Hu Shi's national learning : actualizing the Chinese renaissance by reorganizing national heritage

Abstract

This thesis examines the core components of Hu Shi’s (1891–1962) scholarship on the reorganization of China’s national heritage. Hu was a prominent intellectual and a key leader of China’s republican-era modernization movement. He encapsulated his plan for China’s twentieth-century transformation in the notion of a renaissance, explicating its main tenets as a problem-oriented attitude and gradualist approach to reform; the import and ample consultation of relevant Western intellectual achievements; and the reorganization of China’s vast cultural and intellectual heritage. Eventually, he hoped, the three would converge to re-create Chinese civilization and culture. The common scholarly focus on the first two aspects has considerably overshadowed the importance of national heritage reorganization to Hu’s ‘renaissance’ vision. This thesis argues that a full appreciation of Hu’s vision of a renaissance for China demands a comprehensive exploration of his academic project of reorganizing the country’s national heritage. Only by studying Hu’s reorganization program in its totality can we understand his complex and evolving connection to China’s tradition. It is commonplace for historians to examine segments of Hu’s intellectual endeavors—for example, his initiation of the literary revolution, his attack on Confucianism, and his advocacy of science and democracy—and conclude that he was an iconoclastic thinker that sought to overthrow the ‘old traditions’ in favor of western academic and intellectual norms. My thesis shows that Hu held complex, evolving, and subtly inflected views on Chinese tradition and its relevance to the rebirth of Chinese society in the twentieth century. The significance and originality of the thesis rests in the fact that it is the first study to subject the key aspects of Hu’s reorganization program to a detailed analysis, and bring them into an explicit conversation with each other. Previous scholarship has tended to take different segments of Hu’s reorganization oeuvre in isolation from each other, and treat them as independent fragments of his vast scholarly corpus. In other words, Hu’s academic contributions in the research of Chinese literature, philosophy, religion, and intellectual history—the key constituents of his reorganization program—are usually studied as unrelated topics. This segmented approach fails to recognize that Hu’s renaissance project demanded a comprehensive critique of China’s cultural tradition and its scholarship across all spheres under the rubric of national learning. To prove my argument that we cannot fully appreciate Hu’s renaissance without examining all aspects of his reorganization of national heritage, I draw upon the vast corpus of primary and secondary materials on this topic, written in both Chinese and English, and subject them to detailed and contextualized textual analysis. My goal in selecting materials was to build a thorough study of Hu’s reorganization program as a coherent but evolving corpus in the terms that Hu himself envisaged when he embarked upon this task in 1919.