Hu Shih
Hu Shih
Hu Shihwas a Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat. Hu is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese. He was influential in the May Fourth Movement, one of the leaders of China's New Culture Movement, was a president of Peking University, and in 1939 was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature. He had a wide range of interests such as literature, history, textual criticism,...
NationalityChinese
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth17 December 1891
CountryChina
The sun exactly at noon is exactly [beginning to] go down. And a creature when he is born is exactly [beginning to] die.
After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.
The Renaissance movement of the last two decades differs from all the early movements in being a fully conscious and studied movement.
A group of slaves will never make a liberal and progressive country; such a country can be made up only of independent-minded and free-thinking people.
The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.
And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.
And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools.
It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.
The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.
In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.
Grasp the opportunity with both hands to feel really very special as an Indian reading these quotes on the Indian Independence Day. A number of famous and reputed persons have thrown some light on the chapter of Indian Independence. India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border!"
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood.
For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.