the author unkown.
HU SHI, CORNELL CLASS OF 1914, may be counted among the most important alumni Cornell University has ever produced; some say he is the most important of all. Yet there still remains a discrepancy between name and recognition, between historical impact and local Ithaca lore.
A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891.
A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891.
Dr. Hu‘s Early Life
HU SHI, CORNELL CLASS OF 1914, may be counted among the most important alumni Cornell University has ever produced; some say he is the most important of all. Yet there still remains a discrepancy between name and recognition, between historical impact and local Ithaca lore.
A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891. This was a time when Charles Darwin was much discussed in intellectual circles east and west, and the end of the authoritative and aristocratic Chinese imperial system became foreseeable. The first Chinese newspapers started to take hold, and the creation of a public sphere of opinion would permeate the entire country. A few years later, in 1910-11, public opinion would play a huge role in the process of China‘s revolution. In fact when Hu Shi was asked, in 1942, what he liked best about the United States, he answered: "The press!"
Hu Shi was in Beijing around the time of the Chinese revolution, studying at one of the newly established universities. He applied for a scholarship, which brought him to Cornell University in the fall of 1910 where he embarked on studies in agriculture. He abandoned that field rather quickly to address the more existentialist questions offered by history, philosophy, and the arts. He was hailed as the "incurable optimist" by his close friend Elmer Eugene Barker in his Personal Recollections of a Great Humanist‘s Intellectual Development of 1962. Hu graduated with his B.A. in 1914 after four years of undergraduate and one year of graduate studies. In his later Cornell years, he lived in a rooming house for instructors at the edge of Cascadilla Gorge, one of the two beautiful ravines that border the Cornell campus.
HU SHI, CORNELL CLASS OF 1914, may be counted among the most important alumni Cornell University has ever produced; some say he is the most important of all. Yet there still remains a discrepancy between name and recognition, between historical impact and local Ithaca lore.
A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891. This was a time when Charles Darwin was much discussed in intellectual circles east and west, and the end of the authoritative and aristocratic Chinese imperial system became foreseeable. The first Chinese newspapers started to take hold, and the creation of a public sphere of opinion would permeate the entire country. A few years later, in 1910-11, public opinion would play a huge role in the process of China‘s revolution. In fact when Hu Shi was asked, in 1942, what he liked best about the United States, he answered: "The press!"
Hu Shi was in Beijing around the time of the Chinese revolution, studying at one of the newly established universities. He applied for a scholarship, which brought him to Cornell University in the fall of 1910 where he embarked on studies in agriculture. He abandoned that field rather quickly to address the more existentialist questions offered by history, philosophy, and the arts. He was hailed as the "incurable optimist" by his close friend Elmer Eugene Barker in his Personal Recollections of a Great Humanist‘s Intellectual Development of 1962. Hu graduated with his B.A. in 1914 after four years of undergraduate and one year of graduate studies. In his later Cornell years, he lived in a rooming house for instructors at the edge of Cascadilla Gorge, one of the two beautiful ravines that border the Cornell campus.
From Old to New
Hu went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia two years later. His thesis was on the development of logical thought in ancient China, a comparative analysis in which John Dewey‘s pragmatism (Dewey was his teacher at Columbia) figured most prominently as a theoretical model. Returning home to China, Hu Shi (now Dr. Hu) taught at Peking University, the intellectual center of China‘s literary renaissance movement. Hu is directly credited with sparking this renaissance, and Ithaca‘s Cayuga Lake figures rather prominently in this development. According to Hu‘s belief in the "immortality of words," a canoe ride on the lake changed the intellectual fortunes of an entire nation.
As the story goes, a party of Chinese Cornellians entertained guests from other campuses, including a female student from Vassar College. When the group decided to go boating on Cayuga Lake, a freak storm almost brought disaster upon them, resulting in their "thorough drenching." Subsequently, they built a fire on land to dry their clothes, and in true Chinese fashion, Hoong C. Zen (Class of 1916), a member of the group, composed a poem of traditional diction to commemorate the incident. Zen‘s antiquated style of expression so infuriated Hu Shi, to whom the poem was respectfully submitted for criticism, that Hu started a vigorous discussion about the pros and cons of contemporary modes of expression. The discussion resulted in his call for abolishing the terse and, as perceived by most Chinese, incomprehensible language of the traditional literati and substituting it with the vernacular language, which he claimed was much more suited to debating pressing contemporary issues.
The impact of this discussion, already started earlier in the 1890s but greatly amplified by Hu from Ithaca, was a complete paradigm shift in the way the new nation of China would henceforth communicate. In a magazine article published in China, Hu demanded that all literary matter be written in the common language of everyday use. The article propelled Hu, at age 27, into the top 12 most influential celebrities of his country. It is hard to underestimate the impact of this literary renaissance. When the Chinese minister of education in 1920 ordered that all textbooks and popular educational reading matter be rewritten in the vernacular tongue, an entire nation was finally able to access a regular, modernized education.
Hu went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia two years later. His thesis was on the development of logical thought in ancient China, a comparative analysis in which John Dewey‘s pragmatism (Dewey was his teacher at Columbia) figured most prominently as a theoretical model. Returning home to China, Hu Shi (now Dr. Hu) taught at Peking University, the intellectual center of China‘s literary renaissance movement. Hu is directly credited with sparking this renaissance, and Ithaca‘s Cayuga Lake figures rather prominently in this development. According to Hu‘s belief in the "immortality of words," a canoe ride on the lake changed the intellectual fortunes of an entire nation.
As the story goes, a party of Chinese Cornellians entertained guests from other campuses, including a female student from Vassar College. When the group decided to go boating on Cayuga Lake, a freak storm almost brought disaster upon them, resulting in their "thorough drenching." Subsequently, they built a fire on land to dry their clothes, and in true Chinese fashion, Hoong C. Zen (Class of 1916), a member of the group, composed a poem of traditional diction to commemorate the incident. Zen‘s antiquated style of expression so infuriated Hu Shi, to whom the poem was respectfully submitted for criticism, that Hu started a vigorous discussion about the pros and cons of contemporary modes of expression. The discussion resulted in his call for abolishing the terse and, as perceived by most Chinese, incomprehensible language of the traditional literati and substituting it with the vernacular language, which he claimed was much more suited to debating pressing contemporary issues.
The impact of this discussion, already started earlier in the 1890s but greatly amplified by Hu from Ithaca, was a complete paradigm shift in the way the new nation of China would henceforth communicate. In a magazine article published in China, Hu demanded that all literary matter be written in the common language of everyday use. The article propelled Hu, at age 27, into the top 12 most influential celebrities of his country. It is hard to underestimate the impact of this literary renaissance. When the Chinese minister of education in 1920 ordered that all textbooks and popular educational reading matter be rewritten in the vernacular tongue, an entire nation was finally able to access a regular, modernized education.
Political and Scholarly Influence
Hu‘s influence did not end with the literary revolution he helped to bring about. Being extremely interested in politics and the economy, Hu was sent to America by the Generalissimo Jiang Kai-shek as ambassador (1938-1942). Legend has it that he was once asked to become president of China, to which he responded that he was a scholar who couldn‘t keep his own desk clean, let alone run an entire country. Hu returned to the United States to live in New York in the 1950s and served as the Chinese delegate to the United Nations and the curator of the Gest Library at Princeton University and was a highly productive scholar. Hu Shi passed away in 1962, two years before the Cultural Revolution would sweep his native country clean of everything considered to hamper the progress of the socialist revolution. Both his son Tsu-wang and his grandson Fu Victor graduated from Cornell University in 1942 and 1978, respectively.
Throughout his life, Hu received numerous honors, awards, and medals as well as 30 honorary doctorates. As literary output goes, his published writings were compiled into 37 volumes. A bibliography of his unpublished writings fills up to 32 pages. A postage stamp was issued in his honor, and there are buildings named after him.
The Wason Collection has a huge amount of material on Hu Shi, including pieces handwritten or collected by him. For example, while in Japan, Hu purchased original letters of famous Chinese literati and officials. These 16 volumes are unique testimonies to the literary and political life in 18th- and 19th-century China. The very first edition of the famed Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng) is among the items constituting the Hu Shi Collection in the Rare and Manuscript Collections. Rubbings, autographs, and photographs complete the materials on the Cornell alumnus, whom Martin W. Sampson, one of Cornell‘s most respected English professors, honored by saying: "If in 2,000 years Cornell should cease to exist, it may well be remembered as the place that educated Hu Shi." At the time this statement was made, Hu was still in his 30s.
Jerome B. Grieder. Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
This is an exploration first of Hu Shi as a liberal philosopher, and secondly of the inherent problems posed by the application of liberal philosophy to China in the early twentieth century. As such, it is both an intellectual biography and the history of a larger struggle over politics and culture. The narrative begins with Hu Shi‘s childhood in a fatherless house and the contradictory influences of his mother, who was at once a "traditional" Chinese woman and a supporter of a "modern" education for her son. To achieve this education, Hu moved to Shanghai where he learned skepticism from the Song-dynasty writer Sima Guang and was exposed to the West through Liang Qichao and Yan Fu.
By this time already committed to the quest of modernizing China, in 1910 Hu won a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to enroll at Cornell, where he quickly came under the influence of liberal political philosophy in general and John Dewey‘s experimentalism in particular. Upon his return to China in 1917, Hu Shi became a leader in the New Culture movement, his most celebrated historical role. While he continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s to participate actively in culture and politics, his influence went into a slow decline as his ideas lost relevance in the escalating fever of revolution. However, Grieder notes that his contribution to scholarship on China‘s literature and history continued to play an important role, particularly in the inspiration of other writers. Grieder suggests further research in two interesting appendices: one on "the women in Hu‘s life," and the other on the 1950s attack on Hu in the PRC.
Grieder‘s ultimate concern is the evaluation of Hu Shi‘s liberal thought in light of its incontrovertible failure. It failed not because Hu sought blindly to apply Western ideas without concern for China‘s own traditions. Rather, Hu proposed that the Hanxue scholarship arising in the early Qing dynasty rested on the same methods as Western science, a strategy similar to the later Communist invocation of a "popular tradition" in Chinese history. Nor was the failure due to a lack of concern for political process, despite Hu‘s aversion to narrowly defined political action. Rather, an interest in governmental institutions as a means to protect the rights of individuals once the nation-state had been built was what distinguished Hu and his contemporary liberals from earlier political thinkers like Liang Qichao and Yen Fu.
Hu himself failed, in Grieder‘s analysis, in his elitist conflation of his own understanding of "freedom" (that of individual thought) with the desires of the people for freedom from hunger and oppression. The failure of the greater cause of liberal reform in China failed for related though different reasons. The gradual process of social evolution, while perhaps relevant to literary reform and other intellectual movements, could not provide the solution to China‘s pressing needs for social transformation. Liberalism is itself paradoxical in this respect: democracy can only arise from a democratic society; it offers no source of power other than public opinion, which cannot be effective in a system driven by brute force. Tragically, China‘s liberals were forced either to abandon their liberalism for the politically more realistic cause of revolution or, as Hu Shi, to hold on to their liberalism and become increasingly irrelevant. This is the same dilemma with which Chow Tse-tsung and James Thomson (among others) have wrestled, and their conclusions, though differing in particulars, are largely in agreement.
Grieder found inspiration for this study, begun in 1955, in the communist attack on Hu Shi then in full swing. Despite his conclusion that liberalism could not have succeeded in revolutionary China, he is saddened by this failure of "what we ourselves might have hoped to see done" (p. 347). This sentiment clearly resonated with reviewers of the time, who had little but praise for Grieder‘s sensitive and detailed approach for this vitally important figure.
See Edward Rhoads (The American Historical Review, 76.4:1207-8), C. P. Fitzgerald (Pacific Affairs, 44.3:432), and David Roy (Journal of Asian Studies, 30.2:440-2) for contemporary reviews.
----
He was hailed as the "incurable optimist" by his close friend Elmer Eugene Barker in his Personal Recollections of a Great Humanist‘s Intellectual Development of 1962. Hu graduated with his B.A. in 1914 after four years of undergraduate and one year of graduate studies. In his later Cornell years, he lived in a rooming house for instructors at the edge of Cascadilla Gorge, one of the two beautiful ravines that border the Cornell campus.
2015.10.27
360 view of Cascadilla Gorge.
Cornell University 和 Sàtísh Khànál
2月18日 23:46 ·
Cornell right now: Frozen falls in Cascadilla Gorge.
沒有留言:
張貼留言