Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937

Hu Shih (1891-1962), a leading Chinese educator and scholar who received much of his education in the United States, was an important advocate of liberal political and social views in China during the 1920s and 1930s. A self-proclaimed disciple of John Dewey, under whom he had studied at Columbia, Hu was a tireless critic of intellectual dogmatism and a persistent advocate of "evolutionary" and pragmatic reform. Ultimately his position proved vulnerable to attacks from both the conservative traditionalist and the radical revolutionary extremes. In this elegantly written intellectual biography, Jerome B. Grieder examines the development and expression of Hu Shih's ideas against the background of a deepening revolutionary crisis in China.