LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hu Shih
built 627 days ago
Today, as in Hu Shih’s day, higher education is playing a significant role in China’s aspirations for the future, and the scale of the endeavor has expanded exponentially. In 1910, Hu Shih was one of 70 Chinese students to come to the United States on a scholarship. Today approximately 20,000 Chinese students enter American colleges and universities each year.
Source:
The debate between Suzuki and Hu Shih might ... seem to be a matter of internal Asian intellectual politics; but, like so much in modern Asian politics, it was performed before an American audience. The debate was carried out in English and published in the journal Philosophy East and West, an organ of the University of Hawaii's East-West Center and America's westernmost outpost in the territorial expansion of Western philosophy to the Asian continent. Both debaters were students of Western thought and had spent formative years in America. Both positions in the debate spoke to, and in the language of, modern Western scholarship: the one to religious philosophy; the other to intellectual history.
Source:
A onetime cultural critic who became a leading figure in the emergence of modern China, Hu Shih rose to prominence by promoting the use of the vernacular in literature-a practice that earned him the title "father of the Chinese literary renaissance." During the May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s, he joined other public intellectuals in attacking the classical language that had existed since about 200 BCE and arguing for the popular pai-hua as the written medium for both scholarship and general communication. The effort ushered in an era of mass literacy, relegating ancient Confucian texts to the status of reference works rather than standards to be memorized by every student. Hu's own scholarship helped convert the theretofore standard written language from an ideographic system to an alphabetic one-a "Herculean task" in the words of The New York Times.
Source:
Hu Shih and other intellectuals who had returned from study abroad concluded that for Western-style government to work there must first be a thorough reexamination and total regeneration—after the Western model—of traditional Chinese culture. The centre of this cultural reform movement was Peking National University, the faculty of which Hu joined in 1917. Although…
Source:
The impassioned critiques of Liang Chi-chao ±ç±Ò¶W, the cogent lucidity of Hu Shih, and the caustic wit of Lu Hsun were often expressed in "wars of the pen." Standing in contrast to this high level of social involvement were writers such as Chou Tso-jen and Lin Yu-tang, who rediscovered the informal essays of the 16th and 17th centuries. They advocated an easygoing humor and the savoir-vivre of sipping tea and copying old books; but were at the same time conversant with Freud and D.H. Lawrence. Although both types of essays were written in the colloquial language, their spirit was still rooted in the old culture of the scholar. The writers themselves... were not government officials, but college professors, publishing house editors, journalists, and high school teachers.
Source:
Hu Shih was born in Shanghai, where his father, a literatus from Anhwei, was serving as a government official. When Hu Shih was 4 years old, his father died. By this time the child prodigy already knew 1,000 Chinese characters. While in primary school, Hu received an education in the Chinese classics and was an avid reader of vernacular fiction.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Hu Shih