Introduction to the Second Edition

Twenty five years ago, when I was a student at Boston University, I first read The Chinese Renaissance by Dr. Hu Shih. I can still recall vividly the intellectual excitement roused by the book. From its little more than one hundred pages I acquired a far richer understanding of the epochal changes then overtaking China than had been possible from the study of dozens of books and literally hundreds of periodical articles. Rereading his lectures today, thirty years subsequent to their delivery at the University of Chicago, I find that my initial enthusiasm for Dr. Hu's scholarship and historical insight has not waned.

It was characteristic of the late Dr. Hu that, at a time when his country was cruelly wracked and torn by civil wars, Communist subversion, and foreign invasion, he sought to place these tragic events in a broad historical setting. In an era when it was so easy for China's leaders to succumb to political despair and intellectual cynicism and to wring their hands over their nation's plight and prospects who but Dr. Hu could have used so optimistic a phrase as the "renaissance in China"? It was not that he was oblivious to the tides of nationalism that were rolling over his age-old country or that he dismissed lightly the titanic struggles for political and military power that all too often mesmerised the observer seeking rhyme and reason in the transient affairs of the day. On the contrary, he took these phenomena as seriously as he believed history itself would take them.

Dr. Hu had a wary regard for the nature and meaning of revolution and, insofar as China was concerned, he invoked the word sparingly and advisedly. He himself strove to grasp and transmit understanding of history, as it had been and as it was becoming. Revolutions, however defined, were, he knew, not without precedent in China nor was cultural renaissance alien to the history 01 his country. If Dr. Hu preferred to categorize the mighty transformation in China during modern times as a "renaissance" rather than as a revolution, it was doubtless because he himself placed a value upon the changes to which he himself was a primary witness. Revolution implied metamorphosis, for better or for worse, while "renaissance" signified rebirth and, hopefully, new life.

Chronologically Dr. Hu was still a young man when The Chinese Renaissance was published in 1931. Still, it is clear that the basic ideas and personal experiences which he presented reflected a life that was already mature. Long before he was invited to present the Haskell Lectures in Comparative Religion at the University of Chicago, he had made his mark internationally as a scholar, philosopher, critic, and educator. His many addresses and publications had won him unstinting renown in China and the West. To single out but a few of the factors conditioning his views of the nature and implications of the widespread changes occurring in modern China would surely leave one open to the charge of oversimplification. Nevertheless, it would perhaps not be inappropriate to take note of the following circumstances.

Dr. Hu was in many ways a prototype of the new Chinese intellectual who inspired and was inspired by the Chinese renaissance. Born in 1891 in a small village in Anhwei province in eastern China, it- was still not too late for him to have a traditional upbringing and education. Unlike many Chinese intellectuals of later generations it could never be said of him that he was ignorant of or alienated from his own cultural heritage. He was, thus, never at a disadvantage in academic jousts with even the most conservative Confucian scholars; he was ever prepared to match quotations from the Classics and the commentaries with the most erudite of pundits.

But Dr. Hu also boasted, in the narrower sense of the term, a sound and solid Western training and education. He was at ease in the realm of Western history, literature, and thought. These two cultural traditions, the Chinese and the Western, did not constitute separate and distinct sectors of his mind but were rather integrated into a philosophical whole. He was, accordingly, able to view the Chinese Revolution in its many manifestations from the perspectives of both the centuries-old civilization of China and of world history. It becomes immediately apparent to the reader of his works that he never suffers from cultural parochialism or strident nationalism.

If Dr. Hu possessed a finely rounded view of history, he also had a favored point of departure in his intellectual inquiry, especially as it related to matters of the Chinese Revolution. During his years as a graduate student in the United States he became intimately involved in. the pai hua movement, the campaign to replace usage of the classical with the colloquial language. Once he became wedded to the premise that the promotion of literacy among the masses of his countrymen, traditionally illiterate and unlettered, would ultimately work a revolution, a renaissance of inconceivable dimensions, his orientation towards the vast upheaval in China was affected accordingly. He took it as axiomatic that the wars and politics, the science and technology, of the modern world would inevitably alter the nature of Chinese civilization but he also believed with equally firm conviction that acquisition of the instruments of basic literacy by China's millions of people would lastingly shape the character of the revolution in the older way of life. While his fellow revolutionaries battled against warlords, subverters, and aggressors, Dr. Hu sought to arm his countrymen for an all-out war against ignorance.

One last determinant of the thought of Dr. Hu might well be stressed, namely, the circumstances of his own life. Even during his adolescent years he was not oblivious to the erosive effects of Western civilization upon the traditional Chinese way of life. Not simply cultural change but, as importantly, its unprecedentedly quick tempo captured his attention. In his essay, "Social Disintegration and Readjustment" (The Chinese Renaissance, page 96), he himself has neatly summed up his marvel at the intrusions of modernity into his own familiar world. "And the rapidity of it all!," he exclaimed.

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I -saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, 1 saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and 1 saw their elimination by electric lights. In the field of locomotion, I traveled in sedan chairs, wheelbarrows, and small river boats rowed by men ... I saw the first tramway operated in Shanghai in 1909, and wrote a poem protesting against its dangers to the rickshaw. My first trip on a steamship was when I was only two years old, but I never rode in a motor car before coming to the United States in 1910, and did not travel in the air until 1928. And my people have traveled with me from the vegetable oil lamp to electricity, from the wheelbarrow to the Ford car, if not to the aeroplane, and this in less than forty years' time.

Dr. Hu was an indefatigable scholar but he also sought to learn the lessons of life.

Dr. Hu Shih has justly been acclaimed as one of modern China's foremost scholars, philosophers, and educators. He was revered not only in his native land but also in the United States where for years he carried on his work. The republication of The Chinese Renaissance, the book by which he is best known in this country, thirty years after its first appearance is a fitting tribute to this inimitable scholar and man.

Brooklyn College June 18, 1963 Hyman Kublin Professor of History