Hu Shi
1 min readHu Shi（1891-1962）is a Chinese philosopher and essayist.His courtesy name is Shizhi .Born in Shanghai，he had an ancestry in Jixi ，Anhui Province.In January 1904，he was arranged to marry Jiang Dongxiu ，an illiterate girl one year older than him with bound feet.The marriage took place in December 1917.He received his fundamental education in Jixi and Shanghai.
On August 16，1910，Hu Shi was sent to study at Cornell University in the United States and later Columbia University.He was greatly influenced by his professor，John Dewey，and became a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change.He received his Ph.D.in Philosophy in 1917 and returned to lecture at Peking University.During his tenure there.he began to write for the journal New Youth，and quickly gained much attention and influence.
Hu Shi soon became one of the leading and influential intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement and later the New Culture Movement.He quit New Youth in the 1920s and published several political newspapers and journals.Afterwards，he began writing in vernacular Chinese，the use of which spread rapidly.His most important contribution was helping establish the vernacular as the official written language.
He was the ambassador for the Republic of China to the United States of America（1938-1942），chancellor of Peking University（1946-1948），and later president of Academia Sinica .He died of heart attack at the age of 71.
