Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China sets out to analyze the life and thought of Hu Shih as a key to understanding China in his lifetime. The study focuses on the inner tensions and dimensions of Hu's life and attempts to reconstruct the intellectual and emotional dilemmas that his life encompassed. By describing Hu's pessimism and alienation aroused by an age of chaos, the study reveals what is meant to be a transitional figure in twentieth-century China. By extension, the book is a study of the tragedy of a Chinese cosmopolitan intellectual who could find no satisfying role in the life of his own turbulent nation.