I first met Hu Shih shortly after 1923 when I returned to China from my studies in the United States. However, it was only after the Mukden Incident in 1931 that I came to know him more intimately. He was then teaching in the National Peking University and I in Tsinghua. A group of friends met with him frequently to discuss the crisis created by Japanese aggression. The group, after long and careful deliberation, decided to establish a weekly journal of political discussion. Hu Shih was naturally chosen to be its editor-in-chief. V. K. Ting, Eu Ssu-nien and I were associated with him in the editorial work. We had a weekly editorial dinner-meeting, in which about ten people participated.
In editing the Independent Critic, Hu Shih insisted that there should be no unsigned editorials. He required that every member of the editorial board should sign whatever he wrote. He thought that anonymity was misleading, inasmuch as no two persons thought exactly alike on any subject; if there was agreement, it was only in general trend and not in every shade of opinion or in every concrete detail. A journal could only be honest with its readers by stating who in particular was responsible for the leading article it carried in any issue.
The Independent Critic came out at the time when the country, particularly the students, were fanatically patriotic, demanding a war of resistance against Japan. Hu Shih was as patriotic as anybody else. He thought that in the modern world all peoples were patriotic. In his mind patriotism was not a monopoly of anyone people. Patriotism alone could not save China. War was a serious business. He asked the readers of the Independent Critic to consider the alternatives to war. He was not a peace-at-any-price man, but he felt that without exhausting the possibilities of avoidance of war, leaders in and out of the government would not have discharged their duties to the country. In this line of thought he was strongly supported by V. K. Ting and myself but not so strongly by the others associated with the journal.
In his work with the Independent Critic, he showed unmistakably two of his strong characteristics, namely, his passion for individual freedom and responsibility and his rationalistic approach to all problems.
By the time the Independent Critic came out, the battle of the vernacular versus the classical language as the medium for literary expression had been fought and won: likewise the battle of science versus metaphysics. These issues were no longer issues, but the Independent Critic had much to say on education and culture. It was hospitable to all points of view.
Strangely Hu Shih himself never paid too much attention to economic problems or to the menace of Communism. He was, of course, opposed to Communism. He thought that his entire life and work were against the spread of the Communist ideology, for which he had only contempt. He regarded the Communist doctrine to be both unscientific and inhuman. Indeed, no system of thought could be further away from what Hu Shih believed in than Communism. In this matter it may be said that Hu Shih overestimated the rationalism and humanism of modern peoples and thereby underestimated the factor of human passions.
It is only natural that when the Communists in 1956 ushered in the period of the "one hundred flowers," the critics of the Communist regime, directly or indirectly, fell back on the philosophy of Hu Shih. It is also natural that once the Communists closed the period, they should mobilize the intellectual elite on the mainland to combat the spirit of Hu Shih. Philosophers, historians and literary critics were all required to give a command performance against Hu Shih. Volume after volume came out to criticize the literary, philosophical and historical writings of our friend. Nothing demonstrates so well the intellectual importance of Hu Shih as this Communist campaign against him.
Was he against the Kuomintang? No, he was not. He wished the Kuomintang to succeed. But he was against certain policies and practices of the Kuomintang. In this respect I can speak from intimate knowledge. During his years of residence in the United States as a private citizen after leaving the post of ambassador in Washington, D.C., he never criticized the government or its leaders. He often said to me: "If I wish to criticize the politics of our own country, the place to do it is in Taipei and not in New York."
When the government asked him to be the president of the Academia Sinica, some of his friends who were against the government advised him not to accept the post. If he wished to accept it, they said, he should remain in the United States and perform his duties only nominally. Hu Shih thought such advice to be cowardly and irresponsible. He was interested, deeply interested, in the work of the Academia Sinica. He felt he had a contribution to make. He was ready to devote the last years of his life to the promotion of knowledge in China through the Academia Sinica. He did not regard his post as a political one. Culture and enlightenment, he felt, could not control the politics of a country. But he was equally sure that the state of enlightenment of a society in the long run conditioned the politics of a country. He did not, while president of the Academia Sinica, seek to influence the politics except on rare occasions. He was at all times ready and willing to offer his ideas to the leaders of the government on subjects on which he had done some thinking, but he never indulged in any backbiting or partisan criticism.
Whether Hu Shih should have tried to organize a political party and engage in practical politics is open to question. He considered it carefully and repeatedly. After consideration, he decided against such procedure. I was at no time anxious that he should lead the modern-minded people of China in a political party. I knew that at most he and his friends could only play the role of opposition, because their was no way for him to make his party the majority party of free China. Nevertheless, I thought that the Chinese people should learn the art and the practice of a responsible opposition. There are good and bad governments with various degrees of goodness and badness. There are also good and bad oppositions with various degrees of goodness and badness. If a country cannot produce a good opposition, it is most likely that it cannot produce a good government. Both elements are essential to the success of a democratic regime.
Those friends of Hu Shih who regret that he did not form a political party should always try to study the responsibilities and the technique of an opposition.
There has been much misunderstanding of Hu Shih's stand in relation to Chinese culture. The conservatives of China have complained that Hu Shih undermined the value of the old culture of China. He may have. He appreciated the greatness of Chinese culture, but he saw also its shortcomings. In relation to Chinese culture he was, in fact, neither an iconoclast nor an idolater. He urged that Chinese history, philosophy and literature should be studied objectively and scientifically. What is false or unsound should be openly discarded. To pretend that China's great men of the past were perfect or all-sufficient was a pretense for which he had no use. Furthermore, he believed that if Chinese culture should be studied scientifically, the present and the future generations would appreciate that culture all the more, and that the stature of Chinese culture after a process of modern criticism would remain great.
In matters of the spirit, Hu Shih always said that the present generation had available two great assets which the past generations of China did not have, namely, modern science and Western culture. I do not wish to say much about modern science because no one in China today is against it. But I would like to say a few things about Western culture. Hu Shih appreciated the differences as well as the similarities between Chinese and Western cultures. He had a proper appreciation for both. When he spoke out in praise of the richness and variety of Western culture, it was because, first of all, he believed in it and, secondly, Chinese culture could be enriched by learning as much as possible from modern science and Western culture. Indeed, if Chinese culture should fail to assimilate modern science and certain elements of Western culture, China would be deliberately sacrificing the possibilities of a new cycle of spiritual development. The conservatives of China have faith in China's past. Hu Shih had faith in China's past and in her future. He urged the present and the future generations to look forward and not backward. He wished the Chinese people to reach new heights of achievement and not content itself with what the past generations had done. His spirit should therefore inspire us to new and greater efforts to develop a Chinese culture more glorious than it has ever been.