Hu Shi

Hu Shi the Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat of the twentieth century (1891-1962) who was a leader of the New Culture movement and the foremost advocate of pragmatism and of gradual reform in modern China. He championed the vernacular language, scientific method and the critical examination of tradition.

Early Life and Education

Hu Shi was born on 17 December 1891 in Shanghai, though his family came from Jixi in Anhui province. His father died when he was young, and he was raised by his mother, whose care and discipline he later credited with shaping his character. He received a classical education and showed precocious ability, passing through the early stages of the examination curriculum.

In 1910 he won a scholarship under the Boxer indemnity funds and went to the United States to study. He attended Cornell University, where he first studied agriculture and then turned to philosophy and literature, and afterwards Columbia University, where he studied under the philosopher John Dewey and adopted the pragmatist philosophy that would guide his thought.

Dewey's teaching, with its emphasis on experiment, consequences and the piecemeal solution of concrete problems, gave Hu a method as well as a philosophy. He returned to China in 1917 with a commitment to the application of critical intelligence to the problems of his country, and with a programme of intellectual and cultural reform.

The New Culture Movement and the Vernacular Language

Hu Shi returned to become a professor at Peking University and quickly emerged as a leader of the New Culture movement. His essay on a constructive literary revolution, published in New Youth in 1917, argued that literature must be written in the living language of the people, the plain speech, rather than in the dead classical style accessible only to the elite.

The advocacy of the vernacular was a cultural and political act as much as a literary one. It opened the way for a new literature, for mass education and for the discussion of modern ideas in a form that ordinary readers could understand. The movement triumphed within a few years, and the vernacular became the standard medium of Chinese writing.

Hu contributed stories, poems and essays in the new style, and he took part in the wider movement for reform in the name of science and democracy that the May Fourth Movement of 1919 represented. He was, with Chen Duxiu, the leading intellectual of the movement, though he differed from the more radical of his colleagues in his commitment to gradual and constructive change.

Pragmatism and Scholarship

Hu Shi was the foremost Chinese exponent of pragmatism, which he understood as a method of inquiry rather than a system of doctrine. He urged his readers to suspend belief in received authority, to test ideas by their consequences, and to approach all questions with the caution of the experimenter. His watchwords were boldness in hypothesis and care in verification.

He proposed that the Chinese scholarly tradition contained a method of critical investigation analogous to the modern scientific approach, and he studied the great scholars of the Qing period as forerunners of empirical research. This interpretation did much to reconcile the study of China's past with the demands of modern science.

His scholarship ranged widely, covering philosophy, history, literature and textual criticism. He wrote on Chinese logic and the history of thought, on classical novels, and on the sceptical tradition of the ancients, and he insisted that the same rigour must be applied to ancient texts and to contemporary claims. His work helped to establish modern scholarship in China.

Politics, Diplomacy and Later Years

Hu Shi was a liberal who believed in reform by discussion and law rather than by revolution. He criticised the revolutionary programme of the Nationalists and the class struggle of the Communists, and he defended individual freedom, free speech and the rule of law. His advocacy of a non-violent transformation of society placed him between the two great political forces of his day.

He served as a public figure and at times as a diplomat. From 1938 to 1942 he was China's ambassador to the United States, where he worked to secure support for China's resistance against Japan. He later became chancellor of Peking University, and he represented the liberal strand of Chinese opinion in a period when the field between the parties narrowed.

He left mainland China in 1949 and lived afterwards in the United States and then in Taiwan, where he became president of the central research academy. He continued to write and to lecture until his death on 24 February 1962 in Taipei, defending liberal values in circumstances that grew increasingly hostile to them.

Influence and Legacy

Hu Shi transformed modern Chinese intellectual life in several ways at once. He helped to create a literature in the vernacular, introduced pragmatism and the habit of critical inquiry, and set new standards of evidence in historical and textual scholarship. His concern that ideas be judged by their consequences gave Chinese thought a new discipline.

His liberal position, criticised by radicals as timid and by conservatives as corrosive, was an attempt to hold the middle ground of reason and tolerance. He believed that the reform of a society was the patient work of education and experiment, and he resisted the appeal of comprehensive systems that promised sudden salvation.

He is remembered as one of the principal architects of the intellectual revolution of the early republic and as the leading Chinese advocate of the free examination of all questions. His essays and his scholarship remain widely read, and his defence of independent thinking and of the tested idea continues to inform debates about the place of the intellectual in Chinese society.

See also

• New Culture Movement
• Pragmatism
• Vernacular Chinese literature
• May Fourth Movement