Chapter 11: Reassessing Hu Shi — 70 Percent Native, 30 Percent Foreign, Firmly Rooted in the Confucian Tradition

In the 1950s on the Chinese mainland, there was a nationwide mass movement devoted specifically to criticizing Hu Shi. The year 1954 marked the peak of this campaign, which sought to denounce and utterly discredit Hu Shi’s so-called bourgeois philosophical thought, demanding that all intellectuals draw a clear line between themselves and Hu Shi.

I. Communist Loudspeakers Tried to Lure Him Back; Hu Shi Finally Escaped Beijing

At that time Hu Shi was in the United States, so the campaign amounted to an “absent-target” criticism. Mao Zedong felt that criticizing someone who was not present was unsatisfying, and therefore had intermediaries pass messages to Hu Shi urging him to return. Mao even emphasized that the person and his ideas would be treated separately, that Hu Shi’s personal dignity would be respected, and that he would be free to come and go. Hu Shi replied: “Apart from his ideas, what else does Hu Shi have?”

In 1949, Hu Shi was trapped in Beijing and narrowly managed to escape. Having escaped once, how could he possibly reenter an iron barrel? At the time, loudspeakers of the People’s Liberation Army blared daily toward Beijing, demanding that Hu Shi stay on and continue as president of Peking University. Hu Shi finally managed to get away and went to the United States to live freely.

Hu Shi (1891–1962), originally named Hu Sìméi, admired Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the idea of “survival of the fittest,” so he changed his name to “Shi,” and became known as Hu Shi. He was the standard-bearer of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s, making outstanding contributions in literature, philosophy, historiography, education, ethics, and many other fields. Hu Shi was two years older than Mao Zedong, yet died earlier, passing away in 1962 at the age of seventy-one.

II. Mao Zedong Once Admired and Consulted Him; Hu Shi Later Advised Mao in Vain

In 1920, Mao Zedong drafted the “Charter of the First Self-Study University of Hunan” in Beijing, based on one of Hu Shi’s lectures on self-education, and brought it to Hu Shi’s home for review and revision. Hu Shi carefully reviewed it, Mao took the revised version, and soon returned to Changsha to establish the self-study university. In 1936 in Yan’an, Mao personally told Edgar Snow: “I am a loyal reader and admirer of Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi.”

By the time Japan surrendered in 1945, the situation had changed. Hu Shi, then in the United States, sent Mao Zedong a telegram, earnestly and somewhat naively urging him: “Now that Japan has surrendered, the Chinese Communist Party no longer needs to maintain a large private army. The CCP should learn from the British Labour Party. That party has not a single soldier, yet in the recent election it won an overwhelming victory and obtained five years of governing power.” Naturally, Hu Shi never received a reply. Mao was no longer the May Fourth-era auditor at Peking University or assistant librarian, but the leader of a party commanding massive armed forces, and he had no reason to take seriously an unarmed scholar.

On March 9, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek sent Chiang Ching-kuo to Shanghai to meet Hu Shi, asking him to go to the United States as a mediator to seek American involvement in peacefully resolving the civil war. Hu Shi sailed on April 21 to San Francisco, only to learn that on April 19 Chiang Kai-shek had rejected the CCP’s twenty-four demands and that the PLA had already crossed the Yangtze River. The situation was settled, and Hu Shi could do nothing to reverse it. On June 19, the new premier Yan Xishan invited Hu Shi to serve as foreign minister, but Hu Shi declined.

III. The United States Considered Backing Hu Shi to Replace Chiang as President

In the United States, Hu Shi accepted a position in 1950 as director of the East Asian Library at Princeton University in order to make a living. On June 23, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Asian and Pacific Affairs met with Hu Shi, hoping to persuade him to lead anti-Communist, pro-American figures in exile and in Taiwan, thereby replacing Chiang’s regime. Hu Shi expressed no interest in politics. At that time, the United States had lost confidence in Chiang and hoped to establish a third force to counter Communist expansion. Because Hu Shi showed no interest, the matter was dropped.

In subsequent years, Hu Shi spent considerable time talking with historian Tang Degang about past events and writing memoirs. When the campaign criticizing Hu Shi reached its peak in China in 1954, Tang would bring stacks of Chinese newspapers to Hu Shi every week, and the two would joke while reading them over meals.

IV. Mao Zedong Again Tried to Lure Him Back, Promising to Criticize Only His Ideas

Mao Zedong once conveyed to Hu Shi through intermediaries: “Criticizing you is criticizing your ideas, not you as a person. I respect your character. Criticizing your ideas is unavoidable—if I don’t do it, your ideas will spread uncontrollably in intellectual circles, and I won’t be able to maintain my situation.” He also said: “Hu Shi is truly stubborn. I’ve had people take messages urging him to return, but I don’t know what he is so attached to. To be honest, he did make contributions to the New Culture Movement. Restore his reputation in the twenty-first century.”

Had Hu Shi really returned, Mao Zedong would at least have given him a senior ministerial post. Hu Shi was of presidential stature; if he had gotten along with Mao, becoming a vice premier or vice chairman of the state was entirely possible. Mao would have given him a few years of glory. But Hu Shi would not have escaped the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, nor the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Shi advocated independence and freedom, insisted on skepticism as the starting point of scholarship, and was famous during the May Fourth era for advocating “more study of problems, less talk of -isms,” refusing to be led by the nose by any single ideology. All of this stood in opposition to the Communist Party, which talked only of ideology—specifically Marxism—and allowed no alternatives. To force intellectuals to obey, Mao had to thoroughly discredit Hu Shi’s independence and freedom. In fact, criticism of Hu Shi’s thought began gradually in 1951, peaked in 1954, and continued even into 1958.

Hu Shi did not fall into the trap again. Once inside the iron barrel, there would be no exit—only destruction. Mao launched a nationwide movement of enormous scale; even Hu Shi’s son was mobilized. Assigned to teach at Tangshan Railway Institute after graduation, he was required to publish an article titled “A Criticism of My Father Hu Shi,” denouncing Hu Shi as a class enemy and “an enemy of the people,” publicly declaring the severing of father–son relations.

V. The Son Who Stayed on the Mainland Was Driven to Suicide

Even so, by 1957 Hu Shi’s son was still labeled a rightist and driven to despair, eventually committing suicide. He had not left Beijing with Hu Shi in 1949, and this was his fate. Had Hu Shi himself stayed, he too would not have escaped—his end would have been obvious.

Mao’s campaign against Hu Shi was in essence a campaign against intellectuals—a rectification movement forcing self-criticism, ideological remolding, Marxist–Leninist indoctrination, and unquestioning obedience to the Party. All dissenting voices were swept away to solidify absolute unity. After such massive campaigns, intellectuals had no choice but to submit in order to survive. Criticism became a commanded chorus: one dog barking at a shadow, a hundred dogs barking in response.

VI. Seventy Percent Native, Thirty Percent Foreign: Confucius, Not Dewey

The Communist Party denounced Hu Shi as “worshipping foreign things” and “a lackey of American imperialism.” Yet the historian Tang Degang, who studied Hu Shi deeply, said: “Hu Shi was seventy percent native product, thirty percent foreign goods.” In the 1920s, Hu Shi accompanied the American pragmatist John Dewey on lecture tours in China for two years, leading many to identify Hu Shi simply as a pragmatist. In truth, Hu Shi was Confucian at his core and never intended to “overthrow the Confucian shop.” To label him “America-first” was a misunderstanding.

Tang Degang evaluated Hu Shi as follows: “He was the founding master of China’s New Culture Movement, yet after fifty years of testing, he neither fell into extremism nor became outdated. He consistently maintained a balanced, central position—opening new paths, standing at the head of the Confucian tradition, seeking truth from facts, setting an example for all, and guiding our ancient civilization toward modernization.”

Hu Shi resembled Enlightenment philosophers such as Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. In such figures, the qualities of ordinary people, scholars, practitioners, and philosophers all coexisted. They wrote with the optimism and confidence of practitioners, using clear and authoritative prose to discuss all manner of issues under the sun.

VII. Ambassador to the United States, Bound-Foot Wife, A Clear Conscience

Hu Shi was an American-trained PhD and a model of new thought, yet he remained devoted for life to the bound-foot wife arranged by his mother. His wife was one year older than he, born in the Year of the Tiger. It was an arranged marriage; she had a few years of private schooling, was literate, supported her husband, raised children, and managed the household efficiently. Hu Shi respected his mother’s wishes all his life; in family photographs, his wife stood at the center, with Hu Shi beside her. Living beside his “tigress wife,” Hu Shi felt secure, at ease, and free.

During World War II, while serving as China’s ambassador to the United States, he collected stories from around the world about men who feared their wives. He found that only three countries lacked such stories: Germany, Japan, and Russia. He thus concluded that countries with stories of men fearing their wives were free and democratic, while those without such stories were authoritarian and totalitarian. He joked: “Don’t see that other people’s wives are fashionable and follow fashion blindly. It’s better to fear your wife a little. So after ‘might cannot bend him, wealth cannot corrupt him, poverty cannot move him,’ I add one more: ‘fashion should not be followed.’”

VIII. A Model of Old Morality and a Teacher of New Thought

Hu Shi died in Taipei in 1962. Chiang Kai-shek sent a couplet in his memory:
A model of old morality within the New Culture;
A teacher of new thought within old ethics.
These two lines neatly summarized Hu Shi’s life.

IX. Liang Qichao First, Hu Shi Second

Liang Qichao (1873–1929) was the foremost great thinker of the late Qing and early Republic. Hu Shi, eighteen years younger, belonged to the next generation of Enlightenment thinkers. When Liang Qichao was alive, he was the undisputed number one thinker. After Liang’s death, Hu Shi became China’s leading thinker. Liang Qichao was a heroic figure in Hu Shi’s mind; only someone of Liang’s caliber was fit to shoulder the nation’s great responsibilities. Hu Shi deeply admired Liang Qichao, mourned him profoundly at his death, and remembered him for decades.

From the late Qing through the Republic, China failed to follow the paths indicated by Liang Qichao and Hu Shi, instead veering toward the Russian extreme. This has been China’s tragedy.