Hu Shih

Hu Shih, (born Dec. 17, 1891, Shanghai, China—died Feb. 24, 1962, Taiwan), Chinese Nationalist diplomat and scholar, an important leader of Chinese thought who helped establish the vernacular as the official written language (1922). He was also an influential propagator of American pragmatic methodology as well as the foremost political liberal in Republican China (1912–49), advocating building a new country not through political revolution but through mass Chinese education.