Ch'ien Mu (30 July 1895-), scholar, known for his works on Chinese intellectual history and philosophy and for his history textbook, Kuo-shih ta-kang. From 1951 to 1965 he served as president of New Asia College in Hong Kong. A native of Wusih, Kiangsu, Ch'ien Mu was born into a poor family. His father died when Ch'ien was very young, and his mother was unable to send him to the village school until he was 12. He was a quick student, and his teachers encouraged him to continue his schooling. It was only with the greatest difficulty that his family managed to support him through the Wusih Middle School. Since a college education was out of reach, Ch'ien became a village schoolteacher soon after being graduated from middle school in 1912.

Despite the heavy teaching load that was the common lot of primary school teachers in China, Ch'ien Mu continued to study Chinese history and literature in his spare time. In the spring of 1 92 1 , a friend recommended him for a teaching post at the private Chimei Normal School at Amoy, which had been founded by the overseas Chinese philanthropist Tan Kah Kee. Ch'ien Mu taught for one term at the Amoy school, and in the autumn of 1921 he returned to Kiangsu to join the faculty of the Wusih Provincial Normal School. His schedule now permitted him to spend more time on his own work, and he began to write articles for various newspapers and periodicals. However, it was not until his article on Mo-tzu, "Mo-pien t'an-yuan," appeared in the Tung-fang tsa-chih [eastern miscellany] in April 1924 that Ch'ien's serious writing became known to a large audience.

When Fengtien forces invaded the lower Yangtze area in January 1925, Wusih was in the battle zone. All schools were closed, and Ch'ien's house was sacked. Ch'ien managed to support his family during this difficult period by selling his work on the Analects of Confucius {Lun-yü yao-lueh) to the Commercial Press in Shanghai. The civil war dragged on and the schools remained closed ; Ch'ien occupied himself with annotating the difficult text ofKung-sun Lung tzu, a task which he completed in three months. In 1926 Ch'ien resumed teaching, now at the Wusih Third Provincial Normal School. In 1928 the Commercial Press published his Kuohsueh kai-lun [essentials of sinology], which was based on his school lectures. The book was intended as an introductory text for the study of Chinese intellectual history, and it soon was adopted by middle schools throughout the country.

Tragedy struck the Ch'ien family in the autumn of 1928. Within a period of three months, Ch'ien Mu's wife, son, and elder brother died. The heavy funeral expenses had to be met, and Ch'ien had to support his mother. Accordingly, he accepted an offer to teach at the Soochow Middle School in the autumn of 1929. His financial worries were alleviated when the Commercial Press published his detailed studies on two members of the group of ancient Chinese philosophers associated with the ming-chia [school of names] : Hui Shih, of the fourth century B.C. ; and Kung-sun Lung, of the early third century. Ch'ien Mu also prepared essays on the philosophies of Motzu and Wang Yang-ming for the encyclopedic compendium Wan-yu wen-k'u [library of universal knowledge], sponsored by the Commercial Press.

A new phase of Ch'ien Mu's career began in 1930. In the spring of that year, he married again. Later in the year, his nien-p'u [chronological biography] of Liu Hsin, a Confucian scholar and bibliographer of the Han period, and of Liu's father, Liu Hsiang, appeared in the Yen-ching hsueh-pao [Yenching journal]. Ch'ien's article contained a devastating critique of the Hsin-hsueh wei-ching k'ao [forged classics of the Wang Mang period], which K'ang Yuwei (q.v.) had published in 1891. K'ang had set forth the theory that the "old text" versions of the ancient Chinese classics were all products of an elaborate program of falsification conducted by Liu Hsin. Ch'ien exploded K'ang's theory. Impressed by Ch'ien Mu's scholarship, Yenching University offered him an instructorship, which he accepted. In 1931 Ch'ien left Yenching to join the staff of Peking University as an associate professor.

In later years, Ch'ien recalled that the period at Peiping prior to the Sino-Japanese war had been one of the most serene in his life. As a university professor, he was financially secure. In the spring of 1933, Ch'ien completed a major work on ancient Chinese philosophy. Published in 1935 under the title Hsien-Ch'in chu-tzu hsinien [chronology of the pre-Ch'in philosophical schools], this study was considered by many Chinese scholars to be the definitive summary of the Ch'ing school of textual criticism. It was followed in 1937 by Chung-kuo chin san-pai-nien hsueh-shu shih [history of Chinese scholarship in the last three hundred years], an equally important contribution to the study of Chinese intellectual history. In that work, Ch'ien emphasized the continuity of the Neo-Confucianism of the Sung period and Ch'ing scholarship, a relationship which had been obscured by the Ch'ing scholars' criticism of Sung learning and which had been overlooked by such scholars as Chang Ping-lin and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (qq.v.). In the introduction, Ch'ien also attacked contemporary advocates of total Westernization for seeking change for the sake of change. Ch'ien Mu was to express this attitude repeatedly in his later writings. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in July 1937, Ch'ien Mu went south to Hunan by way of Hong Kong to join the refugee university that had been organized in Changsha by the faculties of Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai universities. In the spring of 1938, he followed the migration of that institution to Yunnan province. Ch'ien decided that, because of the lack of library facilities in west China, it would be useful to students if he published his lecture notes in book form. The result was the Kuo-shih ta-kang [outline of Chinese history], a history of China from ancient to modern times. Originally published in 1940, it was, for the next few years, probably the most widely used history textbook in China.

The Kuo-shih ta-kang was intended to show the way for the solution of China's problems through the clearer understanding of its past history. The book embodied the results of much creative thinking, but it also contained many debatable generalizations. Because it was written at a time of foreign invasion, it exaggerated the onerousness of alien rule and suppressed the contributions made by alien dynasties to the development of Chinese culture. After its publication, Ch'ien became known as one of the most eloquent and learned spokesmen of the conservative group of Chinese historians. While the Kuo-shih ta-kang was being prepared for publication, Ch'ien received word that his aged mother was ill. He left Yunnan for Hong Kong and, using an assumed name, made his way to Soochow, where his mother was living. During his mother's last months, Ch'ien lived in seclusion in Japanese-occupied territory. In 1941 he made his way to Hong Kong, where he took a plane to Chungking. He then went to Chengtu, where he resided for almost six years. He became the director of the Research Institute on Chinese Culture of West China Union University. In the summer of 1946 Ch'ien Mu returned to Kiangsu. Finding that the postwar atmosphere there was hostile to academic pursuits, he accepted an offer to teach at the University of Yunnan at Kunming. In 1 947 he was persuaded to return to Wusih to teach at Kiang-nan University, which was located on hills overlooking T'ai Lake. Ch'ien was very fond of the area and would have liked to help develop Kiang-nan University into an outstanding institution of higher learning. However, in the spring of 1 949, the Communist military forces swept southward to Kiangsu, and he fled to Hong Kong. In the autumn of 1950, to help solve the educational problems of the young Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, Ch'ien and a few colleagues founded a night school. They taught liberal arts and commercial subjects to some 50 students. Initially, the school's classrooms were rented from a local middle school and also served as bedrooms for the faculty members. In the spring of 1951 Ch'ien decided to transform the night school into a day school, and it became the Hsin-ya shu-yuan (New Asia College). His course on Chinese history was the college's greatest attraction. The school combined the spirit of traditional Chinese academies and the Western tutorial method. After 1954, New Asia College received financial assistance from Yale University, the Asia Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the British Cultural Association, the Hong Kong government, and the Mencius Educational Foundation of Hong Kong. These contributions enabled the college to expand its physical plant and academic program. Ch'ien's educational efforts were rewarded by the ministry of education of the National Government in Taiwan with a medal and a financial award in March 1955. In July 1955, Hong Kong University honored him with an honorary LL.D. degree. In 1960 he was invited to lecture at Yale University during the spring semester and was given an honorary D.Litt. in June of that year. While in the United States, he also visited other leading universities, including Harvard and Columbia. In the autumn of 1960, he visited England, France, Germany, and Greece before returning to Hong Kong. Ch'ien Mu resigned from the presidency of New Asia College in June 1965, but he continued to serve on its board of governors. In 1965-66 he served as professor of Chinese studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Ch'ien Mu wrote many other works on Chinese history, philosophy, and classical studies. His Kuo-shih hsin-lun [new discussions of Chinese history] was published in Hong Kong in 1955.