Politics & Power Quote by Hu Shih

History’s sneakiest accelerant, Hu Shih argues, isn’t the factory or the classroom but the coup, the uprising, the regime change - the moments when power is grabbed, broken, reassembled. Writing as a philosopher steeped in China’s early 20th-century turmoil, Hu is taking aim at a comforting modernization myth: that societies evolve mainly through “objective” forces like industry or enlightened education. His claim is bluntly directional. Revolutions don’t just reflect social change; they manufacture it, fast, everywhere, and often irreversibly.

The context matters. “1911” is the Xinhai Revolution, the fall of the Qing dynasty, the end of an imperial system that had organized identity, hierarchy, and legitimacy for centuries. From there, “to the present time” telescopes through warlordism, the May Fourth ferment, nationalism, communism, and the global contagion of mass politics. Hu, a major advocate of vernacular language and pragmatic reform, had reason to praise “new schools” - yet he demotes them. That’s the tell: he’s acknowledging that cultural and educational reform moves slowly and unevenly, while political rupture forces even reluctant populations to renegotiate gender roles, class expectations, speech, loyalty, and what counts as citizenship.

The subtext is both warning and diagnosis. Revolutions are socially “productive” not because they’re morally superior, but because they reorganize the rules of everyday life at gunpoint and at speed. Hu’s line reads like a corrective to technocratic optimism: you can build railways and universities and still keep an old social order intact; you can’t depose a regime without detonating the social scripts that sustained it.