Virtually all historians of Asia are familiar with the protracted history of Jesuit exchange with China during the Ming and Qing eras; it is still common that graduate students are required to read Jacques Gernet's Chine et Christianisme, Action et Reaction. Scholars of recent decades have challenged Gernet's oversimplified narrative of Sino-Missionary conflict, however, and now offer better informed and more nuanced interpretations of the missionary encounter with China. Studies now extend beyond the scientific and religious footprints of Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall von Bell to analyze the multi-denominational and intellectual exchanges that transpired at “the grassroots level,” as Riiki-Leena Juntunen puts it, rather than only the more rarified exchange that occurred between Jesuits and the court. These three monographs represent mature and well-researched engagements with the question of Sino-Christian “inculturation,” and they highlight how present scholarship has largely divided the history of missions in China between two conflicting views. One view holds that traditional ecclesial structures and orthodoxies represent the most effective way of conveying Christianity in China, while the other view, the one that predominates in these three books, suggests that such structures and orthodoxies can impede successful religious exchange.
Riika-Leena Juntunen's study of Christian missionary sites in Hunan explores what she identifies as “spaciality” and “localization,” or how a place with pervasive cultural, religious, or political views, such as a Western Christian mission church, transforms and is transformed by the analogous views held by local Chinese once it is transplanted into its new cultural context. While Juntunen's use of “mission station” for Fuyintang 福音堂, is awkward—“church” or “Gospel Hall” would have been a more accurate rendering of the term—her study effectively illustrates how malleable Chinese society has been when encountering transplanted missionary spaces on Chinese soil. This book is divided into four chapters that rely largely on Finnish archival materials related to mission churches in Hunan's Lizhou county. Chapter one explores the various messages conveyed by newly established churches, and how emotional responses figured into Sino-Mission encounters. Among her most salient points in this chapter is that, “Wherever they went in China, foreign missionaries did not enter into a vacuum, but a society where people held varying ideas about the nature of their presence” (20). With several intriguing examples from the Jinshi Finnish mission, Juntunen offers a rather apparent observation—that cultural views on both sides of the Sino-Missionary divide influenced each other in ways that created new hybridized identities related to space and locality.
Chapters two and three discuss how missionary place in Lizhou was reconfigured through time due to outside determining forces such as the Taiping Rebellion and the rising influence of foreign powers, and how local Chinese resisted or accommodated to foreign missionary presence for self-empowerment. Here I find one of her assertions problematic. In Juntunen's Introduction she suggests that, while the missionaries “carried the burden of cultural colonialism, the local members were never victims of pressing Western culture but active partakers” who found “new strategies for survival in their immediate surroundings” (5). Factors she points out later in her book, such as imbalances in power relations between local Chinese and foreigners, functioned to disturb the cultural status quo in Hunan (74–76). Lizhou Chinese may have found “new strategies for survival” under Western pressure, but they often did so precisely because of their victimization under foreign coercion. The final chapter examines the turbulent conflicts that arose when local Jinshi Christians were forced to confront changing social circumstances such as nationalism and the communist occupation of Lizhou. As she states, “the rising popular nationalism started to restructure the mission station's place identity and tied the Christian community to the new political thinking” (85). Tracing the history of place and locality at the Lizhou Finnish Protestant mission churches through changing political contexts and church destruction due to communist church destruction, Juntunen has aptly illustrated that place and locality “are never static and no identities remain unchanged over time” (7). While at times the narrative suffers from awkward prose and lacks chronological cohesion, this work is nonetheless a significant contribution to the study of Sino-Christian cultural exchange and serves as a good example of how local history during China's transition from empire to nation state can be successfully analyzed on both the micro and macro historical levels.
David Mungello's welcome new book on the “Catholic invasion of China” represents a much-needed overview of the Roman Catholic mission in China and its evolution from a missionary initiative into a largely independent Catholic community. Although embedded in his book's title is the rather pejorative word “invasion,” Mungello does not comprehensively dismiss the Catholic mission to China as a manifestly imperialist enterprise. He divides Catholicism in China into two eras: the short-term “debacle,” when missionaries indeed invaded China as ambassadors of Westernization and bearers of a religious message, and the long-term transformation of the Catholic faith from an edifice of Western culture into a Church that is more authentically Chinese. Demonstrating masterful dexterity with primary and secondary sources, Mungello weaves together a compelling tapestry of anecdotes and archival statistics to argue that Catholicism was slow to indigenize in China due to missionary “attitudes of superiority that transcended the realm of spirituality” (14). After contextualizing “Catholicism and Western imperialism in China,” the second chapter argues that the post-1842 Catholic mission that had replaced the Portuguese Padroado with a French Protectorate sought to de-Sinicize the Chinese Catholic Church. It was during the eighteenth century that the Church's emphasis in China departed from theological concerns (Rites Controversy) to matters of authority (French Protectorate), which stimulated local Chinese Catholics to complain about European conceit in an “Open Letter” (Zhaoran gonglun 昭然公論) on Ash Wednesday 1846. Chapter three describes European efforts to resist the emergence of an indigenous Catholic Church, and correctly connects this Western response mostly to the French missionaries who had the attitude that “adopting Christianity also meant adopting French culture” (40). As Mungello notes, the Belgian missionary Vincent Lebbe was an exception to this trend and sought to liberate Chinese Catholics from French European dominance. My only quibble with this chapter is that it deals more with Chinese Catholic resistance to ecclesial imperialism than with European resistance to Catholic indigenization, as the chapter title suggests.
Chapters four and five describe controversies surrounding Catholic sisters who saved children from infanticide and abandonment in China and accusations against missionary priests of sexual misconduct. Defending the sisters against Chinese criticisms—that they represented political interests over religious aims and maltreated Chinese females—Mungello admits that Catholic sisters could “not escape the taint of colonialism,” but praises them for their “courage” and being “a feminist force” that “bonded profoundly with these abandoned girls” (77). Chapter five confronts accusations made by China's communist officials against several of the missionaries who were canonized saints by Pope John-Paul II in 2000. These accusations blamed missionaries of raping Chinese women and accused them of relying on foreign military backing to humiliate the Chinese people. Mungello argues that these claims represent a “mixture of fact and fantasy,” and that what was stated in the Peoples Daily in 2000 against these missionaries “lacks credible evidence” (108). The concluding chapter of this book suggests that the “Catholic invasion” of China ended once missionaries were evicted in 1951 and Chinese Catholics were able to govern their own community. This post-1951 era marks for Mungello the time when the Chinese Church was finally able to appropriately Sinicize, and he concludes his book with a series of musings on the current and future realities of Catholicism in China. I do wonder, however, if Mungello's argument that “the elevation of a Chinese pope in the near future is a likelihood” is a bit optimistic. That said, Mungello has accomplished the difficult task of summarizing a complex and unwieldy topic in a manner only a scholar of his intellectual dexterity and insights could have done.
Matteo Nicolini-Zani's study of Christian monasticism in China is noteworthy for two important reasons: it describes an influential part of China's history that has been almost entirely overlooked, and it includes the history of women monastics into the narrative. Nicolini-Zani has divided his study into five chapters that describe Christian monasticism in China, from the era of the so-called Nestorians (Church of the East) that entered China during the Tang dynasty to the two communities founded by Vincent Lebbe during the Republican Era. This book is comprised largely of previously published articles that have been reworked into a monograph, and the work thus suffers at times from lack of overall unity. It is thus difficult to discern a unified argument, and the reader should read each chapter more as a discrete discussion than a cohesive whole. Perhaps the main question Nicolini-Zani asks in this collection of articles is: how does monasticism, which conducts its work in isolation, relate to the ideals and aims of the Christian mission? The predominance of his history of monastic communities in China sets out to explain that while monastics may not participate in the public work of missionaries, they nonetheless have a “missionary dimension” due to the influence they have on the societies around them (2). China's first cloistered Catholics were nuns who arrived in 1869, followed in 1883 by the first male order of monks who established a Trappist abbey a short distance from Beijing. Chapter one outlines the history of the Syro-Oriental monks (“Nestorians”) who proliferated along with Buddhist monastics during the Tang dynasty. The second chapter describes how the French Carmelite communities that settled in such places as Shanghai and Chongqing, unlike the Syro-Oriental monks, made comparatively few attempts to adapt to Chinese society. Chapter three provides a stirring narrative of the Trappist mission to Yangjiaping and its atrocious destruction by communist forces in 1947.
Chapter four outlines the challenges that the Benedictine order encountered while establishing communities in Beijing, Xishan, Chengdu, and Yanji; and here Nicolini-Zani provides several examples of how the Benedictines attempted to apply Vincent Lebbe's recommendation to engender “a Church detached from European nationalism and governed by a native clergy” (197). The book concludes with a history of the communities founded by Vincent Lebbe according to his model of inculturation. Not only did Lebbe's new communities make genuine efforts to Sinicize Catholic monasticism, but they also served as expressions of Chinese patriotism. During the war of resistance against the Japanese in the 1930s, Lebbe summoned “his Little Brothers to become active witnesses of the patriotism of the Catholic Church in China” (279). By ending his book with Lebbe's efforts to adapt Catholic Christianity to Chinese cultural mores, Nicolini-Zani underscores one of the most common points he makes in his book, which is to demonstrate how monasticism in China did function as a social influence in China both inside and outside the realm of religious belief. While the overall structure and narrative of this book is somewhat fractured, it remains an important contribution to our overall understanding of the vicissitudes of Sino-Western and Sino-Missionary history. These three works have reconsidered, and effectively resisted, Gernet's assertion that Christianity and China cannot find an intellectual and cultural accord, and they have provided examples of how these two cultural forces have in fact organically found points of confluence.
