The Critical Review, also known as Xueheng in Chinese, was a major Chinese-language journal that supports traditional Chinese culture during the New Culture Movement. Generally regarded as cultural conservatism, the scholars who published on the journal, including Wu Mi, Mei Guangdi, Hu Xiansu, Liu Yizheng and Guo Binhe, were termed the Critical Review Group or the Xueheng School, based at National Southeastern University.

Hu Xiansu or Hu Hsen-Hsu was a Chinese botanist and scholar. He was the founder of plant taxonomy in China and a pioneer of modern botany and paleobotany research in the country. One of his most notable achievements as a botanist was the discovery of the living fossil Metasequoia glyptostroboides in the 1940s, which previously thought to have been extinct for over 150 million years. This has been considered one of the most important botanical discoveries of the 20th century.