China, Too, Is Fighting to Defend a Way of Life: An Address by Dr. Hu Shih, Ambassador of the Republic of China to the United States of America

Item Details

San Francisco, Grabhorn Press, 1942, Hardcover

First Edition, Very good

13" x 10", 18 pp, in original red and yellow paper-covered boards with mounted spine label.  A very good copy with corners and lower spine bumped, minor wear to boards. "Compliments" card of Carl Wheat laid in.  Colophon: "Of this significant contribution to a better understanding of events now transpiring in the Far East, two hundred copies have been printed on handmade paper at the instance of Carl I. Wheat and with the generous approval of Ambassador Hu Shih, for whose personal use one hundred such copies have been reserved. The title and signature in Chinese are from His Excellency's facile brush." 

Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962,) was "a Chinese Nationalist diplomat and scholar [and] 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" (Britannica). He served as China's ambassador to the United States from 1938 to 1942. In this address, he framed the ongoing conflict between China and Japan as akin a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism akin to that between Western Europe and Nazi Germany.