Hu Shih (Hu Shi, 胡适）(1891-1962), Chinese philosopher and essayist, leading liberal intellectual in the May Fourth Movement (1917-23).

Hu Shi grew up in a fatherless house and under 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 professor of philosophy at Beijing University, he wrote for the iconoclastic journal New Youth (edited by a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu). His most important contribution was promotion of vernacular literature to replace writing in the classical style. Hu Shih was also a leading critic and analyst of traditional Chinese culture and thought. He was ambassador to the United States (1938-42), chancellor of Beijing Univ. (1946-48), and after 1958 president of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

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. His contribution to scholarship on China's literature and history continued to play an important role, particularly in the inspiration of other writers. Because of his criticism of the Chinese Communists, his work is almost completely untaught in schools in mainland China.

Below are two collections of speeches and talks given by Hu Shih: