Forthcoming Book:

Hu Shi, A Biography

To Be Published by Oxford University Press in February 2027

Hu Shi, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, a former dean at Peking University and a soft-spoken intellectual, lost his temper during a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was an extraordinary behavior at an extraordinary time. Since his appointment three years earlier by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, Hu Shi had tried, with determination but with tact, to push the officially neutral U.S. into involvement in the war that had engulfed the rest of the world and had been ravaging his nation since the Japanese first invaded it in 1931. China’s existence was suspended in the balance. Indeed, as he had said on many occasions, his homeland was “bleeding to death.”