulers) fighting for dominance; there had been two attempts to restore the monarchy; the old conservative intellectual bureaucracy was still powerful; China’s political and economic sovereignty were still threatened by foreign powers; and the masses were still 90 percent illiterate and still obedient to ancient traditions.

Reforms of language and education.

Hu Shih and other intellectuals who had returned from study abroad concluded that for Western-style government to work there must first be a thorough reexamination and total regeneration—after the Western model—of traditional Chinese culture. The centre of this cultural reform movement was Peking National University, the faculty of which Hu joined in 1917. Although some Peking intellectuals were more politically minded than others, in 1917 they all agreed, as Hu explains,

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to keep away from politics for twenty years and to be devoted only to educational, intellectual, and cultural activities, to build a political foundation by way of non-political factors.

Early in 1917, Hu’s “Wen-hsüeh kai-liang ch’u-i” (“Tentative Proposal for Literary Reform”) was published in Hsin ch’ing-nien (“New Youth”), an influential magazine established by Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tu-hsiu), Hu’s colleague at Peking University, who was to become one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. In this article Hu made himself the champion of the pai-hua movement. He proposed a new, living literature, liberated from the tyranny of the “dead” language and style, accessible to the people, and flexible enough to express all kinds of new ideas. The poems Hu wrote in 1918, which were published in 1920 as Ch’ang-shih chi (A Book of Experiments), were just the beginning of a flood of new literature in the vernacular, resulting in new short-story and essay forms, new drama, and translations of modern European literature. Despite severe attacks from the traditionalists, “vernacular literature,” as Hu said, “spread as though it wore seven-league boots.” By 1922 the government had proclaimed the vernacular as the national language.

The literary revolution was, however, a single aspect of a broader campaign directed against the deadweight of the traditional values. To reappraise China’s cultural heritage, Hu emphasized the need to use the new pragmatic methodology of Dewey. The slogan he propounded in 1919 generated much enthusiasm among intellectuals: “Boldness in suggesting hypotheses coupled with a most solicitous regard for control and verification.” Hu’s Chung-kuo che-hsüeh shih ta-kang (published 1919; Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy), which examined the logic of the ancient philosophers, and his later studies of the old vernacular literature, which verified authorship and authenticity, demonstrated how the scientific method could be applied in the study of traditional Chinese literature. So effective was Hu’s advocacy of pragmatic methodology that it led to the examination and destruction of many of the accepted—and invalid—versions of ancient Chinese history.

Escape from politics was not long-lived. The agreement made by Hu and his colleagues began to disintegrate in 1919 after the May Fourth incident, when patriotic, anti-Japanese sentiment exploded into a student demonstration against the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference to support Japan’s claims to Shantung province. The demonstration hastened the inevitable split between the leftist intellectuals, who had been incipient political activists all along, and the liberal intellectuals, who tended to avoid political activism.

The split became overt on July 20, 1919, when Hu challenged the leftists in an article entitled “More Study of Problems, Less Talk of ‘Isms’.” Deeply convinced of the feasibility of the experimentalist approach, with its reliance on coolness and reflective deliberation, he counseled gradualism and the individual solution of individual problems. In his view, the invocation of such abstract formulas as Marxism and anarchism, in the hope that one specific Western doctrine would solve all of China’s problems, was futile; in coping with real issues he felt they would most likely lead to disastrous consequences. By appealing to cool reason at a time when the whole nation was ringing with sentimental battle cries, however, Hu Shih and his fellow liberals were bound to face frustration. Moreover, by urging the acceptance of pragmatism, which dismisses isms as unproven fabrications yet is itself an ism, Hu’s position seemed to be untenable and unconvincing.

Because of this position, Hu not only made himself the declared antagonist of the Chinese Communists but also found himself frequently in uneasy relationships with the Nationalists. It was not until war with Japan broke out in 1937 that a modus vivendi was reached between Hu and the Nationalist government. He served as its ambassador to Washington from 1938 to 1942 and in 1945 was appointed chancellor of the government-sponsored Peking National University. After the establishment of the Communist government in 1949, Hu lived in New York City, where in 1957 he served as Nationalist China’s representative to the United Nations. In 1958 he went to Taiwan to assume the presidency of the Academia Sinica, China’s leading scholarly organization, a position he held until his death in 1962.