Aging & Wisdom Quote by Hu Shih

The engine of influence isn’t doctrine here; it’s homework. Hu Shih frames the Jesuits’ entry into China not as a conquest but as a method: learn the language, absorb the culture, then build relationships where ideas actually circulate. That sequencing matters. It casts cultural competence as both a moral gesture and a tactical prerequisite, implying that any attempt to persuade without first listening is crude, even doomed. For Hu, a leading voice of China’s intellectual modernization, this isn’t neutral description; it’s a case study in how change travels.

The subtext is an argument about intermediaries and gatekeepers. “Young intellectuals” are singled out because they’re the hinge generation: literate, ambitious, unusually open to new frameworks, and positioned to translate those frameworks into institutions. Hu’s phrasing hints at a familiar asymmetry: foreign actors don’t have to reach “the people” directly if they can win the class that writes, teaches, and reforms. Contact becomes the quiet precondition of conversion - not necessarily religious conversion, but conversion to vocabularies of science, ethics, governance.

Context sharpens the edge. Hu Shih lived through the late Qing collapse, the May Fourth movement, and fierce debates over tradition versus reform. In that milieu, Jesuit “accommodation” reads like an early prototype of soft power: respect as strategy, translation as leverage. The line nudges Chinese readers to notice how cultural openness can be empowering and exploitable at once, and how intellectual networks - not armies - often decide what a society comes to call modern.