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Hu Shih

Hu was born on December 17, 1891, in Shanghai to Hu Chuan (胡傳; Hú Chuán) and his third wife Feng Shundi (馮順弟; Féng Shùndì). Hu Chuan was a tea merchant who became a public servant, serving in Manchuria, Hainan, and Taiwan. 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, right after the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, his wife Feng and the young Hu Shih left Taiwan for their ancestral home in Anhui.

In January 1904, Hu Shih's family arranged his marriage to Chiang Tung-hsiu (江冬秀; Jiāng Dōngxiù). In the same year, Hu and an elder brother moved to Shanghai seeking a "modern" education.[

Family legend has it that Hu Shih's ancestors were descended from the last teenage Emperor of Tang China (being different in origin from the rest of the Hu clan), who fled in disguise with a loyal minister of court in 907 to Anhui and eventually took the name as his son.

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 U.S. In 1912 he changed his major to philosophy and literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving his undergraduate degree, he went to study philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by his professor, John Dewey. Hu became Dewey's translator and a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change, helping Dewey in his 1919–1921 lectures series in China. He 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.

He 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.[11] The significance of this for Chinese culture was great – as John Fairbank put it, "the tyranny of the classics had been broken".[12] Hu devoted a great deal of energy, however, 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."[13] For instance, he made a major contribution to the textual study of the Chinese classical novel, especially the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, as a way of establishing the vocabulary for a modern standardized language.[14] His Peking University colleague Wen Yuan-ning dubbed Hu a "philosophe" for his wide-ranging humanistic interests and expertise.

Public services

Hu was the ambassador of Republic of China to the U.S. between 1938[16] and 1942.[17][18] He was recalled in September 1942 and was replaced by Wei Tao-ming. Hu then served as chancellor of Peking University, which was then 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. That December, Hu Shih Memorial Hall was established in his memory.[19] 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" (为胡适说几句话), advocated acknowledging not only Hu Shih's mistakes, but also his contributions to modern Chinese literature. This article was sufficiently convincing to many scholars that it led to a re-evaluation of the development of modern Chinese literature and the role of Hu Shih.[20] Selection 15 of the Putonghua Proficiency Test is a story about Hu Shih debating the merits of Written vernacular Chinese over Classical Chinese.

Courtesy--wikipedia

- Hu Shih