Liberal scholar and reformer, born in Chiki, Anhwei, E China. He studied at Cornell and Columbia universities, where he became a disciple of the philosopher, John Dewey. He became professor of philosophy at Beijing University (191749), where he led the gradualist New Culture movement from 1919, urging the re-examination of China's culture and increased personal liberty, and opposing the increasingly rigid Marxism of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. He wrote extensively on Chinese philosophy, and is also known for his championing of pai-hua, the new Chinese vernacular that would make literature accessible to the masses. He served the Nationalist government as ambassador to the USA (193842) and the UN (1957), and was president of the Academica Sinaica on Taiwan (195862).
Hu Shih (Traditional Chinese: 胡適, Simplified Chinese: 胡适, pinyin: Hú Shì), (December 17, 1891-February 24, 1962) was a Chinese philosopher and essayist.
Biography
Born Hu Hóngxīng (洪騂) in Shanghai to Hu Chuan (胡傳, courtesy name Tiehua 鐵花) and Feng Shundi (馮順弟), Hu's ancestors were from Jixi (績溪), Anhui.
Hu became a "national scholar" through funds appropriated from the Boxer Indemnity grant. On August 16, 1910 Hu was sent to study agriculture at Cornell University in the United States. At Columbia he was greatly influenced by his professor, John Dewey, and Hu became Dewey's translator and a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change. Hu soon became one of the leading and influential intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement and later the New Culture Movement. His most important contribution was the promotion of vernacular literature (Baihua) to replace classic literature (see Classical Chinese): the significance of this for Chinese Culture was great -- as John Fairbank put it, "the tyranny of the classics had been broken".1
Hu was ambassador from the Republic of China to the United States of America (1938-1941)(Cheng and Lestz 1999, 373), chancellor of Peking University (1946-1948), and later 1958 president of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, where he remained until his death by heart attack in Nangang at the age of 71.
Writings
Unlike other figures of the Warlord Era in the Republic of China, Hu was a staunch supporter of just one main current of thought: pragmatism.
Literary revolution
Hu was well known as the primary advocate for the literary revolution of the era, a movement with the aim of the replacement of scholarly classical Chinese in writing with the vernacular spoken language, as well as the cultivation and stimulation of new forms of literature. In an article originally published in New Youth in January 1917 titled "A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform", He originally emphasized eight guidelines that all Chinese writers should take to heart in writing:
1. By this, Hu meant that literature should contain real feeling and human thought.
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3. Hu did not elaborate at length on this point, merely stating that some recent forms of poetry had neglected proper grammar.
4. Hu rejected this way of thinking as being unproductive in solving modern problems. Hu implored writers to use their own words in descriptions, and deplored those who did not.\
6. By this, Hu was referring to the practice of comparing present events to events in the past, even when such events are not entirely applicable. Though these forms had been pursued by earlier writers, Hu believed that modern writers first needed to learn the basics of substance and quality, before returning to these matters of subtlety and delicacy. This rule, perhaps the most well known, ties in directly with Hu's believe that modern literature should be written in the vernacular, rather than in Classical Chinese.
In April of 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 only four:
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