Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih’s line is doing quiet but radical work: it takes a term Western readers instinctively treat as singular and civilizational - “the Renaissance” - and breaks it into a repeatable historical pattern inside China. That plural, “many periods,” isn’t casual; it’s a polemic in miniature. Hu is refusing the story in which cultural rebirth is a European invention and modernity arrives in China only as an import. He’s also refusing a different trap: the nationalist myth of an unbroken, timeless tradition. A “renaissance” implies interruption, decay, and deliberate recovery. It suggests that Chinese culture has revived itself before, and can do so again, without pretending it never needed renewal.

Context matters. Hu Shih was a leading voice of the May Fourth era, arguing for vernacular literature, critical scholarship, and pragmatic reform. In that fight, historical precedent is a weapon. By pointing to earlier “renaissances” - moments of intellectual reopening, textual re-evaluation, aesthetic experimentation - he legitimizes his own modernizing agenda as continuity with a Chinese habit of self-correction, not betrayal of “Chineseness.”

The subtext is also aimed at Western condescension and Chinese defensiveness at once. If China has had multiple renaissances, then “awakening” isn’t a one-time miracle reserved for Florence; it’s a cultural capacity. Hu reframes reform as endogenous: not copying the West, but reactivating a recurring Chinese impulse to interrogate inherited authority and rebuild the present out of the past.