Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 PDF
Preview Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937
Harvard East Asian Series 46 The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and adjacent areas. Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance An example of Hu Shift's distinctive cal- ligraphy: Title page of Jen-ch'iian lun-chi (A collection of essays on human rights), pub- lished in Shanghai, 1930 Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 191J—1937 Jerome Β. Grieder Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts i yo 9 © Copyright 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Preparation of this volume has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-106958 SBN 674-41250-8 Printed in the United States of America To my mother and father, Naomi Lane Babson Grieder and Paul A. Grieder Contents Preface ix Part I The Education of a Chinese Intellectual ι The Early Years, 1891-1910 3 2 The American Experience, 1910-1917 39 Part II The Chinese Renaissance 3 The Literary Revolution 75 4 The New People and the New Society 8g 5 China and the West 129 Part III Liberalism 6 Peking, 1917-1926 173 7 Shanghai, 1927-1930 217 8 Peking Again, 1931-1937 246 Part IV An Epilogue and an Evaluation g The Later Years 293 10 The Chinese Renaissance, Chinese Liberalism, and the Chinese Revolution 314 Appendixes A. The Women in Hu's Life 351 B. The Chinese Delegation to the VIII Congress of the International Federation of Students, 1913 355 C. The Chinese Communist Attack on Hu Shih 358 Bibliography 369 Glossary 399 Index 405 vi Illustrations Frontispiece. An example of Hu Shih's distinctive calligraphy. Title page of Jen-ch'üan lun-chi (A collection of essays on human rights), published in Shanghai, 1930. Following page ιηο Hu Shih as a schoolboy. Published in Hu Shih liu-hsüeh jih-chi, facing p. 423. Hu Shih in 1914. From Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, June 4, 1914, p. 543. Hu Shih in China, about 1920. From Who's Who in China (Shang- hai: China Weekly Review, 1925), p. 373. Portrait bust of Hu Shih by Lucile Swan, done in· Peiping in the early 1930s. Photograph by Serge Vargassoff, published in Asia magazine, March 1935, p. 139. Postwar caricature of Hu Shih by Loh Han-ying (pseud. Chang Kwong-tso). Published in Shanghai T'ieh-pao, reprinted in China Weekly Review, May 31, 1947, p. 377. Hu Shih in Taiwan in his later years. Photograph by Li Ho-sheng, published in Hai-wai lun-t'an, May 1, 1962, p. 2. vii Preface This is a study of the ideas of Hu Shih (1891-1962), and of Hu's efforts to shape China's intellectual response to the modern world. It thus falls into the category of intellectual biography, a fact which I acknowledge only with some misgiving. For intellectual biography is a presumptuous undertaking. The biographer who deals in ideas must strive to tell not only what his subject said, but why; to relate word to thought, and in some measure to link thought to deed. Not only the discernible facts of a life are opened to scrutiny and judg- ment, but also the unseen and often unfelt threads of motive that bound these facts together into a coherent and vital whole. Even to attempt such a reconstruction presumes an encroachment by the writer upon the innermost center of his subject's being, an intimacy too great to exist without engendering in the one an emotional in- volvement in the life of the other. At the outset, then, it seems only fair to apprise the reader of my prejudices, insofar as I am conscious of them. I first saw Hu Shih in the spring of 1955, when he addressed a colloquium of the East Asian Regional Studies program at Harvard University. His topic was "The Intellectual Revolution in Modern China," and even as a fledgling graduate student I knew enough about the subject to recognize its importance, and enough about Dr. Hu to acknowledge the privileged position that he had occu- pied in the history he proposed to discuss. I knew enough, too, to suspect in the end that he had not done justice to the subject in an hour devoted largely to a self-justifying account of the political and intellectual blunders that everyone else had made. I carried away from that evening an appreciation of the urbane affability of the speaker, and little desire to pursue the study of an intellectual re- form movement that claimed such a self-indulgent figure as one of its leaders. I might have dismissed Hu outright after that first encounter had it not been for the fact that the Chinese Communist attack on his life and works was just at its peak, and this suggested itself to me as a suitable topic for seminar research. Reading the anti-Hu polemics of Peking's ideologues led me inevitably back to an exam- ination of the ideas and activities against which they aimed their ix Preface criticism. As I became better acquainted with the opinions that Hu had published in China in the years 1917-1937 and with the circum- stances surrounding them, my harsh first judgment of him began to soften. Later still, in Taiwan, I began to sense the dimensions of the psychological burden that rested upon Hu and others of his generation, men who had witnessed the accomplishments of a life- time repudiated, often in a violent and highly personal fashion as was the case with Hu himself. If Hu was, at the end of his life, a disappointing figure, vaingloriously parading the reputation earned in an earlier and more propitious era, he was also, I think, a pro- foundly disappointed man. In that other time and setting much of what he had had to say had been perceptive, substantial, and even in an undramatic way courageous. In this book I hope that I have been able to make clear my reasons for thinking so. I should add, however, that this study is not intended merely as a defense of Hu against his critics, least of all his critics in Communist China, whose views, profusely published in the mid-1950s, I have relegated to an appendix. Hu Shih's ideas merit attention in their own right, and that is what I have tried to accord them here. Hu Shih was a scholar — by education and vocation a philoso- pher, or more accurately a student of the history of philosophy, and by avocation a student of the history of Chinese literature. But he was also a man of wide-ranging interests, with opinions on the vital issues of his time that he felt obligated to share with any who might wish to listen or to read. This is not a book about Hu's scholarship or about his very considerable contributions to the development of a modern understanding of the significance of certain aspects of the Chinese tradition. I have not attempted to assess the usefulness or the validity of what Hu said concerning China's past, but rather to evaluate the manner in which he sought to mold contemporary opinion about the modern world and China's place in it. My aim has been to set forth a record of Hu's views on the great social, political, and intellectual problems that confronted the Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s, and to try to understand why he said what he did about man's relationship to his environment and his culture, about the nature of history and of cultural transformation, and about China's future in the new age into which she had been com- pelled to enter. In his pronouncements on these questions of general import Hu expressed what has usually been characterized, by his enemies as χ
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