His heart failed him when he was jocosely talking with other men of letters. It was only hours after he, as president of the Academia Sinica, had helped elect seven new academic fellows. He died with a smile on his lips and hosts of admirers around him.
In a way, death came as a vindication for Dr. Hu. Barely two months ago, his 25-minute speech charging lack of spiritual values in the traditional culture brought on a wave of protests from the traditionalists. National debate for or against his views raged throughout China. One professor, an arch traditionalist who defended everything anciently Chinese, proposed that Dr. Hu should be tarred, feathered and airdropped to the Chinese mainland "to which he properly belongs." Dr. Hu's disciples had acidly pointed out that on the mainland the Communists have been conducting an intellectual witch hunt aimed at Dr. Hu and his teachings.
But his death proved his greatness. Universal recognition of Dr. Hu Shih as a patriot, an intellectual pioneer and a fighter for science and democracy—a recognition long denied him by his vociferous opponents—came quickly.
Even newspaper reporters, who are supposed to be made of flinty material, cried and forgot to write the news. Young students in colleges voluntarily put on black armbands. For days, thousands of people, mostly with swollen eyes, trooped into the mortuary to have a last look at the man who, some say, wielded the most profound influence on Chinese civilization since Confucius.
The professor who proposed the airdropping said he still could not agree with Dr. Hu but conceded that he was a good man.
This personal triumph is coupled with the stark fact that Dr. Hu's ideas have not succeeded too well. While nursing a weak heart, Dr. Hu—at 71—was fighting the same forces he opposed when he was a little known young man of vision and energy. They were the traditionalists on the right and the Marxists on the left.
Desert Footprints
Early this year, Dr. Hu was recuperating in hospital. The debate was going on. He did not choose to get into the argument because the issues involved were those of 45 years ago. In those 45 years, he had spoken or written millions of words.
Hu Shih remained a pioneer. The "barren desert of culture" which he intended to convert into an oasis is today far from being a grazing land for intellectuals, although. his footprints are all over the place.
Hu Shih was born on December 17, 1891, to a mandarin's family hailing from Chichi in Anhwei province. His father, Hu Ti-hua, was the magistrate for the prefecture of Taitung in Taiwan. When the Manchus ceded Taiwan to Japan as a result of the Shimonoseki treaty, the people of Taiwan organized a defense force to resist the Japanese imperial army. Old Mr. Hu, already suffering from serious leg diseases, joined the defense force until there was little to be defended. He left for Amoy and died three months later.
Hu Shih was not born in Taiwan as some of the Taitung people are wont to claim. He did live in Taitung for a while when a baby. His precocity was a family legend. At about seven, he was already reading and writing with comparative fluency.
School in Shanghai
At the age of 13, Hu Shih went to Shanghai and attended the Meichi School. It must be noted that at that time very few Chinese children went to a duly instituted school. Mostly, they went to private classes held by frustrated pedants who had failed to become mandarins. At 14, Hu Shih become a student of the Chengchung Middle School. Later, he was enrolled at the China Academy.
He did not graduate from the academy because of insolvency. For some time, he managed to earn a living by teaching English and Chinese at a middle school. In 1910, Hu Shih succeeded in winning a government scholarship for study in the United States.
He went to Cornell University and tried to learn agriculture. Soon, he discovered that he was tailor-made for letters. Accordingly, he changed his department. In later life, he was to tell his friends the one year in agricultural school was not wasted, because he could tell rice from wheat.
From Cornell, he migrated to another Ivy League school, Columbia. It was there that he comes to admire Professor John Dewey and his theories of pragmatism. Hu Shih expounded Dewey's ideas throughout his life. The professor went to China for lectures at the invitation of his illustrious disciple.
With a PhD degree, Hu Shih left Columbia in 1917. In the Peking of that time, Western winds were brewing. Dr. Tsai Yuan-pei, a liberal scholar, was the chancellor of Peking University, and he had the singular ambition of making Peita the most liberal university. Lecturing there were several prominent traditionalists as well as a large contingent of rebels. These rebels were trying to revolutionize Chinese culture.
Before coming home, Hu Shih had already corresponded with the rebels and supplied the brains. Once back, he became a professor at Peita and joined the rebels' ranks. The young man of 26 immediately was made the ringleader.
It was while teaching at Peita that he and his friends started the "new culture movement" demanding the abolition of the archaic wen yen as the style of writing. They proposed the colloquial pai hua. They also introduced science as a weapon against traditional Chinese metaphysics. The "May 4" student movement of 1919 took place when Dr. Hu was teaching at Peita.
It was at about the same time that Dr. Hu was married. He had written many articles against arranged marriages. Still, he married the girl, a Miss Kiang, in a partnership arranged by his mother. Dr. and Mrs. Hu Shih nevertheless were an ideal couple and never suffered from the defects of the old-fashioned marriage system.
In 1928, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek unified China. Dr. Hu returned from a trip to Europe and America to become president of the China Academy in Shanghai. Three years later, he went back to Peita as dean of arts. When Japan took Peiping in 1937, Dr. Hu left for visits to Europe and America.
In 1938, Dr. Hu put on the striped pants and became China's ambassador to the United States. V-J Day saw him home again. He was made chancellor of Peita. He also was elected a member of the National Assembly and sat in the chair more than once.
In 1948, Generalissimo Chiang offered Dr. Hu the presidency of the Republic of China. Hu Shih, who used to advise his followers "to study the problems more but talk less about political doctrines", politely declined. Later, he also declined another offer—that of premier.
Last Plane Out
He stayed in Peiping until late 1948, when the Chinese Communists surrounded the ancient capital. President Chiang dispatched a plane and flew Dr. Hu out. It was the last plane. Dr. Hu went to the United States to lecture.
In 1952 and 1954, Dr. Hu came to Taiwan for lectures. He was the only non-ballplayer who could pack a huge stadium. His addresses were interestingly in consonance with his writings of many years ago.
In 1958, Dr. Hu came back once and for all. He was made president of the Academia Sinica. Mrs. Hu also came home. In the four years, Dr. Hu was admitted to the hospital several times because of heart trouble. He observed his 70th birthday in the sickbed.
Often escaping notice of the press was the fact that three years ago, Dr. Hu concurrently became chairman of a council devoted to long-range development of science in free China. In some ways the council is even more important than the Academia Sinica, since it takes a direct hand in promoting sciences, research and the livelihood of scientists.
While in the States, Dr. Hu lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and University of California. He also held 25 doctoral degrees, the most for a Chinese. He wrote 44 books including three in English.
The New Culture
The greatest contribution of Dr. Hu was the new culture movement that he started in 1918.
This movement envisages more than the introduction of the colloquial pai hua as the style of writing. It calls for a revolution in cultural outlook and approach. It urges the youth of China to look into the teachings of Confucius and to weed out what is no longer suitable. Dr. Hu does not subscribe to Confucianism. In fact, he is a sharp critic of the ancient Chinese sage, whose impact on Chinese thinking and life is still so poignantly felt today.
Some people attributed the slogan "Down With the Confucius Shop" to Hu Shih. Hu Shih never went that far. His main attacks were directed against the self-styled proponents of Confucianism, notably the Chu Hsi school of the Sung dynasty. Dr. Hu ridiculed many of the pseudo-Confucian institutions, such as the custom that a widow or even the fiancee of a deceased man should never remarry, such as the senseless rituals and pomp, and the convention to speak no evil, hear no evil and see no evil.
Said Dr. Hu in 1918: "We know for a fact our society is a rotten one; yet we claim ours to be a land of the saints and sages. We know for a fact our society is infested with corruption and nepotism; yet we shower eulogies on the corrupted. We know for a fact that we are inflicted with incurable diseases; yet we claim that all is very fine and well. Why don't we realize that if we want to cure the diseases we must first of all admit the diseases are there; if we want to have a good government, we must first of all admit that the government we have today is a bad one; and if we want to improve on our society, we must first of all acknowledge our society, as it is, is rotten to the core."
New Broom
Thus Dr. Hu criticized the corrupted family system, lashed at the inflexible and ludicrous codes, attacked the old, ridiculous customs and hypocritical conventions. He demanded frankness and straightforwardness. "Say the words of your own times," he wrote.
With the heirlooms of ancient China thus re-examined and criticized, Dr. Hu prescribed for science and democracy. In the late 1910, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy were popularized by the Hu school so much they became living slogans.
In aggrandizing science and democracy, Dr. Hu called for acceptance of the whole Western approach. He did not like such halfhearted approaches as "Chinese culture as the foundation, Western culture as the means." Institutionalized, Chinese culture, he said last year, has little spiritual value.
He defined his new culture movement as "study of the problems, import of knowledge, rearrangement of Chinese thoughts and building of a new culture." Running throughout his writings is the pragmatic way of looking at things. Dr. Hu told young men that if they discovered after much study that they could not agree with Hu Shih, "go ahead and disagree with Hu Shih."
In studies, one must be "daring in making hypotheses but cautious in finding the evidences." Once one finds the hypothesis to be wrong, he ruled, one must admit his mistake and start all over again.
True Gentleman
But Hu Shih is not a denouncer of Confucius. The worst that the Confucianists could say of Hu Shih is that he did not take as truth every word uttered by Confucius. In character, Hu Shih could be safely classified as a genuine chun tzu (gentleman) in the eyes of Confucius. Hu Shih was kind to all men, devoted to his mother and wife, dedicated to China, his country, and having all the virtues extolled by Confucius.
Hu Shih never tried to negate Confucius entirely. He merely attacked those parts of Confucian teaching that had been grossly distorted by self-styled Confucianists.
Nor did Hu Shih ever propose indiscriminate transplanting of Western civilization. He introduced the pragmatic approach. Dr. Hu did not find every Western thing perfect. He was an atheist, believing in no religion at all and having strong reservations about the eternity of man. All men perish and some of the world's greatest inventors or writers did not even have names, Dr. Hu said. What may be eternal is our society.
These are part of the new culture movement launched by Dr. Hu and his friends in the first few years of the Republic. The degree of his success remains debatable. He convinced many people. Still, the traditionalists are fighting a rearguard action.
In propagating his new culture, Dr. Hu discovered that he had a good weapon, the colloquial pai hua. Wen Yen, the stilted Chinese way of writing, was the only one in 1917. The Chinese did not use punctuation marks. Cliches and redundancy marked the written language.
Dr. Hu declared that to storm and take the enemy's fort, pai hua must take over. He thus laid down the rule that only pai hua should be written. He started to write poems in pai hua, throwing all rhymes and meters out of the window. He invented and adopted punctuation marks. He wanted to open the Chinese language to all.
Some critics mistook his pai hua campaign as the whole range of his new culture movement. As a matter of fact, Dr. Hu was not the first to write in pai hua. Some of China's best novels, such as All Men Are Brothers, Red Chamber Dream and Journey to Heaven, were written hundreds of years ago in pai hua. Dr. Hu's pai hua poems were poor in quality.
However, Dr. Hu did save pai hua from the poorhouse and popularize it. He fought successfully the verbosity and inanity of wen yen, calling it a "dead language." He injected a force and vigor into pai hua. Today, pai hua is more widely accepted.
Again, his success in this field is not complete. Each era has its own writing style. The wen yen at the time of the pai hua campaign was the wen yen of the late Ching dynasty. It was different from the wen yen of the Han or Six Dynasties times. And written language usually is different from the spoken language. Dr. Hu insisted that pai hua could do without wen yen. Som of his critics pointed out that Dr. Hu wrote pai hua so well only because he was well versed in wen yen.
Losing Battles
Unfortunately, these critics seem to be winning the argument. Wen yen survived the Hu Shih onslaught. It is still taught in schools and used in letters and literary compositions. Even the pai hua today has assumed a new aspect. Dr. Hu's writings are clear-cut, straightforward and beautiful. But cliches now have crept into pai hua so that today it can be full of flowery inanity, journalistic double talk or flatness. This is something Hu Shih never anticipated.
Another generally mistaken idea concerns the May 4 movement. To Dr. Hu Shih, the May 4 (1919) student riot was not an entirely a fortunate development. The excitement and sentiments the revolt touched off made the intellectuals forget the new culture movement. The intellectuals began to think more of politics, less of culture.
The Chinese Communists have tried to glorify the May 4 movement as a purely political move inspired by Communism. This was not the case. The Communists also have tried to identify the students movement with the new culture movement. Again, this is not so.
Reforms Delayed
The new culture movement had been going on when the revolt came. The revolt fired up the patriotism and political consciousness of young men. In a way, it handicapped the mild, evolutionary new culture movement.
At the height of the student movement, Dr. Hu counseled calm. First, he called on the young to discuss the problems more than the political doctrines. He said, "The great danger of political doctrines is that they make people so self-contented that they may be led to think a fundamental solution is right here."
As the years went by, Dr. Hu noticed two distinct trends against democracy. On the left, a group of intellectuals tried to pass Marxism off as the only cure for China. On the right, another group of intellectuals preached dictatorship. Dr. Hu subscribed to neither. Although he wrote few political treatises, he was convinced that democracy is the only form of political ideology for China.
That is why Hu Shih had no liking for Communism. That is why he believed Communism will not last in China. And that is why the Chinese Communists have tried several times to "liquidate" the teachings of Hu Shih on the mainland. Mao Tse-tung's propagandists always picture Hu Shih as "the arch spokesman for capitalistic imperialism."
Life of Research
Dr. Hu diligently applied his theory of "daring hypothesis plus cautious research" to his work. After the new culture movement, he was mostly engaged in lecturing and research work. In fact, he never stopped doing historical research.
A valid criticism is that Dr. Hu spent too many years in research on relatively unimportant subjects, while leaving some of the books he had begun to write unfinished. For instance, his History of Chinese Philosophy stopped at the first volume. There were supposed to be second and third volumes but he was too preoccupied with other subjects to write them. Even his autobiography stopped short. It carried accounts of his boyhood, studies in the United States and no more.
On the other hand, he spent more than five years in trying to establish the identity of the hero of the novel Red Chamber Dream. He said the hero was the author, Tsao Shueh-ching. He also spent five years trying to reconstruct the life and teachings of the monk Sheng Hui. He went to London to read the raw material taken from the caves of Tung Huang, visited Japan, browsed in bookstores and did everything he could to bring to life an almost forgotten monk whose teachings had tremendous influence in the sixth century. And he wrote more than one million words about another Chinese novel, Hsin Shih Ying Yuan, concluding that the author was Pu Liu-hsien, a writer of established fame of the Ching dynasty.
Capacity for Truth
Most people agree that the Red Chamber Dream is a great book, Sheng Hui was a great monk and Pu Liu-hsien is a wonderful writer. Still, some critics insist Dr. Hu could have created a more profound influence on intellectuals by using his almost infinite capacity for getting at the truth.
On the other hand, observers are agreed that the one volume of his History of Chinese Philosophy, is a scientific, unbiased study. Despotic rulers of ancient China were known to favor the idea of burning the books they did not like. The latterday disciples of Confucius, especially the school led by Chu Hsi of the Sung dynasty, had few qualms about interpreting everything according to their own concepts. If the historical records did not agree with them, the records stood good chance of revision.
Thus Confucius became the only philosophical leader - with Laotze, Motze and the others branded as heretics. Since the late Han dynasty, there had been an unending effort to propagate Confucius or what were supposed to be the Confucian tenets. The Confucianists also would have people believe that Confucius was the golden mean - with Laotze on the left and Motze on the right.
Dr. Hu did justice to all schools of philosophy. He proved Confucius actually was the conservative.
Many better books on philosophical history were inspired by Dr. Hu. So much so that Dr. Hu's book, with the inevitable slight mistakes here and there, failed to make the grade as the definitive history.
His critics also insisted that with his wealth of historical knowledge and his penchant for accuracy, Dr. Hu could have written a really authentic and unbiased history of China. For at heart, he was a historian. Dr. Hu did not try very hard to write that book.
The Generalist
This writer agrees with those who maintain that Dr. Hu spent too much time on secondary subjects. He should have realized that men of letters of his standing and popularity are quite rare. He could have done more by trying to be a cultural leader and historian, rather than a bookworm who righted ancient wrongs.
Dr. Hu Shih was a good writer. But a large number of people could write better.
Dr. Hu was a good historian. But many others have written more better history.
Dr. Hu Shih did assiduous research on a great variety of subjects. Still, his contributions cannot be compared with the works of other scholars who established facts about the Shang dynasty, discussed totem systems in ancient China and made comprehensive studies of the economy, government and tax systems of the various ruling families.
Dr. Hu was the first one to write poems in pai hua. His poems lacked the finesse and vision of the poets of today.
Dr. Hu Shih advocated advancement of the sciences. But he was not a scientist despite his early interest in agriculture.
Dr. Hu imported Dewey's pragmatism into China. Yet Dewey is only one of the many thinkers introduced to Chinese intellectuals in the last century.
In short, Dr. Hu Shih would not rate as the best in any of these specialized fields.
Yet his achievements are greater than all the specialists put together. He became a unique institution.
This was because of his consistency, his integrity, his earnestness and his undying love for China. The man never changed in his basic beliefs. He meant what he said. He always tried to build up a better China through cultural progress. And he worked hard.
Because of his shining character, his love for the young and his unassuming manners, he could talk directly to the people. He was believed. He was revered. Herein lies the strength and popularity of Dr. Hu.
Men of his character and his achievements are rare indeed. That is why after his death an anonymous businessman said, "Dr. Hu's death is a bigger loss than that of the mainland. We still could retake the mainland but we have lost Dr. Hu forever."
Man of Contrasts
Dr. Hu was a man of optimism and boundless humor. He talked irrelevantly about the virtues of a hen-pecked husband. He made little jokes about himself and his friends. He sometimes went in for a few rounds of mahjong. Newspaper accounts of these activities would tend to present him as a frivolous man, or, at best, a wit.
But Dr. Hu was a serious man. He studied, even on the sickbed. His mind never stopped thinking over problems and questions, and seeking right answers. Said his secretary, "Mr. Hu's mind worked at a terrible pace. That was not good for an old man with a troublesome heart."
Dr. Hu would spin in his grave if someone compared him with Confucius. Yet, there are a number of things the two have in common. Both were rebels of their times. Both had tremendous influence during their lifetime, although surrounded by controversy. Confucius vindicated himself over the centuries. The shade of Dr. Hu Shih no doubt will have the same satisfaction.