Time & Perspective Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih’s line lands like a politely unsheathed blade: it doesn’t plead for China’s spiritual legitimacy so much as deny the right of outsiders to be the judge. The setup is telling. He doesn’t say the Chinese are “religious” in some essential, romantic sense; he says no serious student of history can claim otherwise. Authority shifts from missionary impression or orientalist cliché to evidentiary scholarship, a move that fits Hu’s broader project as a modernizing intellectual who trusted critical method over inherited dogma.

The subtext is aimed at a familiar insult in early 20th-century discourse: that China was “practical,” “ethical,” or “ritualistic,” but spiritually barren. Hu counters by choosing the accusers’ yardsticks and still clearing the bar. “Even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India” is a strategic concession that’s also a critique. Medieval Europe invokes the Western Christian benchmark often smuggled into “religion” as definition; “pious India” nods to a different, non-Western exemplar of overt spirituality. By naming both, Hu exposes how comparative religion can become a rigged exam, then insists China passes it anyway.

Context matters: Hu Shih was writing in a period when Chinese thinkers were negotiating modernity under pressure from imperialism, missionary narratives, and domestic debates about Confucianism’s status as philosophy, ethics, or religion. His sentence argues that China’s traditions (Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, popular practice) are not a deficiency to be corrected, but a complex record to be read. The real intent isn’t to make China look more like Europe or India; it’s to make “religious experience” stop meaning “their kind.”