HU SHIH

born Dec. 17, 1891, Shanghai, China died Feb. 24, 1962, Taiwan Chinese Nationalist diplomat and scholar, an important leader of Chinese thought who helped establish the vernacular as the official written language (1922). He was also an influential propagator of American pragmatic methodology as well as the foremost political liberal in Republican China (191249), advocating building a new country not through political revolution but through mass Chinese education. Additional reading Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (1934), a collection of lectures presenting Hu Shih's views on the cultural changes of modern China through disintegration and readjustment; Bertrand Russell et al., Living Philosophies: A Series of Intimate Credos (1931), includes an English adaptation of Hu Shih's autobiography; Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution 19171937 (1970), a historical account of the roots and developments of Hu Shih's liberal ideas between 1917 and 1937; Chou Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960), a definitive study of the intellectual revolution in modern China in which the leading role played by Hu Shih is thoroughly examined; Chan Wing-tsit, Hu Shih and Chinese Philosophy, Philosophy, East and West, 6:312 (195657), a summary of Hu Shih's contribution to Chinese philosophy; Chan Lien, Chinese Communism vs. Pragmatism: The Criticism of Hu Shih's Philosophy, 19501958, Journal of Asian Studies, 27:551570 (1968), an interpretation of the criticisms launched by the Chinese Communists against Hu Shih during the 1950s.