Who is hu shi

LLD hon. A onetime cultural critic who became a leading figure in the emergence of modern China, Hu Shih rose to prominence by promoting the use of the vernacular in literature-a practice that earned him the title "father of the Chinese literary renaissance.

The effort ushered in an era of mass literacy, relegating ancient Confucian texts to the status of reference works rather than standards to be memorized by every student. Hu's own scholarship helped convert the theretofore standard written language from an ideographic system to an alphabetic one-a "Herculean task" in the words of The New York Times.

Hu's international stature was enhanced by his frequent presence in the United States, particularly his high-profile tenure as Chinese ambassador from to During that time, he rallied support for his homeland-then under Japanese assault-and after World War II served as a delegate to the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations.

The writings of John Morley, the doctrines of Woodrow Wilson, and Hu's personal friendship with Norman Angell, the British pacifist, all influenced the development of his standards of national and international political behaviour. By far the most important single influence on him, however, came from Professor John Dewey, whose student he was at Columbia from to The methodology of Dewey's pragmatism appealed to him because it provided an intellectual sequence through which to approach the problems of social change without necessitating specific assumptions as to the context within which change must occur.

It was, in short, the application of scientific methods and attitudes to new areas of investigation, and throughout his life Hu emphasized this aspect of Dewey's thought by referring to himself as an "experimentalist," in politics as well as in scholarship. Upon his return to China in , Hu became a professor at Peking National University Pei-Ta ; his association with it lasted until , interrupted for a decade during the war and for a briefer period in the late twenties when he resided in Shanghai.

Throughout much of this time, Pei-Ta was the uncontested centre of China's new intellectual life, and Hu's position there brought him into direct contact with many of the most brilliant personalities of those years.

In all these men remained on the mainland, and in the course of the last few years each has repudiated his former teacher. Apart from his activity as a scholar, Hu also sought to shape the views of his countrymen on contemporary problems, and his opinions on a broad range of social and political issues were published in essays that he contributed to a number of influential periodicals during the twenties and the thirties.

It is possible that no other writer of his generation was read more widely, and in the minds of some he remains, even now, the greatest of the many who participated in the struggle to bring to China the benefits of enlightenment. This was in large part a struggle against the deadweight of tradition, involving, among other things, a redefinition of the individual's place in society, his emancipation from the claims of family, clan or native place, from the authoritarian hierarchy of inherited relationships, and from the beliefs of a bygone age.

Thus Hu ceaselessly exhorted the young people of China, the middle-school and university students, to assume the responsibilities that the times urged upon them, to develop their individual personalities, to think critically and independently, and to remain mindful of their obligation to tolerate the ideas of others.

Hu Shih was not a political activist, nor even primarily a political thinker. He was convinced that a stable political settlement could be achieved only after the social patterns and intellectual assumptions of the past had been swept away, and his chief concern was the introduction of new methods of research and modes of thought by means of which he hoped to liberate the Chinese mind from the coercion of traditional attitudes and values.

But the times through which he lived would not permit him the privilege of isolating himself from the political life of the nation, and it was repeatedly necessary for him to define his political views. His moderate or evolutionary approach to the problems of social change, his beliefs concerning the function of law as a political instrument, and his view of the role of the individual in society and government combined together to make him, in the broadest sense of the term, a political liberal.

He was among the most articulate and consistent members of the relatively small group of publicists and scholars who attempted, in an environment of revolutionary tensions, to create an attitude of mind capable of, and a political climate favourable to, effective use of the instruments of democratic government. Hu Shih affirmed the importance of the individual as a social and political end in himself, and he asserted that institutions have no legitimate purpose other than to promote the realisation of individual personality.

He steadfastly believed that through education the individual could be made to comprehend the workings of his own society and enabled to participate usefully in the tasks of self-government.

He envisioned a society less homogeneous than that idealised by Confucian theorists, and in it law-traditionally a negative factor in Confucian political philosophy-must play an important part, as the instrument by means of which opportunities for self-expression are created and protected. Thus Hu was a firm advocate of constitutionalism, which he viewed as a prerequisite to the political education of the people, and he insisted that only legally defined and defended liberties would enable an enlightened public opinion, the conscience of the nation, to function as it should.

Concerning the nature of the current crisis and the shape of the future, Hu Shih was at odds with many of his contemporaries. In an era of steadily increasing nationalistic sentiment he remained an avowed 'cosmopolitan. But on the other hand he jeered at the view expressed by certain traditionalist thinkers that China's "spiritual" inheritance was morally superior to the "materialistic" civilisation of the West and destined ultimately to triumph over it.

Time and again he argued that insofar as traditional ideas and attitudes had impeded the achievement of material well-being for the Chinese people, they had stunted the spiritual growth of Chinese society and culture as well. He denied, in effect, that human progress can be measured by a double standard, and he insisted that China must abandon her pretensions to uniqueness and accept the position assigned to her when judged against the evolution of humanity as a whole.

He sought to push China out into the march of world history, where the pace was set by Western achievement, both technological and intellectual. It is easy for Westerners to sympathise with Hu Shih's efforts, for he spoke the language of a Western-oriented liberal intellectual. But this was not a language comprehensible to many Chinese, nor easily accommodated to the political and social conditions prevalent in China in the twenties and thirties.

If Hu's description of the problems China faced differed from the descriptions offered by others, so did the programme he put forward as a means of solving these problems. He was convinced that the only realistic and reliable approach lay in gradual and undramatic reform which would aim at the isolation of specific difficulties and then seek to resolve them "bit by bit, drop by drop. While others preached extreme and all-encompassing solutions, Hu was a consistent advocate of moderation. When we study this position against the unfolding history of China during those troubled years it is difficult to escape the conclusion that intellectuals of Hu's persuasion were condemned to frustration and impotence by their own convictions.

Until China was ruled by a succession of warlord regimes, all of which made some show of respect for parliamentary government but were in fact supported only by armed force of a most brutal and cynical kind. For Hu Shih and like-minded men, no participation in any of these governments was possible, nor did they possess any means of influencing governments so constituted. Their only recourse was to public opinion, by which they set great store.

They did their best to arouse public opinion against the abuses of militarist politics by publishing demands for "good government" and for "government with a plan'—meaning, among other things, a published budget, public accounting, a civil service selected in accordance with well-defined standards of merit and rigorously controlled as to size, revision of gross injustices in the electoral process, and the disbanding of private armies.

Such demands are themselves an indication of the political climate of the period, which doomed them to failure. The hopelessness of their situation was well demonstrated in when Ts'ao K'un, the warlord whose armies at that time supported the "central" government in Peking, bought from parliament his election to the presidency of the Republic in spite of a vigorous campaign waged against him in the pages of The Endeavor Nu-li Chou-pao , a small weekly paper founded by Hu Shih, V.

Ting and others partly as an attempt to frustrate Ts'ao's ambitions. After the unification of most of the country by the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek in , China's liberal intellectuals were faced with a new situation, and initially the prospects may have seemed brighter. The Nationalist government established in Nanking was, in fact, a "government with a plan. Sun Yat-sen's writings, vague and inconsistent as they were on some points, became after his death in the sacred texts of the Nationalist revolution, against which no appeal was possible, and no criticism tolerated.

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