Having long been neglected as an area of academic research, the history of Christianity in China has received considerable attention during the past three decades. The exploration of new archival sources and sophisticated research approaches have contributed to a growing body of scholarly literature. Daniel Bays has availed himself of this rich vein of newly accumulated knowledge to produce a concise and accessible overview as well as a convincing reinterpretation of the often tortuous transition of Christianity from a foreign creed to an indigenized and acculturated faith in a non-Western society. Chronological in approach, the volume considers both the Nestorian and Roman Catholic variants. However, the emphasis is clearly on the Protestant dimension. The main text concludes with a stimulating narrative of the extraordinarily rapid rise of indigenous Christianity in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Russian Orthodox Mission to China is considered in a brief but informative appendix. Here we can offer only a few comments on this important work.
Much has been made in the scholarly literature of Chinese reactions to Milton Theobald Stauffer's investigative survey of the development of Christianity in China, titled The Christian Occupation of China. A General Survey of the Numerical Strength and Geographical Distributon [sic] of the Christian Forces in China (Shanghai: China Continuation Committee, 1922). Its provocative title is said to have contributed to the severe anti-missionary agitation that had been started by Chinese activists in the early 1920s. However, modern writers do not indicate when objections to the report's title were first raised, nor by whom. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that a Chinese version with the rather more innocuous title of Zhonghua guizhu (China for Christ) appeared at the same time. It should also be noted that a survey with a similar title, Survey of the Missionary Occupation of China, had been published by Thomas Cochrane in Shanghai in 1913—without causing resentment.
It is, however, a fact—as Daniel Bays has convincingly explained—that radical activists attacked religion in general and the foreign creed in particular in the third decade of the twentieth century. Whereas the Confucian elite had opposed Christianity in defense of Chinese cultural superiority in late imperial China, the radical intelligentsia of the 1920s employed modern nationalistic rhetoric to promote its revolutionary political agenda. Demonizing the missionary “Other” certainly proved attractive in urban settings, especially among the student population, but was less effective in China's vast countryside. Although ever-present xenophobic undercurrents could surface from time to time, the rural folk were more interested in receiving the missionaries' material support in their desperate struggle for survival. It was not until the early 1950s that a potent mixture of nationalism and xenophobia was effectively fostered in anti-missionary campaigns as part of the drive by the Communist rulers to gain the support of the masses.
Bold generalizations are still quite common in modern studies of the cultural encounter between foreign missionaries and Chinese society. However, Bays shows greater awareness of the complexities inherent in this encounter. He devotes considerable space to the relationship between the missionaries and the emerging local churches. In this connection, he pays particular attention to the complex internal and external factors that complicated the already slow implementation of the “Three-Self Principles” that were meant to facilitate the transition from mission church to indigenous church.
A few points require clarification. For example, the assertion that “there were missionaries from the Propaganda Fide in Shandong as well” (p. 27) in the eighteenth century is not quite correct. There were, in fact, two groups of Franciscans active in the province at this time: Spanish friars under the patronato real and Italian Franciscans who had been assigned to China by Propaganda Fide. It was not until the 1830s that Propaganda Fide sent an Italian secular priest, Ludovico de Besi, to Shandong.
While recent academic research has focused almost exclusively on prominent Chinese church leaders, the lives, beliefs, experiences, and attitudes of ordinary Christians have been sadly neglected. Daniel Bays is, therefore, to be congratulated for having devoted considerable space to Chinese indigenous churches, especially those with Pentecostal characteristics, notably the True Jesus Church and the Jesus Family. He concludes that at this level, in rural China, village Christianity has much in common with Chinese folk religions. It is, however, unfortunate that the author refers to the key missionary in the formative period of the True Jesus Church as “Peterson” when recent studies have established that his Chinese name, Ben Dexin, stands for Bernt Berntsen who was a Norwegian-American faith missionary, not a Swede.
A New History of Christianity in China contains a few typographical errors and minor inaccuracies, but these can be easily corrected for the next edition. At the same time, the by now voluminous literature on early modern Catholic China mission history, much of it in English, could be considered in an updated edition. This succinctly written, groundbreaking work will no doubt become required reading for undergraduate and graduate students of world history and religious studies.
