Education Quote by Hu Shih

A modern Chinese intellectual praising a missionary strategy is already a small provocation. Hu Shih’s line isn’t devotional; it’s diagnostic. He’s describing how persuasion actually works when the audience is an educated elite: you don’t convert minds by repeating doctrine, you win status contests. The “Christian mission” becomes less a spiritual enterprise than a cultural pitch deck aimed at the gatekeepers of prestige.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Hu credits the Jesuits with pragmatic intelligence: they understood that China’s literati class demanded reasons, proof, and demonstrable capability, not pious enthusiasm. On the other, he exposes the quiet arrogance smuggled into the missionary project. “Show and convince” implies performance and argument, yes, but also a preloaded conclusion: that Europe must be “superior,” and that conversion is the downstream effect of accepting that hierarchy.

Subtext: the battlefield is not theology but modernity. The Jesuits, in Hu’s telling, are early operators in what we’d now call soft power, where clocks, calendars, astronomy, cartography, and courtly access matter as much as scripture. The conversion target isn’t “the Chinese” in some abstract mass; it’s the intelligentsia who certify what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Context sharpens the bite. Hu Shih, a May Fourth-era reformer and champion of pragmatism, lived through China’s wrenching encounter with Western science and institutions. His sentence reads like a warning shot to Chinese reformers and Westernizers alike: cultural change doesn’t arrive as pure truth. It arrives packaged as “superiority,” sold to elites, then naturalized as common sense.