Hu Shih
Modern Chinese · East Asia · 1891 to 1962
Chinese scholar who urged testing every idea by its results, and who led a drive to write in plain, spoken Chinese.
What it is
Hu Shih (1891 to 1962) was a Chinese scholar, writer and diplomat. He was born in Shanghai and studied in the United States, where he came under the influence of the philosopher John Dewey and the school of thought called pragmatism. He was a leading figure in China's New Culture Movement.
Among the things he is known for are his call to write in the language people actually speak, and his insistence that ideas should be treated as hypotheses and tested by what they lead to. He also served as China's ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942.
The main ideas
- Test ideas by results. He took from John Dewey the method of pragmatism, treating ideas as hypotheses to be tested and checked.
- Write as people speak. In 1917 he proposed a living literature in plain spoken Chinese, free of the older classical style, in a proposal printed in New Youth.
- Gradual change. He favoured change step by step, not by sudden revolution.
- Liberal politics. He is counted among the leading liberals of his time in China.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine someone who is handed a grand theory that promises to solve every problem. Hu Shih would ask them to start smaller: name the particular problem, propose an answer as a guess, and check it against what really happens. This is an illustration of his method, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- The 1917 proposal for literary reform appeared in the magazine New Youth and argued for writing in the plain spoken language.
- Experiments (1920) is his collection of poems written in the plain spoken language.
- His years as ambassador to the United States ran from 1938 to 1942.
- Peking University and Academia Sinica were the institutions where he taught and later led, the latter in Taiwan until his death.
Questions and criticism
- Pragmatism as a test. It is fair to ask how long one should wait for the results before judging an idea, when some results take a long time to show.
- Gradual or fast. It is fair to ask when gradual change is enough and when it is too slow.
- Plain language and its price. Writing in the spoken language opened literature to more people. It is fair to ask what, if anything, was lost from the older style.
Close neighbours
The page on John Dewey is the nearest, since Hu Shih drew on him, and the page on Kang Youwei covers another Chinese thinker of the modern age.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced by
- John Dewey · He studied under Dewey and spread his pragmatism in China.