In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.
From Hu Shih
In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.
It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood.
It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.
Life and human society are the chief concern of Confucianism and, through it, the chief concern of the Chinese people.
No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.
Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.
The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.
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