Hu Shih

Hu Shih was a Chinese academic, writer, diplomat and politician who contributed to Chinese liberalism and was a leading advocate of written vernacular Chinese. Born in Shanghai, he studied at Cornell and at Columbia under John Dewey, whose translator he became, then lectured at Peking University and became one of the leading intellectuals of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements. He promoted vernacular Chinese in literature in place of Classical Chinese. He was the Republic of China's ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942 and, from 1957 until his death, president of the Academia Sinica in Taipei; in the 1950s the Chinese Communist Party campaigned against his thought.