Reasons why Hu Shih became a model of old and new ideas

Hu Shih shifted the Chinese tradition with his power of thought, and he was a clear symbol of the shift from "traditional China" to "modern China". In the "non-study chapter", he was soberly aware that "our country today is in an era of transition between the old civilization and the new civilization" and that "students are the oars of transition". He was soberly aware of the fact that "it is the duty of the people in the transitional era to create a new civilization for the State of China in which the old and the new are merged". Being in the era of alternation and transition between old and new civilizations, Hu Shi, as a foreign student, had a strong sense of mission to "recreate civilization". Liang Qichao said in "An Introduction to the Academics of the Qing Dynasty", "One of the most unfortunate things about the movement of Western thought in the late Qing Dynasty was that not all the foreign students had participated in this movement. The driving force of the movement and its backbone was the people who could not understand Western language and writing. Sitting here, they were limited in their ability, and they could not avoid the evils of peddling, fragmentation, generalization, superficiality, and errors. Therefore, the movement has been in progress for twenty years, but it has not been able to obtain a sound foundation, and it has risen and fallen, and has been despised by the society. In this respect, the Western students of the past have done a great disservice to the country." (Liang Qichao on the History of Qing Learning, 80 pp., Fudan University Press, 1985) The main plot of the May Fourth drama was that the foreign students represented by Hu Shih took advantage of the hegemony of Western discourse and culture to subvert and rebuild China's civilization. 1915, Zhang Shizhao introduced Hu Shih in his last issue of the magazine Kayin. The introduction to Luo Zhitian's The Dream of Recreating Civilization: A Biography of Hu Shih begins with a highly skillful account of Hu's historical significance, and in 1917, in his Diary of Studying Abroad and Returning to China, Hu Shih quoted Homer's epic poem: "Now that we have returned, you shall see what will be the difference." He also declared that this phrase "can be used as a pioneer flag for our foreign students." In June 1919, after Zhang Taiyan's speech at the China Junior Society, Hu Shih "went on", first declaring that what Zhang Taiyan had said was "negative advice", then saying, "I will now put forward a few ideas from a positive point of view". Then he said, "I will now put forward a few ideas from a positive point of view", and finally, he repeated in English the poem in Homer's epic poem quoted in the "Returning to China" - "You shall see the difference now that You shall see the difference now that we are back again". In his diary in 1915, Hu Shih drew an analogy between the role of foreign students and that of missionaries: "The real value of a missionary lies in the fact that the foreign missionary is like a returned foreign student who always brings back with him a new point of view, a critical spirit. Such a point of view and spirit are lacking in a people who have grown accustomed to and indifferent to the existing order of things, and are absolutely necessary for any reform movement." Luo Zhitian said this was Hu Shih's husband's own way. As he contemplated returning to China, he had a clear self-awareness of the role he would play in Chinese society. Hu Shih repeatedly saw himself as a "missionary". "Monk Shenhui's revolutionary endeavor was an open and direct challenge to the prestigious Northern School of Zen. In the end, he was able to defeat the Northern School and was honored as the 'Seventh Ancestor' and elevated his master to the 'Sixth Ancestor' status as well. So Shenhui was really a great destroyer, who overthrew the Northern School of Zen, and he was also a great founder, who established the Southern School of Zen and was the founding father of that school." (Hu Shi's Autobiography, Chapter 10, "From Organizing the State Histories to Studying Monks") In his later years, in his oral autobiography, he saw the May Fourth New Culture Movement as the "Copernican Revolution" in the same sense, and in 1919, in his essay "The Significance of the New Wave of Thought," a paper that was a summation of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, he summed it up as follows "to study the problems, to import theories, to organize the history of the country, and to recreate civilization", consciously identifying himself with Nietzsche's image of "reassessing all values". The image of the foreign student and "missionary" clearly includes "the impact of the West". His very name - Shiyi, Shizhi - is a clear reflection of the enormous impact of the West, especially of Social Darwinism, on ancient China. Therefore, it is also relevant here to evaluate Fei Zhengqing's "Western Impact - Chinese Response" research model after the emergence of Corwin's new research model of "Discovering History in China". I agree with Luo Zhitian that "shock-response" is an important and obvious historical phenomenon, a major theme that cannot be avoided in the study of modern Chinese history, and that this paradigm has not yet accomplished its mission. In fact, there is no contradiction between the "shock-response" paradigm and the "discovery of history in China"; the "shock-response" paradigm itself must pay attention to the conditions of the receivers, precisely the different It is the different recipients - the Americas, Africa, Asia, and different regions within the Americas, Africa, and Asia - that responded differently to the European shock.

Hu Shih's greatest and most far-reaching influence on Chinese thought, society, and culture was his advocacy of the vernacular language movement. Zhou Cezhong said in his article "Hu Shih's Criticism and Contribution to Chinese Culture", "From the May Fourth era onwards, the vernacular language became authentic not only in literature, but also in all writing documents. This event was of overwhelming importance in Chinese thought, academia, society and politics, and had a tremendous impact on the thoughts, words and deeds of the Chinese people. In some ways it can also be seen as a watershed moment in Chinese history. ...... This is undoubtedly Hu's greatest contribution to Chinese culture." Qian Mu countered Zhou's assessment in his speech, "Words in Culture," "The recent people, in admiration of Westernization, have been advocating vernacular language, not knowing that vernacular language is different from literary language. If they rely on the vernacular as their main language, the books that have been deposited for thousands of years for the spirit of national culture will all lose their correct understanding, and the books will not burn but will burn themselves, and it will be difficult to describe the magnitude of the disaster." Lu Xun believed that Hu Shi's advocacy of the vernacular language movement had changed "silent China". Liao Zhongkai even compared him to Confucius and Mencius. Hu Shih's advocacy of the vernacular language movement, the literary revolution, the reappraisal of classical novels, and the New Culture Movement were isomorphic. In his Oral Autobiography, he said, "This one shift is simply the same as Copernicus's ideological revolution that shifted the earth-centered theory to the sun-centered theory in the history of Western thought." Once when talking about Hu Shih's contribution to the new poetry, Zang said that many of Hu Shih's ideas were strategic. This assessment is itself strategic. In today's view, writing in the vernacular language and the "great liberation of poetic styles" are both of transformative significance, a strategic shift in Chinese poetry and culture.

Tang Degang recalled in "Miscellaneous Memories of Hu Shih" that in the early 1950s, Hu Shih was selected by the influential American magazine Look Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of our time because of his "invention of the simplified vernacular language. Hu Shih did not invent a language, but he did revolutionize Chinese thought, culture, and society through language change. The May Fourth Vernacular Language Movement cannot be evaluated only in terms of the language itself, but must be discussed in a larger context, as a cultural revolution and a symbolic reconstruction of the social order. Hu Shih elevated the language that Lin Shu despised as "the language of the people who sell milk and carts" to the status of a "national language," defeating the authority of the literary language and, in effect, leveling the scholarly class, which had manipulated the privilege of writing. "Language as a social phenomenon is intimately bound up with the social structure and the value system of the society," Brewster notes in "The Enslavement of the Intellectual Underclass in China and the Methods of Its Liberation." "The classical Chinese characters have necessarily developed a special class of interests. No matter what country, when the ability to recite and write is limited to the intellectual class (literary laste), the people of this class are bound to gain power and hold it forever. The people of this class, even without organizing a government, will be superior to the generality of the people, and thus they will obtain all political positions and enjoy all special benefits at the expense of the ignorant and uninformed masses." Hu Shih drew inspiration from the historical correlation between the establishment of the modern nation-state in Europe and the occurrence of the modern national language to create a homogeneous modern nation-state-national state through the modern language movement of the unity of speech and writing. Lin Shu said in "On the Dissipation of the Ancient Language and the Vernacular," "As soon as the vernacular was on the rise, everyone fought to abolish the seat of the ancient language and replace it with the vernacular." Zhang Shizhao said in "Commentary on the New Cultural Movement": "Today's scholars for the aptly named ...... think that today's people's words have their own independent self-existence of the field, and its so-called field, but also to the aptly named as the Great Emperor, Jixi as the upper Beijing, so they are bent on Hu's literary collection of the article in search of the righteousness of the law, in the attempt to set up a collection of poems for the laws and regulations, without distraction, the pen does not pause, so the So, I was obsessed with seeking the righteousness of articles in Hu's Literature Deposit and the poetic laws and regulations in the Trial Collection, with no distractions and no pause for the pen, which led to the present-day literary changes." In fact, Lin Shu and Zhang Shizhao realized that this was not just a "literary change," but a social effect that would eventually spread through the medium of language. Hu Shih was looking forward to creating a "kingdom of the vernacular", but also looking forward to creating a modern "Republic of China" characterized by freedom and equality.