Hu Shih (Simplified: 胡适, Traditional: 胡適, Pinyin: Hú Shì), (December 17, 1891-February 24, 1962) was a Chinese philosopher and essayist. His courtesy name was Shìzhī (適之).

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. In January 1904, his family established an arranged marriage for Hu with Jiang Dongxiu (江冬秀), an illiterate girl with bound feet who was one year older than he was. The marriage took place in December 1917. Hu received his fundamental education in Jixi and Shanghai.

Having become a "national scholar", on August 16, 1910 Hu was sent to study at Cornell University in the United States and later Columbia University. 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. He received his Ph.D in philosophy in 1917 and returned to lecture in Peking University. During his tenure there he began to write for New Youth journal, 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 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. He was chief executive of the Free China Journal, which was eventually shut down for criticizing Chiang Kai-shek.

Sample work

Don't You Forget (translated poem)

Son,

Over twenty years I taught you to love this country,

But God tell me how!

Don't you forget:

It's our country's soldiers,

That made your Aunt suicide in shame,

And did the same to Ah Shing,

And to your wife,

And shot Gao Sheng to death!

Don't you forget:

Who cut off your finger,

Who beated your father to a mess like this!

Who burned this village?

Shit! The fire is coming!

Go, for your own sake! Don't die with me!

Wait!

Don't you forget:

Your dying father only wished this country conquered,

By the Cossacks,

Or the Prussians,

Anyone!

Any life ever worse than -- this !?

reference

• "Hu Shih", in (1931) Living philosophies. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Li [李], Ao [敖] ([1964-]). Biography of Hu Shih [Hu Shih p'ing chuan] [胡適評傳]. Taipei [T'ai-pei shih] [臺北市]: [Wen hsing shu tien, Min kuo 53-] [文星書店, 民國53-]. Series : [Wen hsing ts'ung k'an 50] [文星叢刊 50].

• Yang, Ch'eng-pin (c1986). The political thoughts of Dr. Hu Shih [Hu Shih ti cheng chih ssu hsiang]. Taipei, Taiwan: Bookman Books. in English.

• Chou, Min-chih (c1984). Hu Shih and intellectual choice in modern China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472100394. Series : Michigan studies on China.

• Hu, Shih (c1934). The Chinese renaissance : the Haskell lectures, 1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (see online Resource listed below)

• Grieder, Jerome B. (1970). Hu Shih and the Chinese renaissance; liberalism in the Chinese revolution, 1917-1937. Cambridge [US]: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674412508. Series : Harvard East Asian series 46.

• Cheng, Pei-Kai; Michael Lestz (c1999). The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection, 373, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.