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PKU Today in History - a daily column featuring historic events regarding PKU and PKUers.

Hu Shi, one of the leading figures during China's New Culture Movement (1915-1920s) and President (1946-1948) of then National Peking University, passed away on February 24, 1962 in Taiwan.

Hu decided to donate 102 boxes of his book collection remaining in Beijing to Peking University in his last will.

His body was buried, draped with the Peking University Banner.

Hu Shi (1891-1962)

Born in 1891, Hu Shi (or Hu Shih, courtesy name: Shizhi) had won a scholarship appropriated from the "Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program" and went to study in the US in 1910. He returned to China in 1917 after completion of his doctoral dissertation under John Dewey, philosopher and professor at Columbia University.

As he joined the faculty of PKU at the invitation of then President Cai Yuanpei and lectured at departments of Chinese, English, and Philosophy, he received support from Chen Duxiu, dean of the liberal-arts division and editor of the influential journal New Youth, quickly gaining much attention and influence. Hu soon became one of the leading intellectuals during the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement, which bred the great spirit of patriotism, progress, democracy, and science, now core values of Peking University.

A propagator of American pragmatic methodology as well as the foremost political liberal in China's Republican period (1912-1949),  he always advocated building a new country not through political revolution but through mass education, which was not in line with upsurging movements at that time. One example is when in July 1919, he challenged the activists in an article “More Study of Problems, Less Talk of ‘Isms.'” Deeply convinced of the feasibility of the experimentalist approach, with its reliance on coolness and reflective deliberation, he counseled gradualism and the individual solution of individual problems with "bold hypothesis, but careful verification."

Extended Reading: Stephen Owen to Inaugurate "Hu Shi Liberal-Arts Lecture Series"

Edited by: Jacques

Source: PKU News (Chinese)