y
and Western science; he was influenced mainly by John Dewey who was
guest professor in Peking in 1919-20. Similarly tending towards
liberalism in politics and Dewey's ideas in the field of philosophy were
others, mainly Hu Shih. Finally, some reformers criticized
conservativism purely on the basis of Chinese thought. Hu Shih (born
1892) gained greatest acclaim by his proposal for a "literary
revolution", published in the "New Youth" in 1917. This revolution was
the logically necessary application of the political revolution to the
field of education. The new "vernacular" took place of the old
"classical" literary language. The language of the classical works is so
remote from the language of daily life that no uneducated person can
understand it. A command of it requires a full knowledge of all the
ancient literature, entailing decades of study. The gentry had
elaborated this style of speech for themselves and their dependants; it
was their monopoly; nobody who did not belong to the gentry and had not
attended its schools could take part in literary or in administrative
life. The literary revolution introduced the language of daily life, the
language of the people, into literature: newspapers, novels, scientific
treatises, translations, appeared in the vernacular, and could thus be
understood by anyone who could read and write, even if he had no
Confucianist education.

It may be said that the literary revolution has achieved its main
objects. As a consequence of it, a great quantity of new literature has
been published. Not only is every important new book that appears in the
West published in translation within a few months, but modern novels and
short stories and poems have been written, some of them of high literary
value.

At the same time as this revolution there took place another fundamental
change in the language. It was necessary to take over a vast number of
new scientific and technical terms. As Chinese, owing to the character
of its script, is unable to write foreign words accurately and can do no
more than provide a rather rough paraphrase, the practice was started of
expressing new ideas by newly formed native words. Thus modern Chinese
has very few foreign words, and yet it has all the new ideas. For
example, a telegram is a "lightning-letter"; a wireless telegram is a
"not-have-wire-lightning-communication"; a fountain-pen is a
"self-flow-ink-water-brush"; a typewriter is a "strike-letter-machine".