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Hu Shih (t=胡適; 17 December 189124 February 1962) 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.
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. (2026). 9780500251928, Thames & Hudson. ISBN 9780500251928
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 pragmatism, 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.Luo, Jing (2004). Over a Cup of Tea: An Introduction to Chinese Life and Culture. University Press of America. 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."Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 161–162. ACLS Humanities E-Book. URL: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/ 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.Wen Yuan-ning, and others. Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Modern Chinese Celebrities. Edited by Christopher Rea (Amherst, MA: Cambria, 2018), pp. 41–44. 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.
Hu Shih's work fell into disrepute in mainland China until a 1986 article written by Ji Xianlin, "A Few Words for Hu Shih" (为胡适说几句话), 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." Ji Xianlin: A Gentle Academic Giant", china.org, 19 August 2005 Selection 15 of the Putonghua Proficiency Test is a story about Hu Shih debating the merits of written vernacular Chinese over Literary Chinese.Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi Gangyao. 2004. Beijing. pp. 362–363.
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.
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 (每周評論) in 1919, he criticized Li Dazhao and engaged in a heated debate regarding ideology and problem (問題與主義論戰). Hu writes in "A Third Discussion of Problems and Isms" (三問題與主義):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:
Hu saw his life work as a consistent project of practicing the scientific spirit of Pragmatism as a lifestyle.
In 1919, Hu Shih published the first volume of An Outline History of Chinese Philosophy. The later portion was never finished. Cai Yuanpei, president of Peking University where Hu was teaching at the time, wrote the preface for Outline and pointed out four key features of Hu's work:
Hu's organization of classical Chinese philosophy imitated Western philosophical history, but the influence of textual study since the time of the Qing dynasty is still present. Especially for the second point, "cutting off the many schools" is a result of the continuous effort of Qing scholarship around ancient textual studies. Since the validity of the ancient texts is questionable and the content of them obscure, Hu decided to leave them out. In fact, before the publication of Outline, Hu was appointed to be the lecturer of History of Classical Chinese Philosophy. His decision of leaving out pre-Warring States philosophy almost caused a riot among students.
In Outline, other philosophical schools of the Warring States were first treated as equal. Hu did not hold Confucianism as the paradigm while treating other schools as heresy. Rather, Hu saw philosophical values within other schools, even those considered to be anti-Confucian, like Mohism. Yu Yingshi commented how this paradigm followed Thomas Kuhn's Enlightenment theory.
Feng Youlan, the author of A History of Chinese Philosophy, criticizes Hu for adopting a pragmatist framework in Outline. Instead of simply laying out the history of Chinese philosophy, Feng claims that Hu criticizes these schools from a pragmatist perspective which makes the reader feel as if "the whole Chinese civilization is entirely on the wrong track."Yu-lan Fung, "Philosophy in Contemporary China" paper presented in the Eighth International Philosophy Conference, Prague, 1934. Feng also disagrees with Hu's extensive effort on researching the validity of the resource text. Feng believes that as long as the work itself is philosophically valuable, its validity is not as significant.
Hu sees individual contributions as crucial and beneficial to the system of democracy. In "A Second Discussion on Nation-Building and Autocracy" (再談建國與專治), Hu comments that an autocratic system needs professionals to manage it while democracy relies on the wisdom of the people. When different people's lived experiences come together, no elite politician is needed for coordination, and therefore democracy is, in fact, easy to practice with people who lack political experience. He calls democracy "naive politics" (幼稚政治), a political system that can help cultivate those who participate in it." 从一党到无党的政治 – 维基文库，自由的图书馆". zh.wikisource.org. Retrieved 15 April 2019.
Hu also equates democracy with freedom, a freedom that is made possible by tolerance. In a democratic system, people should be free from any political persecution as well as any public pressure. In his 1959 essay "Tolerance and Freedom", Hu Shih stressed the importance of tolerance and claimed that "tolerance is the basis of freedom". In a democratic society, the existence of opposition must be tolerated. Minority rights are respected and protected. People must not destroy or silence the opposition.
Hu criticized and rejected Sun Yat-sen's claim that people are incapable of self-rule and considered democracy itself a form of political education. The legitimacy and the competency of people participating in the political process comes from their lived experience. Sun's government also proposed to punish any "anti-revolutionary" without due process.
Hu wrote an article in Crescent Moon titled "Human Rights and Law" (人權與約法). In the article, Hu called for the establishment of a written constitution that protects the rights of citizens, especially from the ruling government. The government must be held accountable to the constitution. Later in "When Can We Have ConstitutionA Question for The Outline of National Reconstruction" (我們什麼時候才可有憲法?—對於《建國大綱》的疑問), Hu criticized the Nationalist government for betraying the ideal of Constitutionalism in The Outline of National Reconstruction.
In the writing field, Lu Xun and Hu represented two different political parties. The political differences between the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party led to significantly different evaluations of the two writers. As a supporter of the Communist Party, Lu Xun was hailed by its leader Mao Zedong as "the greatest and most courageous fighter of the new cultural army". By contrast, Hu Shih was criticized by Communist-leaning historians as "the earliest, the most persistent and most uncompromising enemy of Chinese Marxism and socialist thought". The different evaluations of the two different writers show the complexity between two different political parties in modern China. (2026). 9789004424883, Brill. ISBN 9789004424883
Hu's opposition to the Chinese Communist Party was an ideological conflict. As a supporter of Pragmatism, Hu believed that social changes could only happen incrementally. Revolution or any ideologies that claim to solve social problems once and for all are not possible. Such a perspective was present in his early writing, as in the problem versus isms debate. He quotes John Dewey: "progress is not a wholesale matter, but a retail job, to be contracted for and executed in section".
Hu also opposed communism because of his ideological belief in individualism. Hu affirms the individual's right as independent from the collective. The individual has the right to develop freely and diversely without political suppression in the name of uniformity. He writes in "The Conflict of Ideologies":
In contrast to a Marxist vision of history, Hu's conception of history is pluralistic and particular. In his talk with American economist Charles A. Beard, recorded in his diary, Hu believed the making of history is only coincidental. Since he is a proponent of reformism, pluralism, individualism, and skepticism, Hu's philosophy is irreconcilable with Communist ideology. Hu's later scholarship around the Chinese root of liberalism and democracy is consistent with his anti-CCP writings. In a later manuscript titled "Communism, Democracy, and Cultural Pattern", Hu constructs three arguments from Chinese intellectual history, especially from Confucian and Taoist traditions, to combat the authoritative rule of the Chinese Communist Party:
Therefore, Hu regards the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party as not only "unhistorical", but also "un-Chinese".
In April 1918, Hu published a second article in New Youth, this one titled "Constructive Literary Revolution – A Literature of National Speech". In it, he simplified the original eight points into just four:
In the 15 July New Youth issue, Hu published an essay entitled, Chastity (贞操问题). In the traditional Chinese context, this refers not only to virginity before marriage, but specifically to women remaining chaste before they marry and after their husband's death (守贞). He wrote that this is an unequal and illogical view of life, that there is no natural or moral law upholding such a practice, that chastity is a mutual value for both men and women, and that he vigorously opposes any legislation favoring traditional practices on chastity. There was a movement to introduce traditional Confucian value systems into law at the time.
His 1947 essay We Must Choose Our Own Direction (我们必须选择我们的方向) was devoted to liberalism. He held the Jiaxu manuscript () for many years until his death.
The following excerpt is from a poem titled Dream and Poetry, written in vernacular Chinese by Hu. It illustrates how he applied those guidelines to his own work.
His prose included works like The Life of Mr. Close Enough (差不多先生傳), a piece criticizing Chinese society which centers around the extremely common Chinese language phrase 差不多 (), which means something like "close enough" or "just about right":
The Marriage (终身大事) was one of the first plays written in the new literature style. Published in the March 1919 issue (Volume 6 Number 3) of New Youth, this Hu Shih's one-act play highlights the problems of traditional marriages arranged by parents. The female protagonist eventually leaves her family to escape the marriage in the story.
In October 1919, after visiting in China, Hu Shih said with emotion: "In the last ten years, only deceased personalities like Song Jiaoren, Cai E, and Wu Luzhen have been able to maintain their great reputation. The true features of living personalities are soon detected. This is because the times change too quickly. If a living personality does not try his utmost, he falls behind and soon becomes "against the time". In Hu Shih's ideals, only dead people can hold their reputation; the world will soon know the real value and personality of a person if they do not follow the times. They will fall back in time soon if they are not trying to find changes that encourage writers in old China to follow the new revolution and start using the new vernacular style of writing. They cannot stay in the old style; otherwise, they will fall back in time. Furthermore, Hu Shih meant that China needed more new things.
Zhang was the biggest 'enemy' of the vernacular style, According to Liang Shuming: "Lin Shu and Zhang Shizhao were two most significant people against vernacular style of writing in history". But in fact, Hu Shih and Zhang Shizhao had a big age difference; when Zhang was at work in Shanghai, Hu was only a middle school student.
Towards the end of Hu's life, he expressed disappointment at the politicization of the May Fourth Movement, which he felt was counter to the primarily philosophical and linguistic issues that drove him to participate in it. No matter how Hu's position shifted through the course of the Movement, he always put the May Fourth Movement in a global, albeit Eurocentric, context. (2026). 9789004424883, Brill. ISBN 9789004424883 Despite the implications of the May Fourth Movement, Hu Shih ultimately expressed regret that he was unable to play a larger role in his nation's history.
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