Education: Young Sage

When a storm swamped a rowboat on Cayuga Lake in 1916, a young Cornell man named Hu Shih got a ducking. To memorialize the immersion, a soaking compatriot composed a poem in literary Chinese. Its mannered, delicate style seemed so ill-suited to the topic that young Hu dashed off some lustier lines of his own. They were written in Pai Hua (the living speech) instead of Wen Li (the literary language), and they were good. Until Hu did it, no one believed that serious literature could be made from, Pai Hua, as Dante had from Italian.

Returning to China, a Peking University professor at 26, Hu started a literary reform that crackled through China like fire through a paper house. Today Pai Hua is used in China’s schools, books and some newspapers (though not government documents). All China reveres Hu Shih as the “Young Sage” (the old one: Confucius).

Tempest over Teacups. Now chancellor of Peking, China’s oldest and best university, Dr. Hu is his country’s most influential educator. He is also its No. 1 living historian and philosopher, and a wartime ambassador to the U.S. His newest achievement: the first syndicated column in China, which now broadcasts his views on social reform to 50 newspapers from Manchuria to Siam.

The Young Sage was once a young rip. A precocious child, he knew 800 characters of Wen Li before he was three, had earned the nickname Shien-seng (the master) by the time he was five. In his teens Hu became disillusioned, turned to gloomy poetry and carousing, awoke one morning in jail for assaulting a cop while soused. Looking at his scratched face in a mirror, Hu recalled a proverb (“Heaven intended this material surely for some use”), vowed to win a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to the U.S. He did, and went to Cornell.

There Hu studied farming, switched to philosophy when told that he had to memorize the names of 300 varieties of apples. Later he took his doctor’s degree at Columbia under John Dewey, who called Hu the keenest mind he had ever met on Morningside Heights. Hu dated a Chinese Vassar girl, but married the village girl to whom his family had engaged him in childhood. Ambassador Hu’s wife, too shy and unconfident to come to the U.S., stayed behind in Peking. When the Japanese came, she rescued at great peril what she knew was most precious to her husband: 70 crates of rare books and manuscripts.

This week, as the Young Sage turned 56, educators in China’s 148 universities, colleges and technical schools debated Hu’s controversial new “ten-year plan” for Chinese higher education.

Wo Tou. Peking University had survived the long war only by moving, lock, stock & barrel, 800 miles to Changsha, then trekking another 1,000 miles over mountains to Kunming. Back home again, Peking is still on the razor’s edge. Inflation has reduced professors’ salaries to $30 (U.S.) a month. The typical student diet: wo ton (millet, cornmeal and water). Laboratories and libraries have never recovered from Japanese ravages; for one history class, Peking has only three textbooks. For the next ten years, Chancellor Hu says, China ought to concentrate all her scholars, dollars and energies on five (or at most ten) select universities. To presidents of the 138 lesser colleges, Hu’s plan looks like merger or death. It has already been opposed by officials of Chiang Kai-shek’s Ministry of Education, who want more, not fewer, colleges for China’s 400 million people. Says Hu Shih: “I am basically a historian, and as a historian I do not expect miracles.”