Hu Shi

Education in America: Dewey's Influence

Hu Shi was born on 17 December 1891 in Shanghai, into a family with gentry roots in Jixi County, Anhui Province. His father was a minor Qing official; his mother, whom he credited with shaping his intellectual curiosity, raised him after his father's early death. In 1910 he won a government scholarship to study in the United States under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programme, enrolling first at Cornell University to study agriculture before transferring to Columbia University, where he became a student of the philosopher John Dewey.

Dewey's pragmatism — the idea that ideas should be judged by their practical consequences, that truth is provisional and tested through experiment, and that democratic participation is inseparable from the educational process — became the philosophical foundation of Hu Shi's intellectual programme. He absorbed Dewey's method of "bold hypothesis, careful verification" (大胆假设，小心求证) and spent his career applying it to Chinese literary history, classical philology, and political thought. He completed his PhD at Columbia in 1917 and returned to China.

Literary Revolution: Vernacular Chinese

Before returning, Hu Shi had already opened a decisive debate in Chinese intellectual life. In January 1917, New Youth magazine published his essay "A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Reform," which argued that classical wenyan (文言) — the literary Chinese used in formal writing for over two thousand years — was a dead language unsuitable for modern expression. He proposed replacing it with baihua (白话), the vernacular spoken language, as the medium of literature, journalism, and education.

The proposal was both scholarly and revolutionary. A unified written vernacular would make literacy accessible beyond the educated elite, enable the expression of modern ideas, and break the authority of the classical tradition over Chinese cultural life. Chen Duxiu followed with a more combative essay declaring the literary revolution a necessity rather than a proposal. By the time the May Fourth Movement erupted in 1919, the vernacular had already gained significant ground; within a decade, baihua had replaced wenyan in school textbooks across China.

May Fourth and Liberal Intellectualism

Hu Shi was a supporter but not an agitator of the May Fourth Movement. He shared the students' anti-imperialism but was uncomfortable with the movement's emotional nationalism, which he feared would produce intolerance rather than critical thinking. His famous essay "More Study of Problems, Less Talk of Isms" (多研究些问题，少谈些主义), published in 1919, argued against the adoption of wholesale ideological systems — including Marxism — in favour of pragmatic, problem-by-problem social reform. The essay brought him into public debate with Li Dazhao, who defended the need for systematic ideology. This exchange crystallised the divide between liberal incrementalism and radical revolution that would define Chinese intellectual politics for the next generation.

Ambassador and Wartime Role

Hu Shi's academic career at Peking University was interrupted and eventually foreclosed by political upheaval. He served as Chinese Ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942, working to build American public and governmental support for China during the Second Sino-Japanese War — a role he performed with considerable success, cultivating relationships across the American political spectrum. He also served as President of Peking University briefly after the war (1946–48) before the Communist victory made his position untenable.

Taiwan and Final Years

After the Communist victory in 1949, Hu Shi went first to the United States and then to Taiwan, where he served as President of Academia Sinica from 1958 until his death. In Taiwan he remained a symbol of liberal constitutionalism within the ROC, occasionally and cautiously criticising the Nationalist government's authoritarian tendencies while stopping short of open opposition. He died of a heart attack on 24 February 1962 in Taipei, aged 70, at a banquet for newly elected members of Academia Sinica.

Legacy

Hu Shi's influence on modern Chinese culture is pervasive and often invisible, because his central achievement — the triumph of vernacular Chinese as the medium of written expression — became so complete that it no longer appears as a choice. Every Chinese who reads a newspaper, a novel, or a social media post in baihua is reading in the medium Hu Shi fought to establish. His liberal pragmatism — the insistence on evidence, incremental reform, and scepticism toward grand ideological systems — has been a persistent minority tradition in Chinese intellectual life, repeatedly marginalised by the demands of revolutionary and party politics, but never entirely extinguished.