Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

“Vicissitudes” is doing the diplomatic heavy lifting here. Hu Shih could have said “confusion,” “superstition,” or “backwardness,” the easy Modernist insults. Instead he chooses a cooler, almost anthropological term that implies change over time rather than civilizational failure. The specific intent is to normalize China’s religious history as dynamic and contested, not a timeless essence. In one phrase, he pries “Chinese religion” away from the museum display case and puts it back into history.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To Western readers (or Westernized Chinese elites), “too” insists on parity: China is not the exceptional case that needs special pleading or special condemnation. It had its reformations, syntheses, popular revivals, court patronage, crackdowns, pragmatic compromises. To Chinese reformers tempted to treat religion as merely an obstacle to modernization, “vicissitudes” quietly warns against simplistic deletion. A society’s belief systems are not weeds you pull; they’re weather patterns you survive, adapt to, and sometimes harness.

Context matters: Hu Shih, a leading May Fourth intellectual and advocate of pragmatic, evidence-based thinking, was writing in an era when “religion” was being reframed as a social problem, a scientific category, and a political variable. Late Qing collapse, Republican experimentation, and rising ideological movements all turned faith into a proxy battle over national strength. By calling China’s religious development a sequence of vicissitudes, Hu makes a modern claim: the past is not a verdict. It’s a record of revisions.