Hu Shih
Hu Shih was a Chinese academic, writer, diplomat, and politician. Hu contributed to Chinese liberalism and language reform, and was a leading advocate for the use of written vernacular Chinese. He participated in the May Fourth Movement and China's New Culture Movement. He was a president of Peking University and Academia Sinica.
Hu was the editor of the Free China Journal, which was shut down for criticizing Chiang Kai-shek. In 1919, he also criticized Li Dazhao. Hu advocated that the world adopt Western-style democracy. Moreover, Hu criticized Sun Yat-sen's claim that people are incapable of self-rule. Hu criticized the Nationalist government for betraying the ideal of Constitutionalism in The Outline of National Reconstruction.
Hu wrote many essays questioning the political legitimacy of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Specifically, Hu said that the autocratic dictatorship system of the CCP was "un-Chinese" and against history. In the 1950s, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign criticizing Hu Shih's thoughts. After Mao's passing, Hu's reputation recovered. He is now known for his influential contributions to Chinese politics and academia.
Biography
Early life
Hu Shih was born on 17 December 1891, in Shanghai to Hu Chuan, and his third wife Feng Shundi. Hu Chuan was a tea merchant who became a public servant, serving in northern China, Hainan, and Taiwan. During their marriage, Feng Shun-di was younger than some of Hu Chuan's children. After Hu Shih's birth, Hu Chuan moved to Taiwan to work in 1892, where his wife and Hu Shih joined him in 1893. Shortly before Hu Chuan's death in 1895, his wife Feng and the young Hu Shih left Taiwan for their ancestral home in Anhui.In January 1904, when Hu was 11 years old, his mother arranged his marriage to Chiang Tung-hsiu. In the same year, Hu and an elder brother moved to Shanghai seeking a "modern" education.
Academic career
Hu became a "national scholar" through funds appropriated from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. On 16 August 1910, he was sent to study agriculture at Cornell University in the United States. In 1912, he changed his major to philosophy and literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was also a member and later a president of the Cosmopolitan Club, an international student organization. While at Cornell, Hu led a campaign to promote the newer, easier to learn Modern Written Chinese which helped spread literacy in China. He also helped found Cornell's extensive library collections of East Asian books and materials.After receiving his undergraduate degree, he went to study philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City, where he was influenced by his professor, John Dewey, and started literary experiments. Hu became Dewey's translator and a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change, helping Dewey in his 1919–1921 lectures series in China. Hu returned to lecture in Peking University. During his tenure there, he received support from Chen Duxiu, editor of the influential journal New Youth, quickly gaining much attention and influence. Hu soon became one of the leading and influential intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement and later the New Culture Movement.
Hu quit New Youth in the 1920s and published several political newspapers and journals with his friends. His most important contribution was the promotion of vernacular Chinese in literature to replace Classical Chinese, which was intended to make it easier for the ordinary person to read. Hu Shih once said, "A dead language can never produce a living literature." The significance of this for Chinese culture was greatas John Fairbank put it, "the tyranny of the classics had been broken." Hu devoted a great deal of energy to rooting his linguistic reforms in China's traditional culture rather than relying on imports from the West. As his biographer Jerome Grieder put it, Hu's approach to China's "distinctive civilization" was "thoroughly critical but by no means contemptuous." For instance, he studied Chinese classical novels, especially the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, as a way of establishing the vocabulary for a modern standardized language. His Peking University colleague Wen Yuan-ning dubbed Hu a Philosophe for his humanistic interests and expertise. At the university Hu became a well-liked professor, whose top students included award-winning physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.
Hu was among the New Culture Movement reformers who welcomed Margaret Sanger's 1922 visit to China. He personally translated her speech delivered at Beijing National University which stressed the importance of birth control. Periodicals The Ladies' Journal and The Women's Review published Hu's translation.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932 and the American Philosophical Society in 1936.
Public service
Hu was the Republic of China's ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942. He was recalled in September 1942 and was replaced by Wei Tao-ming. Hu then served as chancellor of Peking University, at the time called National Peking University, between 1946 and 1948. In 1957, he became the third president of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, a post he retained until his death. He was also chief executive of the Free China Journal, which was eventually shut down for criticizing Chiang Kai-shek.Death and legacy
He died of a heart attack in Nankang, Taipei at the age of 70, and was entombed in Hu Shih Park, adjacent to the Academia Sinica campus. This was during a conference for his former student, scientist Chien-Shiung Wu. That December, Hu Shih Memorial Hall was established in his memory. It is an affiliate of the Institute of Modern History at the Academia Sinica, and includes a museum, his residence, and the park. Hu Shih Memorial Hall offers audio tour guides in Chinese and English for visitors.Hu Shih's work fell into disrepute in mainland China until a 1986 article written by Ji Xianlin, "A Few Words for Hu Shih", acknowledged Hu Shih's mistakes. This article was sufficiently convincing to many scholars that it led to a re-evaluation of the development of modern Chinese literature. Selection 15 of the Putonghua Proficiency Test is a story about Hu Shih debating the merits of written vernacular Chinese over Literary Chinese.
Hu also claimed that India conquered China culturally for 2000 years via religion. At the same time, Hu criticized Indian religions for holding China back scientifically.
Including redology, he had a wide range of interests in literature, philosophy, history, textual criticism, and pedagogy. Feng Youlan criticized Hu for adopting a pragmatist framework and ignoring all the schools of Chinese philosophy before the Warring States period. Instead of simply laying out the history of Chinese philosophy, Feng claims that Hu made the reader feel as if "the whole Chinese civilization is entirely on the wrong track." Before Feng, Hu might have been the first to interpret the concept of the Tao through modern Western philosophy.
As "one of Cornell University's most notable Chinese alumni", Hu has several honors there, including the Hu Shih Professorship and Hu Shih Distinguished lecture. Hu Shih Hall, a residence hall, was dedicated at Cornell in 2022.
Contributions to philosophy
Pragmatism
During his time at Columbia, Hu became a supporter of the school of Pragmatism. Hu translated "Pragmatism" as. Hu's taking to the thinking reflected his own philosophical appeals. Before he encountered Dewey's works, he wrote in his diary that he was in a search of "practical philosophy" for the survival of the Chinese people, rather than deep and obscure systems. He was interested in. Hu viewed Pragmatism as a scientific methodology for the study of philosophy. He appreciated the universality of such a scientific approach because he believed that such a methodology transcends the boundary of culture and therefore can be applied anywhere, including China during his time. Hu Shih was not so interested in the content of Dewey's philosophy, caring rather about the method, the attitude, and the scientific spirit.Hu saw all ideologies and abstract theories only as hypotheses waiting to be tested. The content of ideologies, Hu believed, was shaped by the background, political environment, and even the personality of the theorist. Thus these theories were confined within their temporality. Hu felt that only the attitude and spirit of an ideology could be universally applied. Therefore, Hu criticized any dogmatic application of ideologies. After Hu took over as the chief editor at Weekly Commentary in 1919, he criticized Li Dazhao and engaged in a heated debate regarding ideology and problem. Hu writes in "A Third Discussion of Problems and Isms" :Throughout the literary works and other scholarships of Hu Shih, the presence of Pragmatism as a method is prevalent. Hu Shih avoided using an ill-defined scientific method. He described his own as experiential, inductive, verification-oriented, and evolutionary.
Hu quotes Dewey's division of thought into five steps:
- A felt difficulty
- Its location and definition
- Suggestion of possible solution
- Development of the suggestions
- Further observation and experiment leads to acceptance or rejection.