A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform

A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform is one of the programmatic texts of Hu Shih, the Chinese intellectual who championed written vernacular Chinese (baihua) as the language of literature in place of Classical Chinese. The work belongs to the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, when China was undergoing a deep political and cultural crisis after the fall of the imperial order and the rise of the new culture that would give its name to the May Fourth Movement. Hu Shih, trained in the United States under the influence of John Dewey, argued that literature should be written in a living language that ordinary readers could understand, rather than in a dead language reserved for the educated elite.

The text sets out, in preliminary form, the arguments he would later develop in more detail. It holds that a dead language can never produce a living literature, a principle he summarized in a phrase that became famous, and that linguistic reform was a necessary condition for the renewal of Chinese culture. Hu did not reject the tradition indiscriminately: he sought its roots in the classical novels and in popular literature written in the vernacular, which he regarded as legitimate precedents for the new prose. His method reflected the pragmatism he had learned from Dewey, according to which ideas and forms had to be tested by their usefulness and effectiveness.

The proposal was widely received, and its influence proved lasting. Hu Shih's campaign contributed decisively to literacy and to the spread of modern literature in China, and it is often regarded as one of the starting points of contemporary Chinese literature. His ideas attracted both support and criticism, but they shaped the country's cultural debate for decades.