Written by Irene Eber

Hu Shi (1891-1962) was born in Shanghai. He was raised in Anhui province by his mother, his father having passed away when the child was only a little over three years old.  From the village school that he first attended he went at the age of thirteen to Shanghai where he completed high school at a so-called modern school.  In 1910, after receiving a scholarship, he studied at Cornell University, and he completed his Ph.D. under John Dewey at Columbia University.  Under the influence of pragmatism and Dewey's ideas, he was gradually led to the conviction that China's modernization had to take place by changing ways of thinking and by writing Chinese not in the classical but in the spoken language.  The latter earned him the name of "Father of the Chinese Literary Revolution."

When he returned to China in 1917 and took up an appointment at Beijing University (Beida), he quickly became one of the foremost intellectuals of his time.  Advocating reforms on social, political, and intellectual issues, his was a highly influential voice for the next twenty years in discussions about reevaluating Chinese culture, so that it would be once more a viable and ongoing tradition.  The Sino-Japanese war of July 1937 temporarily halted his scholarly life and work, when he accepted the post as ambassador to the United States.  He remained in this post until 1942, and he only returned to China as chancellor of Beida in 1946.  In 1949 he was forced to flee to the United States, remaining there until 1958 when he went to Taipei as president of the prestigious Academia Sinica Research Institute.  His contribution and legacy, though eclipsed at times, lives on.  Like Confucius, 2500 years earlier, Hu Shi believed that tradition needed to be reevaluated in order to serve present and future development.  He doubted neither China's role as a world power nor his own in the ongoing process of China's modern change.

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