27 Facts About Hu Shih

1.

Hu Shih, known as Hu Suh in early references, was a Chinese diplomat, essayist and fiction writer, literary scholar, philosopher, and politician.

2.

Hu Shih was influential in the May Fourth Movement, one of the leaders of China's New Culture Movement, was a president of Peking University, and in 1939 was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature.

3.

Hu Shih had a wide range of interests such as literature, philosophy, history, textual criticism, and pedagogy.

4.

Hu Shih was an influential redology scholar and held the famous Jiaxu manuscript for many years until his death.

5.

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.

6.

In January 1904, Hu Shih's family arranged his marriage to Chiang Tung-hsiu.

7.

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

8.

Hu Shih quit New Youth in the 1920s and published several political newspapers and journals with his friends.

9.

Hu Shih's Peking University colleague Wen Yuan-ning dubbed Hu a "philosophe" for his wide-ranging humanistic interests and expertise.

10.

Hu Shih personally translated her speech delivered at Beijing National University which stressed the importance of birth control.

11.

Hu Shih was recalled in September 1942 and was replaced by Wei Tao-ming.

12.

Hu Shih was chief executive of the Free China Journal, which was eventually shut down for criticizing Chiang Kai-shek.

13.

Hu Shih 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.

14.

Selection 15 of the Putonghua Proficiency Test is a story about Hu Shih debating the merits of Written vernacular Chinese over Classical Chinese.

15.

Hu Shih greatly appreciated the universality of such a scientific approach because he believed that such a methodology transcends the boundary of culture and therefore can be applied anywhere, including China during his time.

16.

Hu Shih was not so interested in the content of Dewey's philosophy, caring rather about the method, the attitude, and the scientific spirit.

17.

Hu Shih saw all ideologies and abstract theories only as hypotheses waiting to be tested.

18.

Hu Shih described him own as experiential inductive, verificatory, and evolutionary.

19.

Hu Shih brought the scientific method and the spirit of Skepticism into traditional Chinese textual study, laying the groundwork for contemporary studies of Chinese intellectual history.

20.

In 1919, Hu Shih published the first volume of An Outline History of Chinese Philosophy; the later portion was never finished.

21.

Hu Shih firmly believed that the world as a whole was heading toward democracy, despite the changing political landscape.

22.

Hu Shih calls democracy "naive politics", a political system that can help cultivate those who participate in it.

23.

Hu Shih responded fiercely with an article in Crescent Moon titled "Human Rights and Law".

24.

Hu Shih's works are listed chronologically at the Hu Shih Memorial Hall website.

25.

Hu Shih wrote that this is an unequal and illogical view of life, that there is no natural or moral law upholding such a practice, that chastity is a mutual value for both men and women, and that he vigorously opposes any legislation favoring traditional practices on chastity.

26.

Hu Shih is considered one of the key leaders of the Chinese language reform and the vernacular style of writing articles.

27.

Furthermore, Hu Shih meant that China needed more new things.