Anti-Communist Master: Hu Shih (Part 1)

Hello everyone, it's Michael here. Our program Deception of the World systematically exposes the CCP's history of deception and murder through presenting historical events and influential people. Today I'd like to tell you about an influential figure in modern Chinese history. He is very famous and played a huge role in both political and academic fields in recent Chinese history, but mainland Chinese people may not even know him. His name is Hu Shi. Chinese people are not familiar with him because the communist party hated him to the point of gnashing their teeth. During the Cultural Revolution, in many propaganda-read films, the main villain is often surnamed Hu. For example, the thug landlord portrait in the 1974 film Shining Red Star is called Hu Hansen. One of the eight Cultural Revolution operas, Xia Jiabeng, has a despicable traitor called Hu Chuanghui. You may wonder why he was hated so much by the CCP. Well, let's dive into some recent history. Hu Shi is almost always inseparable whenever we talk about modern Chinese history. Anyone in the academic field knows that it may take up to seven years of study for someone to obtain a doctoral degree. However, Mr. Hu Shi has earned 36 doctoral degrees throughout his life, making him one of the few people that holds the most doctoral degrees in the world. He not only occupies an important place in the history of Chinese literature but also has unique insights into philosophy and history. Many great scholars of the Republic of China era were his students, close friends or loyal fans. What is more unique is that Hu Shi broke his vow of avoiding politics and decided to not only participate but also play a huge role in modern Chinese politics. He had a keen sense of political observation to see through the lies of the communist party and fought hard trying to Since there are so many legendary deeds of Mr. Hu Shi, let's talk about them over two episodes. Hu Shi was born in Shanghai in 1891 and was originally from Jishi, Anhui province. His father, Hu Chuan, also known as Hu Tuehua, was transferred to Taiwan two months after his birth and became the governor of Taitung. When Hu Shi was three years old, he went to Taiwan with his to join his father. After the first Sino-Japanese war, Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Qing dynasty and many officials were transferred from Taiwan back to the mainland. Hu Tuehua, at the request of Liu Yongfu, who was holding on to Tainan, stayed in Taiwan for a while but left only because he was seriously ill and died in Xiamen soon after. Before his death, he left a will for Hu Shi, encouraging him to study hard. As a child, Hu Shi was a gifted student and under his mother's tutelage, he studied hard and read many traditional classics. When he was 13 years old, he was given the opportunity to go to Shanghai to receive modern education, which was just being introduced to China at that time. Before he left, his mother arranged for him to get engaged to a distant relative, Jiang Dongxiu, who was one year older than him. Once he arrived in Shanghai, a new star emerged. In 1910, Hu Shi was admitted to the Second Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at Cornell University in the United States. I'll mention a few words about the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship and the three groups of elites who studied in the United States in the early 1900s. The Boxer Rebellion broke out in Beijing in the year of Emperor Guangxu's reign in 1900. The so-called righteous militia group, Yuhetuan, more commonly known as Boxers, besieged the embassies of various countries, leading to the capture of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance and the evacuation of the Qing Imperial Court. In 1901, General Li Hongzheng was forced to sign the humiliating as Boxer Protocol, agreeing to pay compensation of 450 million teals of silver to 14 countries to be paid in 39 years. This is the Boxer Indemnity. In 1908, the U.S. Congress passed a bill authorizing President Roosevelt to refund China the portion of the Boxer Indemnity that exceeded the actual losses incurred by the U.S., and to use the money to help China run schools and sponsor Chinese students to study in the United States. In 1909, 1910 and 1911, three recruitments for the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship took place in Beijing, taking candidates from all over China. The candidates were required to be physically strong, pure in temperament, complete in appearance and of a clean family background, in addition to being fluent in Chinese and English. For the first recruitment, 68 students passed the preliminary exams in Chinese, English, National History and National Geography, followed by retests in Physics, Chemistry, National History, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Foreign History and Foreign Geography. The preliminary exams and retests took seven or eight days in total. By the end, only 47 students were selected out of 630 candidates, which shows the fierce competition. The later president of Tsinghua University, Mei Yiqi, is one of the accepted students. The second recruitment took place in the following year. The recruitment was still divided into the preliminary exam and retest. More than 400 candidates took the exam and 70 people were admitted. Among them was the famous Hu Shi, who scored in the 55th place. Others admitted include the later linguist Zhao Yuanren and the meteorologist Zhu Kejun. In 1911, the third and last batch of Boxer Indemnity Scholarship students were admitted to study in the United States, 63 in total. Many returned to China after graduation and greatly impacted modern Chinese history. Now back to Hu Shi. He first studied Agriculture at Cornell University, then lost interest and switched to Liberal Arts, completing a major in Philosophy and Psychology, plus a minor in English Literature and Political Economy. In addition to his studies, Hu was also involved in various extracurricular activities and public affairs. For example, he was often invited by his church community to speak about recent Chinese history and so on. In 1915, after completing his undergraduate studies, he moved Columbia University in New York to pursue a doctorate in Philosophy under the tutelage of Professor John Dewey, a leading figure in American pragmatist philosophy at the time. His later academic ideas were heavily influenced by Professor Dewey. In the summer of 1917, after seven years of study in the United States, Hu Shi returns to Peking University to teach at the age of 26. At the repeated urges from his mother, despite his unwillingness, Hu Shi, who regarded his mother with the utmost filial piety, chose to return to his home village and marry Jiang Dongxiu. Jiang was a distant relative of Hu, whom his mother arranged when he was 14. This marriage between a young scholar who obtained a PhD degree in the United States and an ordinary village girl became one of the most talked about news at that time. After the marriage, Hu Shi had two sons and one daughter. The daughter died early, the elder son Hu Ziwang, whose name was the meaning of bringing honour to one's ancestors. The second son Hu Sidu means remembering Dewey, which not only expresses Hu Shi's respect for his mentor John Dewey, but also implies his lifelong firm belief in liberalism. Hu Shi, who returned to China, published an article in 1917 entitled, A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Reform. In this article he advocated for the use of written vernacular Chinese, as opposed to classical Chinese, which is more elegant but difficult to understand. Although the article itself is a mix between the two, it was regarded as the first manifesto for change in writing style. Hu Shi also described his new poetry in vernacular as an experiment, and therefore called his first poetry collection, Collection of Experiments. On May 4, 1919 in Beijing, the May Fourth Movement began. Students gathered to protest China's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles. The movement had sparked rapid changes among the intellectual and elite to reflect on the relation between Chinese traditions and Western thought. The Chinese Communist Party still selectively uses the influence of May the Fourth to endorse the party, because many people, such as original party leaders Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, were actively involved in May the Fourth, and introduced the deceptive political views of the Communist Party. On the other hand, Hu Shi and a few others insisted on regarding May Fourth as a non-politicised cultural movement. We will discuss this further in another video. In terms of scholarly research, Hu Shi first adopted the system and methods of modern Western philosophy to study Chinese pre-Qin philosophy. Based on his doctoral dissertation on the history of the famous schools of the pre-Qin dynasty, he prepared the first volume of Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, but unfortunately, he stopped there and never wrote the second volume. Philosopher Cai Yuanpei once praised the first volume of Hu Shi's Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy as the first new history of philosophy. The famous mainland philosopher Feng Youlan also believes that, in the modernisation of the study of the history of Chinese philosophy, Hu Shi's founding work cannot be overlooked. In literature, Hu Shi's research on the classical novels Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and twelve other novels was also a great achievement, with 600,000 words written and published in a collection called Textual Research on Traditional Chinese Novels. This collection had a great influence on many scholars, including Yu Pingbo, a later expert in academic study of Dream of the Red Chamber. In addition, Hu Shi wrote A History of Chinese Zen Buddhism, which was an in-depth study of Zen Buddhism. He also studied the commentary on the Water Classic and Confucius Classics and offered his own unique insights. Here's how this great man got the CCP to hate him to the bones. In 1922, Hu Shi became the Provost and Acting Dean of Arts and Sciences of Peking University. During his academic and teaching career and administrative work, the gentle and refined Hu Shi began to care about current affairs. In 1930, he co-authored with Liang Shiqiu and Luo Longji a book entitled A Collection of Essays on Human Rights, which was censored by the national government. At that time, Hu Shi did not agree with the governmental system of the nationalist government under the leadership of He thought that Chiang did not understand democracy and the constitution and wrote an article criticising it. However, when the war against Japan broke out in 1937, Hu Shi chose to support the nationalist government in the face of national crisis. He took commands to go to the United States as a Special Envoy in that year to gain the support of the United States. After this news reached Japan, the Japanese cabinet was under pressure and increased the number of Japanese ambassadors to the U.S. to three people, which was rare because they were afraid of Hu Shi's ability and wanted to suppress him. During his tenure as ambassador to the U.S. from 1938 to 1942, Hu Shi travelled to major cities in the U.S. to give speeches and solicit support from the American people for China's war effort, while he also met with President Roosevelt several times to obtain additional aid for the nationalist government. Hu Shi's efforts won the unanimous support of the U.S. government and public and earned a large amount of foreign aid for China's resistance against Japan. However, Hu himself did not take any of it. Even his share of the ambassador's special support income was returned to the government untouched, showing his high moral integrity. In 1942, Hu Shi resigned from his post as ambassador to the United States and lived in New York to engage in academic research. In 1943, he was appointed as an honorary advisor to the Oriental Division of the Library of Congress, and in 1944, he lectured at Harvard University. However, because Hu Shi was so well-connected and had social engagements almost every night, he often stayed up late into the night to write and prepare his lectures for the next day, which aggravated his heart condition. After the end of the war, on November 28, 1946, Chiang proposed the draft constitution of the Republic of China to the National Assembly, which was accepted by Hu Shi, who became the chairman of the National Assembly. Naturally, Hu's earlier criticism about Kuomintang's lack of constitution was resolved. Although Hu Shi was mainly in the academic field, he was not completely separated from politics at this time. As the Chinese Civil War exacerbated, the communist army surrounded Beiping at the end of 1948. Wu Han, a university student in Beijing, was ordered by the CCP to persuade his mentor, Hu Shi, to stay and serve the CCP. Of course, Hu Shi has already seen through the tricks of the CCP and left Beiping. At the request of Chiang, Hu Shi went to the United States again in his personal capacity to make another diplomatic effort for survival of the Nationalist government. Hu valued his student Wu Han's talent, so he said more than once that it is a pity that Wu Han has taken the wrong path. As for Wu Han, the wrong path led him to a tragic end. Later, he struggled a pun severely and died in prison during the Cultural Revolution. When Hu Shi arrived in San Francisco in April 1949, he was faced with a swarm of reporters. Although he had not read the newspapers for more than 10 days, he already knew that the situation in the Chinese Civil War had gotten worse dramatically, and Mr Hu really did not know what to say at this point. He paused and then said, no matter how difficult the situation is, I am willing to use my moral strength to support Mr Chiang Kai-shek's government. My moral support may not be worth anything, but I am sincere in what I say. For if we do not support this government, what other government can we support? If this government collapses, where will we go? At that time, the United States was deceived by the Communist Party's rhetoric and chest-thumping promises of a democratically elected government, and mistakenly chose to abandon the national government, so all of Hu's civil diplomatic efforts were unsuccessful. In his grief and anger, Hu Shi cancelled all his appointments with American politicians, to protest the short-sightedness and stupidity of American politicians. That's all for today. Let's talk about Mr Hu's interesting life, especially his glorious deeds which were hated by the CCP in the next episode. Thank you for watching Deception of the World. Please like and subscribe to our channel. See you in the next episode.