The Philosopher Departs

Few diplomats of any nation have been more popular in the U.S. than slight, charming Hu Shih, China's foremost living scholar, China's Ambassador to the U.S. since 1938. Last week Chiang Kai-shek recalled Ambassador Hu, replaced him with Dr. Wei Tao-ming. The Gissimo did not say why.

True, 51-year-old Dr. Hu had a scholarly disinclination for propagandistic finagling, and everyone knew that U.S. Lend-Lease aid to China was monumentally short of what China could use. But many U.S. citizens agreed that Dr. Hu had more than made good his remark in returning $60,000 for propaganda to his Government: "My speeches are sufficient propaganda and do not cost you anything." Warm, wise, statesmanly Dr. Hu was, in fact and in his own person, just about the most persuasive argument for China imaginable.

His recall was all the more baffling because, since the U.S. entered the war, China's very practical Foreign Minister T. V. Soong has also been stationed in Washington. Between them, they might have seemed to be diplomatically irresistible. If China was not getting its due, the fault might lie with the U.S. rather than with the Chinese Embassy. Dr. Hu's friends hoped that one persistent Washington rumor was true: that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had a big job for Dr. Hu in China.

Hu Shih once said that philosophy was his profession, literature his entertainment, politics his obligation. It was an understatement. As a philosopher Hu Shih is one of the outstanding disciples of the ramified pragmatist, John Dewey. Born in Shanghai, the son of a geographer, Hu Shih was an intellectual prodigy as a child. As a teacher of English during the dark period before the Chinese Revolution, he grew increasingly morbid and dissipated, was once jailed for brawling with a policeman. He came out of this phase to win a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to Cornell (where he was called "Doc"), went on to study under Dewey at Columbia in 1915-17. Dr. Hu's four-volume student diary is still a Chinese bestseller.

Literature has meant much more than entertainment to Dr. Hu. He is himself a milestone in Chinese letters. He led the astonishing movement which in a few years gave China a written language corresponding to its spoken tongue, thus smashing the antique literary monopoly of the mandarins and giving reading and writing to the people. In 1930 he became dean of Peking's School of Literature, leaving there to become Ambassador to the U.S.

Dr. Hu has long been politically active in writing. By natural temper he is a pacifist liberal. For years he sharply attacked Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's one-party Government in a series of articles published later as Essays on the Rights of Man. But when Japan loomed over China, Dr. Hu cast aside doubts and signed under the Gissimo (he has never joined the Kuomintang itself). His statesmanly sagacity has often been revealed. As far back as October 1937, he told the U.S. in a San Francisco speech: "In this modern world of radio and transocean Clippers, there is no such thing as an isolated nation. . . . And the same stupidity of the militarists of an aggressive nation which forced you into the last war will not be lacking to drag you into the present one." Last week, distressed at his recall, Dr. Hu would have liked to find a peaceful world where he could retire with Mrs. Hu and their two sons and continue work on his History of Chinese Literature. But there was yet no such world.

Dr. Hu's successor, Dr. Wei Tao-ming, is an able, Paris-trained Kuomintang lawyer. As China's Minister of Justice in 1928-29 he doubled the number of the country's modern law courts. Later, as Mayor of Nanking, he supervised much of the new capital's modernization. When the war with Japan began he became Secretary General of the Executive Yuan (the Gissimo's Cabinet). Last year he was appointed Ambassador to Vichyfrance, but he never took his post and has spent the past eight months in Washington.

There he will undoubtedly be greatly aided by his politically astute wife. Daughter of a rich mandarin, she early became a bomb-carrying Chinese revolutionary. She met her husband in Paris, where she, too, studied law. As China's first woman lawyer and judge, she was one of the most talked-about women in Shanghai and a favorite of Mme. Chiang's.

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