REFLECTIONS ON PROTESTANTISM AND MODERN CHINA: PROBLEMS OF PERIODIZATION

Abstract

This essay takes an unconventional approach to periodizing modern China’s Christian history. It clearly identifies the three elements to be discussed—the Chinese state, the foreign missionaries, and the Chinese Christians—and draws preliminary conclusions as to their relative importance.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• missions
• Taipings
• the Chinese state

I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting the research and writing of this essay.

Notes

1 Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

2 Xi Lian, Redeemed by Fire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

3 D. E. Mungello, “Historiographical Review: Reinterpreting the History of Christianity in China,” The Historical Journal, 55.2 (2012), 533–52. Another very useful overview is Nicolas Standaert, SJ, “New Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in China,” Catholic Historical Review, 83 (October 1997), 573–613.

4 For example, Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Harvard University Press, 2008). Further evidence of the resourcefulness and adaptability of eighteenth-century Chinese Christianity is presented very convincingly by Eugenio Menegon in Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard-Yenching monograph series) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

5 David E. Mungello, “The Return of the Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian Backlash,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal, xxvii (2005), 9–46.

6 Actually, in terms of overall statistics the Protestant converts were mainly in rural areas, but the missionaries’ institutions and activities were urban-oriented.

7 See the fine recent work by Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012).

8 For one such proclamation, Pei-kai Cheng and Michael Lestz, eds, with Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, a Documentary Collection (New York: Norton, 1999), 146–49.

9 Daniel Bays, “Christianity and Chinese Sects: Religious Tracts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Christianity in China: Protestant Missionary Writings, ed. by Suzanne W. Barnett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Committee on American-East Asian Relations, Department of History, Harvard University, 1985).

10 Apt examples are in Cheng and Lestz, 139–46.

11 Andrew Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 27–48.

12 In 1978, Chang Hao had a long essay in the Cambridge History of China which made a superb recounting of the 1898 reforms. But even this classic piece, along with my own book on Zhang Zhidong as a reformer at the turn of the century and books of other 1970s scholars as well, failed to see the creation of any “religious” issues, let alone the religion-superstition dichotomy, at this time. But then there was a general neglect of religion in those years. Hao Chang, “Intellectual Change and the Reform Movement, 1890–8,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2, ed. by Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, 1980), 274–338. Daniel H. Bays, China Enters the Twentieth Century: Chang Chih-tung and the Issues of a New Age, 1895–1908 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1978). Early studies that did detect the important changes in “religion” beginning in the late nineteenth century included Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns Against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 50.1 (1991), 67–83; and Roger R. Thompson, “Twilight of the Gods in the Chinese Countryside: Christians, Confucians, and the Modernizing State, 1862–1911,” in Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 73–90.More recently, a fine book edited by Mayfair Yang includes several essays which are very important to the early twentieth century. In fact, I think the historical essays are the highlight of the book. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). The three that I refer to are Rebecca Nedostup, “Ritual Competition and the Modernizing Nation-State,” 87–112; David A. Palmer, “Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults: Labeling Heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century China,” 113–34; and Vincent Goossaert, “Republican Church Engineering: The National Religious Associations in 1912 China,” 209–32.

13 Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

14 Her book is Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). An article, “Ritual Competition,” in Mayfair Yang, ed., Chinese Religiosities, 87–112.

15 The best source on these events is Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009).

16 Xi Lian, Redeemed by Fire.

17 See more on Chen in Daniel Bays, “Foreign Missions and Indigenous Protestant Leaders in China, 1920–1955: Identity and Loyalty in an Age of Powerful Nationalism,” in Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 144–64.

18 Both documents in Documents of the Three-self Movement, comp. by Wallace C. Merwin and Francis P. Jones (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, 1963), 18–20.

19 Paul P. Mariani, SJ, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel H Bays

Daniel H. Bays is Professor of History, Emeritus, at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He taught at the University of Kansas for twenty-nine years before coming to Calvin College in 1999 as the Spoelhof Chair and Professor of History/Asian Studies. Since the early 1980s he has been one of the first scholars to focus on Chinese Christianity and he was instrumental in creating grant-funded support for this field. His major works include Christianity in China: the Eighteenth Century to the Present (ed., 1996) and A New History of Christianity in China (2011).