Mei Kuang-ti (22 January 1890-27 December 1945), scholar and editor of the conservative literary journal Hsueh-heng [the critical review]. Though a pioneer in the introduction of Western literature to China, he was an uncompromising opponent of the Chinese literary movements of the 1920's. He taught Chinese at Harvard University from 1924 to 1936. Hsuancheng, Anhwei, was the native place of Mei Kuang-ti. His father, a schoolmaster and a firm believer in memorization of the Chinese classical texts, instilled in the young Mei a genuine love of traditional Chinese literature and learning. Mei Kuang-ti took the first level of civil-service examinations at the age of 12. After completing his secondary education in Anhwei, he went to Peking, where he attended Tsinghua College. He learned English in a single year of solitude and diligent study, competed for a government scholarship in 1911, and won both a scholarship and admission to the University of Wisconsin. After spending two years in Madison, Wisconsin, he transferred to Northwestern University, from which he was graduated in 1915. He then entered the graduate school of Harvard University. Mei Kuang-ti's four years at Harvard deeply influenced his intellectual development. Of primary importance was his association with Irving Babbitt, professor of literature and prophet of the New Humanism, the philosophical and critical movement which flourished briefly in the United States during the 1920's under the influence of Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. In the New Humanism, Mei Kuang-ti saw affinities with China's cultural heritage and possible approaches to the uncertainties that beset the contemporary intellectual scene in China.

Soon after his arrival at Harvard, Mei began a lengthy and often turbulent correspondence w.ith Hu Shih (q.v.), then a graduate student of philosophy at Columbia University. The only record of this literary debate, which concerned the pros and cons of literary reform in China, is contained in Hu Shih's published diaries. Even that fragmentary and admittedly one-sided account reveals the deep seriousness of these young Chinese students, newly exposed to Western learning and distressed by conditions in their homeland, and their earnestness in seeking out solutions. It was through these arguments, Hu Shih wrote, that he gradually formulated his ideas regarding literary reform and began to experiment with the writing of poems in pai-hua [the vernacular]. Mei Kuang-ti was opposed to Hu's position, not because he was unaware of the moribund state of the old Chinese literary tradition, but because he believed that Hu Shih's theories and practices were based on fallacious literary premises. Mei argued that Hu oversimplified the complex relationship between language and literature and underestimated the importance of tradition in the process of poetic composition. In 1917 Hu Shih returned to Peking to raise the banner of literary reform with his articles in the Hsin cKing-nien [new youth], and Mei Kuang-ti remained at Harvard to continue his literary studies with Irving Babbitt.

Although Professor Babbitt had no direct access to Chinese sources, and had not studied Chinese, he impressed Mei Kuang-ti with his profound understanding of Confucius as a moralist and humanist, his interpretation of the early Taoists in the light of modern Western naturalism, his vision of the essential unity of the cultures of East and West, and his interest in working for a "humanistic international." Babbitt's devotion to classicism and his impatient opposition to the philological approach to the study of Western literature made him a controversial scholar. Mei Kuang-ti regarded Babbitt as a man who shared his own deep appreciation of traditional Chinese culture, a fellow visionary who looked forward to a synthesis of the central and enduring elements in both Eastern and Western traditions, and a kindred spirit who also was waging a lonely but heroic crusade against current literary fads. In 1920 Mei Kuang-ti returned to China and became chairman of the English department at Xankai University. He moved to Nanking in 1921 to head the English department at Southeastern University (after 1927, Central or Chung-yang University). Among his students was Ghing-ying Lee, who had traveled from Canton to become one of the eight women in the first coeducational class at the university. She and Mei were married in 1927, after which she went to the United States for graduate work at Radcliffe College and returned to China to teach English language and literature courses. In 1922 Mei Kuang-ti, together with Wu Mi (q.v.) and other colleagues at Southeastern University, founded Hsueh-heng [the critical review] to oppose the Chinese literary revolution. In the first issue of Hsueh-heng, Mei wrote a scathing indictment of the advocates of the new literary movement. By that time, pai-hua had been established as a medium of instruction in Chinese elementary schools and had begun to gain wide acceptance as a medium for communication and writing. The rapid success of the "literary revolution" inevitably encouraged charlatanism. Some of the new writers were ignorant of their own literary heritage, and their understanding of Western literature was similarly shallow and limited. Mei criticized the writers of the new literary movement for their fondness for self-aggrandizement, their lack of objectivity and humility, their fanaticism, their intolerance, and their increasing indulgence in personal, vituperative attacks on those who disagreed with them. Mei Kuang-ti never opposed Western learning, but he did oppose the indiscriminate iconoclasm of the literary reformers who wanted to replace or destroy everything in the Chinese tradition and who, without sufficient knowledge of the central and enduring features of Western philosophy or literature, emphasized much that was peripheral, transient, or decadent. Mei did not oppose the use of pai-hua; he had a great appreciation of many Chinese literary works written in the colloquial language and recognized it as a legitimate style of writing. However, he did not subscribe to the view that pai-hua should completely supersede classical Chinese, although he realized that the classical language needed to be stripped of archaisms and empty rhetoric in order to become a more flexible instrument capable of expressing modern ideas.

As part of their efforts to provide perspective and balance to Chinese understanding of Western literature, the editors of the Hsueh-heng devoted many pages to translations and to essays about the Western writers they deemed important. Mei Kuang-ti's contributions dealt chiefly with literary critics who, not content with analyzing the formal aesthetic qualities ofa literary work, used literary criticism to express their moral and philosophical insights in such a manner that they became critics or prophets of their age—writers such as Carlyle, Arnold, and, of course, Irving Babbitt. This concept of the man of letters was one which for Mei Kuang-ti had been confirmed by the New Humanists in the United States; but it also was profoundly Confucian, central to the Chinese literary tradition. For Mei, the heroes in his own culture were those who were able to exemplify the high moral life both in writing and in action—men such as Ou-yang Hsiu in the eleventh century and Tseng Kuo-fan in the nineteenth, who were at once statesmen, moralists, and men of letters.

What Mei and his colleagues of the Hsueh-heng group refused to accept was that the literary reform movement in China was motivated chiefly by a desire for social and political reform. The urgent demands and the convulsive changes of the republican period made a true appreciation of the best in both Eastern and Western cultures, much less their attempted synthesis, a luxury that Chinese intellectuals could no longer afford. Nevertheless, Mei Kuang-ti saw more clearly than some of the leaders of literary reform the probable consequences of undermining literary principles and of debasing literary values for political ends. His opposition to the modern literary movement was based on this uncompromising refusal to view literature as a response to the practical needs of the time.

While he was introducing Western literary thought to Chinese readers through the pages of Hsueh-heng and other journals, Mei Kuang-ti was simultaneously playing the role of cultural ambassador on the other side of the Pacific. From 1924 to 1936, except for an interval of one academic year (1930-31) when he was acting dean of the college of arts at Central University, he taught Chinese at Harvard University. Y. R. Chao (Chao Yuen-ren, q.v.) had preceded Mei as instructor of Chinese at Harvard from 1921 to 1924. Mei's relatively long tenure in the post had an important influence on the early study of Chinese language and literature in the United States. In his courses, Mei attempted to impart to his students what he felt to be the essential elements of China's traditional civilization.

In 1936 Mei Kuang-ti returned to China to become head of the English department at National Chekiang University and assistant dean of its college of arts and sciences. The Sino- Japanese war broke out in July 1937, and Chekiang University wasmoved toTsunyi,Kweichow, in 1939, where it remained until the end of the war. In 1939 Mei Kuang-ti became dean of the newly independent college of arts. As an important administrator in the university, he devoted much energy to maintaining high educational standards in the face of great hardships. In addition to his regular administrative duties, greatly complicated by material shortages and by psychological uncertainties, he had to be concerned with the personal welfare and physical survival of his students. Many of Mei's students stood in awe of him and were ill at ease in his presence, but he was unstinting in his efforts to encourage and support students in whom he saw promise. He also was known for acts of personal kindness that at times bordered on impulsive generosity: emptying his pockets for a student who had to go on a journey; raising funds for one who required an operation; or risking his own safety to rescue one who had been secretly arrested on false political charges.

At Tsunyi, Mei Kuang-ti continued to give courses on English literature, concentrating on the critics and essayists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His published writings included articles about these writers and analyses of twentieth-century events in Europe with reference to their historical and intellectual backgrounds. From 1938 to 1945 Mei also served on the People's Political Council at Chungking.

By February 1945, Mei Kuang-ti had become seriously ill. His diary for 1945 contains many references to writings which he now began to feel that he would not live to complete. He died on 27 December 1945. Among the many notes and drafts of incomplete manuscripts he left were outlines for books on Han Yü, which were to be written in both English and Chinese. Mei also intended to write an intellectual history of the West for Chinese readers, including biographical and critical studies of 20 or 30 outstanding figures from Voltaire to Nietzsche. These plans were consistent with the pattern of Mei Kuang-ti's career. His mission was to introduce Western literature to China and Chinese literature to the West, treating his subjects in historical perspective and with a sense of tradition, and to uphold a concept of literature which related it to the moral and philosophical life, a concept both Confucian and neo-Humanistic.