Eric Liddell (1902–45), an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh and a missionary in China, is seen by many in contemporary China as a good missionary, having served there during the Second World War and dying of illness in a Japanese civilian camp just before liberation.Footnote 1 The Protestant Liddell is thus a counterpart to Frédéric Vincent Lebbe (1877–1940). Lebbe, a Belgian Lazarist missionary, had sided with Chinese Catholics against a French-dominated ecclesiastical establishment in Late Imperial and Republican China, championing a vision of Christianity free of imperialist and colonialist encrustations. Lebbe eventually adopted Chinese citizenship and also died during the Second World War.Footnote 2 Liddell and Lebbe were among a minority of Western missionaries in China who were deeply troubled by the intertwining of Western imperialism and Christianity and sought a modus vivendi with rising Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism. From the mid-nineteenth century, Christianity had gradually become juxtaposed but opposed to Chinese civilization, as Protestant Britain and Catholic France defeated the Qing empire in the two Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1858–60), and forced China to sign unequal treaties, the terms of which included the lifting of the ban on Christian evangelization. ‘Jesus Christ flew to China on the back of gun shells, whereas the Buddha rode on a white elephant’ was the laconic comment of Chiang Monlin, the first minister of education in the government of the Republic of China.Footnote 3 But there had been a time when Christian missionaries had accommodated to the laws and culture of Late Imperial China, and the story of evangelization might have had a different outcome. This article will explore the theme of ‘Church and Empire’ by studying two periods of Christian evangelization and analysing the ways in which the culture of empires, both Chinese and Western, changed the course of the history of Christianity. The story began with the Jesuit mission some two hundred and fifty years before the first Opium War.
The Catholic Mission to Late Imperial China
In 1692, the Emperor Kangxi (reigned 1651–1722) issued a decree for his European servants, the Jesuit scientists and musicians serving him at court. He decreed that their religion was good and that his subjects should not be impeded from worshipping in Christian churches. This was the much vaunted edict of toleration celebrated in the West.Footnote 4 Among the services recently rendered by the Jesuits to the Qing empire was the work of the Portuguese Tomas Pereira (1645–1708) and the Frenchman Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who together accompanied a Manchu army to the Amur River, where they confronted the Russian garrison at Nerchinsk and forced it to negotiate a treaty, formally demarcating the frontier between the two empires and ending Russian incursions into Manchuria. Since the Russian and Manchu parties shared no common language other than Latin, this first diplomatic success was a credit to Jesuit ingenuity.Footnote 5 Earlier in Kangxi's reign, the Belgian Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88) had served as director of the bureau of astronomy, succeeding the German Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666), who had served Kangxi's father, the emperor Shunzhi.Footnote 6 To his councillors, Kangxi explained: ‘What I am doing now, I do for the love of them, without any concern for others. I am so convinced of their attachment and their loyalty, that even if Europe took arms against me, I shall not cease to enjoy the same goodness they have shown me.’Footnote 7
The Jesuits would indeed remain loyal to the Qing empire. But those who had belonged to the order before its suppression were all dead by the time that Europeans came to take arms against the great-great-grandson of Kangxi in the First Opium War. What went wrong? Or, to state the question a better way: how did the harmonious relationship between Christian mission and Chinese empire in the seventeenth century end up in a confrontation between civilizations in the late nineteenth century?
Originating in the second half of the sixteenth century, the mission to China was the longest and most persistent Catholic endeavour in the early modern world beyond the colonial territories of the Iberian empires. Between the 1580s and 1800, about a thousand missionaries, European and Chinese, worked in this new territory for evangelism; at the mission's height, it ministered to as many as three hundred thousand converts.Footnote 8 Unlike neighbouring Japan, where the mission experienced first spectacular growth and then savage persecution, Catholicism in China progressed slowly but established communities of the faithful that persisted into modern times, despite sporadic and short periods of persecutions. Unlike those in the New World, missionaries arrived in China without soldiers and officials of Western colonizing powers. More so than elsewhere, European missionaries encountered and accommodated themselves to a civilization that was alien, alluring and challenging. The tensions between religions which characterized the Catholic missions in the Ottoman and Persian empires and the aggressive spirit toward Hinduism and Islam in South Asia were altogether less pronounced in Late Imperial China, where state ideology was not determined by allegiance to a single religion.Footnote 9 In the following pages, we will examine the history of the mission, its personnel, methods and converts, and we will study Catholicism's relationship with the religions of China.Footnote 10
Although the first Catholic clergy arrived in China aboard Portuguese ships in the opening decades of the sixteenth century, there are no records of evangelization among the coastal and maritime Chinese populations; this was because the Portuguese came as pirates and traders. The first to try to evangelize was Francis Xavier, the apostle of Asia and the first Jesuit missionary in East Asia, but he died in 1552 on the island of Shangchuan, off the Guangdong coast, before he could embark on his planned China mission. Only after the establishment of a permanent Portuguese base in Macao around 1555, a grant from Chinese officials, was the foundation laid for future Catholic missions.
Accompanying merchants to trade fairs in Guangzhou, Catholic chaplains from Macao first observed the religious customs of Ming China. Despite several attempts to establish a mission in the province, undertaken in the 1570s by Portuguese Jesuits from Macao and Spanish mendicants from the Philippines, the first success was achieved only in 1582/3 by an Italian Jesuit, Michele Ruggieri, who had prepared for the mission by three years of intensive study of Chinese language and culture in Macao. However, one of his Jesuit companions, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), would eclipse him in fame and importance after Ruggieri's return to Italy in 1587.Footnote 11
The most famous of all the China missionaries, Ricci's success rested on his approach. Whereas the first Jesuits dressed as Buddhist monks and made few converts, he assumed the persona of a Western scholar immersed in the study of classical Chinese learning and attracted the attention of the Chinese elites, the mandarins and literati who owed their careers and reputations precisely to such learning. Aside from his charisma, remarked on by many Chinese scholars, Ricci created a brilliant persona with his scientific, technical and geographical knowledge, reinforced by a collection of Western scientific instruments, maps and curiosities. After a modest beginning, Ricci's career took off in 1594. By the time of his death in 1610, he had climbed to the apex of Ming society and reached the imperial capital in Beijing. Jesuit residences had been established in four cities and converts numbered more than a thousand, compared to a few score in the first decade.
Between 1610 and 1644, the mission reached new heights of success. It saw the fastest percentile increase of conversions in the entire history of Christianity in China (albeit the absolute numbers remained modest and were indeed miniscule relative to the total population); it attracted converts from the highest echelons of Late Ming society, among them the highest ranking mandarins and members of the imperial family, and an even broader circle of elite admirers and supporters; it consolidated a successful cultural policy of evangelization, using Western science and the humanities as handmaidens to the queen, theology; it spread to most of the provinces of the country, setting up residences and building churches; and through an energetic programme of composing and publishing Chinese-language Christian literature, ranging from liturgical to literary and scientific works, it achieved a high degree of cultural accommodation and domestication. While in the beginning it was the exclusive domain of the Society of Jesus, after the 1630s the China mission opened up to mendicant friars from the Spanish Philippines, as maritime trade intensified between Fujian and Luzon.
Yet the cataclysm of the mid-seventeenth century almost shattered this Christian edifice. Famine, rebellion and invasion brought death and destruction: peasant rebels overthrew Ming rule (1368–1644), Manchu troops invaded China, and the country was plunged into two decades of war and disorder. Entire Christian communities perished. Two Christian centres survived: Portuguese Macao and Beijing. A haven from warfare, Macao continued to serve as a base for sending personnel and supplies inland. For more than a decade, the Jesuits and Portuguese supported the resistance regime of the southern Ming. Three dowagers and empresses of the Yongli court in southern China converted to Catholicism, as did a number of leading courtiers and the heir apparent of the Emperor Yongli, a boy baptized as Constantine. But when the Manchu Qing forces crushed the Yongli regime in the 1650s, the only remaining hope for converting China lay in Beijing.
In the imperial capital, the Catholic mission survived thanks to the work of Jesuit scientists at the imperial court. Appreciated for their astronomical knowledge, the Catholic mission survived the rebel conquest and the Manchu takeover. Confirmed as superior and director of the Imperial Observatory, the German Jesuit Adam Schall became a confidant and father figure for the much younger Qing Emperor Shunzhi (reigned 1638–61). With political patronage established in Beijing, the Catholic mission rapidly reoriented itself to serve the Qing regime, focusing now on obtaining patronage from the Manchu ruling class rather than on the Han Chinese literati and mandarin elites, as had been the case under the Ming dynasty.
Imperial patronage proved fickle and almost fatal. The death of the emperor Shunzhi in 1661 unleashed a crisis. Blamed for selecting unpropitious dates for burials in the imperial court, the Jesuits, without patronage, were open to attack by their enemies, the xenophobic Confucian scholar Yang Guangxien and Muslim astronomers at court. Placed under house arrest, Schall died before he was put on trial; Christian missionaries were rounded up in the whole country and sent to Guangzhou, in preparation for their expulsion. In this moment of crisis, science saved the day. The Belgian Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest in Beijing demonstrated his superior astronomical and mathematical knowledge in predicting an eclipse and convinced the young Emperor Kangxi that Christian missionaries were innocent of the charges levied against them. The order of expulsion was rescinded, Verbiest was reinstated in the Imperial Observatory, and Christianity survived this crisis and entered a golden age in Imperial China.Footnote 12
The period from 1665 to 1705 represented a prosperous time for the Catholic mission. An energetic and intelligent ruler, the young Kangxi developed an immense curiosity for Western learning, especially in mathematics, and a great respect and affection for Western missionaries, who served as tutors in his private study and at court as astronomers and painters, becoming loyal servants to an imperial master. In return, he bestowed gifts and favours on the missionaries and, as noted above, issued an edict in 1692 explicitly allowing his subjects to practise this Western religion.
With imperial patronage and favour, the Catholic mission prospered. New missionaries arrived, including French Jesuits sent by Louis XIV in 1684; they became embroiled in a jurisdictional dispute with the Portuguese fathers already entrenched in China. In time, the society sanctioned two separate Jesuit missions, one under Portuguese, the other under French, direction. However, this internal tension was overshadowed by a far sharper confrontation that would eventually have negative repercussions for the entire mission, the Chinese Rites Controversy.Footnote 13
The origins of this confrontation went back to the first Spanish mendicant friars who had evangelized in the 1630s and 1640s. Having arrived from Mexico and the Philippines, territories won to the Church by Spanish arms, the friars had developed a different vision of evangelization, one based on the superiority of Christian civilization to all others and on the unique value of Spanish experiences. In China, the friars questioned the Jesuits’ policy of accommodation to Chinese customs, a policy first established by Ricci and confirmed by subsequent generations of Jesuit missionaries, particularly pertaining to the rituals performed in honour of ancestors and the great Chinese sage, Confucius. Whereas the Jesuits defined these as civic rituals, matters indifferent to Christian doctrine, the friars attacked these practices as religious superstitions. Both sides sent representatives to argue their case in Rome. The dispute led to a war of words that engrossed public opinion in Europe and energized opposition to the Society of Jesus.
The Jesuit missionary strategy of harmonizing Confucianism with Christianity emerged from two considerations.Footnote 14 First, for Ricci, the originator of this strategy, Confucian culture had equalled the achievements of Greco-Roman civilization; since the latter had served as the foundation for the evangelization of the West, Confucianism as seen by the Jesuits could serve a similar function. Secondly, among all the religions of China, Ricci had identified Buddhism, the most popular religion, as the hypothetical enemy of Christianization, despite several expressions of friendship by Buddhist monks during the early years of the Jesuit mission. Provoked by Jesuit animosity, Christian-Buddhist polemic flared up in the early decades of the seventeenth century, although it died down after the first two generation of Jesuit missionaries had passed from the scene.
More in the manner of religious polemic than interfaith dialogue, Catholic missionaries in Late Imperial China showed little or no curiosity about Chinese religions, except for the sole surviving Jewish community in Kaifeng. Apart from one religious debate in the 1640s between the Jesuit Nicolas Longobardo and some Muslim leaders, Christian missionaries had few if any dealings with the numerous Chinese Muslim communities, nor did they show any further interest in Buddhism or Daoism.Footnote 15 Moreover, Christianity proved attractive to some adherents of popular religions and banned sects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, an association that brought with it negative political connotations that the missionaries were at pain to disclaim.
Even while the Catholic mission was entering its golden age under the reign of Kangxi, the Jesuits were losing the war in the field of papal politics and public opinion in Europe. In 1704, the papacy condemned certain Chinese rituals in honour of ancestors and Confucius as idolatrous and forbade converts to participate in them. A papal legate, Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710), was dispatched to proclaim the papal decree in China and present the case to the imperial court. Ill-advised and prepared, the Tournon legation was a disaster.Footnote 16 Irked by Western pronouncements on Chinese rituals, the Emperor Kangxi dismissed the papal legate, who eventually died of an illness in Macao, virtually under house arrest by the hostile Portuguese, who were strong supporters of the Jesuits. Nonetheless, and despite the overwhelming opposition of Chinese converts, the papal bull condemning Chinese rituals was publicized in 1705 and all missionaries were enjoined to enforce its stipulations.
It was a watershed. Hitherto represented as a synthesis between East and West and harmonious with Confucian learning, Christianity was now perceived by many as alien, aggressive and anti-Chinese. While Chinese Christians reluctantly abided by the new stipulations, numbers of conversions dropped, especially among the literati elites. The most severe blow came from the emperor, who withdrew his patronage. Kangxi proclaimed Christianity a superstitious and troublesome religion, and while he continued to allow its practice by his Western servants at court, he forbade adherence to Christianity among his own subjects. All Western missionaries had either to swear that they would not leave China and that they would adhere to the ways of Father Ricci, or else to leave the country. The split in the mission was great: the Dominicans, the Augustinians and the priests of the Paris Foreign Missions (Société des Missions étrangères de Paris) refused to accept the conditions and left; the Franciscans were divided in their allegiance; but the great majority of Jesuits accepted Kangxi's conditions. With the exception of Beijing, after 1707 Christianity was outlawed in the Qing empire.
Despite the ban, Christian communities continued. Some churches were seized and converted into schools, and Western missionaries in the provinces went into hiding, but religious life continued for the most part, tolerated by local officials. Kangxi died in 1722, and the succession struggle unleashed another crisis. The new Emperor Yongzhen (reigned 1722–35) prevailed against a brother who was supported by a powerful Manchu noble family, the Sunu, many of whom were Christian converts; the intrigue of a Portuguese Jesuit exacerbated matters. The Sunus were losers in the political struggle and were exiled, but they were celebrated as Christian martyrs in Jesuit letters. The Jesuit, João Mourão, was executed, a death remembered largely with embarrassed silence in missionary records. Still, Christian communities remained largely undisturbed, and laws decreed were not always vigorously enforced. However, two decades later the zeal of a governor in Fujian would change all this.
In 1746, the discovery of a covert Spanish missionary in Fujian unleashed a manhunt. In the end, five Dominican friars and more than a dozen Chinese catechists and Christian leaders were arrested. Interpreting the anti-Christian law rigorously (the death penalty had not been stipulated in the original ban), the governor quietly executed the missionaries in prison before the Jesuits in Beijing could intervene to secure an imperial pardon. Two years later, it was the turn of the Jesuits to suffer martyrdom when a dispute between two Christians in Suzhou led to the denunciation, arrest and quick executions of two of their number. These cases had some aspects in common: both were zealously prosecuted by anti-Christian provincial mandarins, who interpreted and executed the law rigorously; and in both cases, the missionaries at the imperial court tried and failed to secure an imperial pardon. Nonetheless, these instances of persecution did not reflect a new hostility on the part of the Emperor Qianlong (reigned 1735–96), grandson of Kangxi, who enjoyed the service of Western missionary painters and musicians at court. Rather, a combination of local circumstances and indifference at court sealed the fate of the missionaries. In 1752, officials in Hubei province initiated another hunt for Christians, alarmed by a mistaken notion that a local rebellion was in collusion with Christianity. This time the emperor intervened, instructing his mandarins that the two had nothing to do with one another.Footnote 17
Officially banned by the Qing state, the Christian mission continued to be sustained by the two poles of Beijing and Macao. In the imperial capital, worshippers openly attended mass at all four Christian churches, a practice tolerated by Qianlong in reward for the service of his Western missionaries. To the best of their abilities, these missionary courtiers exercised discretion in extending protection to missionaries and converts in the provinces, while Macao served as the rear base. Couriers from the internal mission travelled to the Portuguese enclave carrying letters and reports, and returned to the interior conveying monies, letters and supplies, and escorting missionaries newly arrived from Europe and travelling in disguise.
In 1784, authorities intercepted one of these runs. The emperor was stunned. Enraged that Christianity continued to thrive almost eight decades after being declared illegal by his grandfather, Qianlong ordered an anti-Christian campaign in all provinces of the realm. The 1784–5 persecutions represented the gravest crisis of the mission: scores of Western missionaries and Chinese priests were arrested, some died in prison, and hundreds of converts were punished, by exile, prison and caning.Footnote 18 Moreover, the persecutions came at a time when the mission had lost any effective lobby and protection in the imperial capital. Still, the Christian communities survived, left alone again after this tempest, as the Qing state turned to face graver challenges from Muslim and White Lotus rebellions.
Meanwhile, the Society of Jesus had been suppressed in Europe in 1773. In China, the former Jesuits lived in Beijing under imperial protection while Lazarist missionaries took over their churches.Footnote 19 Between the 1770s and 1840, with only a handful of Western missionaries in the country, the proportion of Chinese clergy increased and most Christian communities were guided by strong local lay leadership. Despite persecutions, Christianity survived in China.Footnote 20 The history of the Catholic mission shows that the Jesuit accommodation to Chinese culture and imperial institutions was a proven formula of success. Its unravelling resulted not from Chinese opposition but from differences within the missionary enterprise. Despite its complexity and multi-dimensionality, the Chinese Rites Controversy was essentially a quarrel between religious orders and missionary methods. The fact that the Jesuits were the losing party implied a negative turn for evangelization in China. Nevertheless, a small but vibrant Chinese Christian community survived into the early nineteenth century, when imperial laws of prohibition were no longer rigorously applied. However, in that century, hostility toward this Western religion would flare up within a few decades, when Western missionaries again entered China, this time backed by diplomacy and military force.
Western Imperialism and the Christian Mission
In the earliest years of the nineteenth century, the first Protestant missionary, the Englishman Robert Morrison (1782–1834), arrived in China and initiated a century of Protestant evangelization supported by Protestant mission societies in Europe and North America.Footnote 21 Morrison preached the gospel surreptitiously while working for the British East India Company, but after the prohibition against Christian evangelization was lifted in 1842, following the defeat of the Qing empire by Britain in the First Opium War, later missionaries could preach the gospel openly. This new wave of Christianity came into China along with Western gunboats and strong-arm diplomacy, and it brought about a direct confrontation between Chinese culture and Western Christianity.
Britain and France were jointly victorious over the Chinese empire in the Second Opium War, and both Catholic and Protestant Christianity benefited. There was an explosive growth in the number of Protestant missionaries in China, from about a hundred in 1871 to about 2,800 by the 1890s, of whom about half were British.Footnote 22 The earliest Christian church built in China after the Opium Wars was the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, the region where Anglo-Chinese conflict first broke out. Constructed rapidly between 1861 and 1863 by the Paris Foreign Missions, Sacred Heart Cathedral, called by locals ‘Stone Chamber’ on account of its material, dominated the skyline with its neo-Gothic spire. Architecturally and artistically at odds with the surrounding neighbourhood of single- or two-storied Chinese houses, this cathedral occupied the site of the former residence of the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Its neo-Gothic silhouette symbolized Christian triumph over a pagan city with numerous Buddhist and Daoist temples, all built in seemingly similar Chinese styles. The first parcels of the ground on which it was built had been acquired by Christians during the Anglo-French occupation of the city; subsequent lots were purchased in part by third parties (usually Chinese Christians) because many neighbours refused to sell to foreigners. The Sacred Heart Cathedral became the centre of the diocese of Guangdong, assigned to the Paris Foreign Missions in a Catholic ecclesiastical division of mission territories in China, in which Italian Franciscans, French Jesuits, German Societas Verbum Dei priests and Spanish Dominicans were each assigned ‘spheres of evangelization’, much in the way that the Western powers (and later Japan) had carved out for themselves ‘spheres of influence’ in a tottering Qing empire and a divided Chinese republic.Footnote 23
Just ten years after the Treaty of Tianjin (ratified in 1860) that ended the Second Opium War, the conflict between China and the West became conflated with the tension between Chinese and Christian civilizations. In 1870, a crowd gathered outside the French convent in Tianjin, one of the so-called ‘treaty-ports’ opened to Western settlement, as required by the Western powers in the treaties of 1842 and 1860. The French nuns had taken in and baptized abandoned infants, most of whom survived only for a short time. Wild dogs had dug out the small shallow graves where these unfortunate baby girls were buried. Soon rumours set the city afire with tales of Christian cruelty and murder. Since France had assumed the role of protector of all Catholic missions in China, the unequal treaties also demanded diplomatic recognition and protection for all ecclesiastical personnel. The French consul in Tianxin rushed to the convent. Faced by an angry mob, he panicked and fired into it. The violence that followed resulted in the deaths of the French consul and dozens of foreigners and Chinese Christians. French diplomatic remonstrance resulted in arrests and executions of rioters, which further exacerbated the hostility toward Christianity.Footnote 24
Tianjin was the first major jiao an (literally ‘religious case’) that involved diplomatic wrangling between the Qing imperial government and Western powers. After Tianjin, there was a rising tide of anti-Christian cases. Many had small beginnings. Disputes between neighbours, one Christian and the other non-Christian; disagreements over properties formerly owned by the Catholic Church and reclaimed after 1860; resentment by local mandarins over the diplomatic privileges enjoyed by foreign missionaries: all these and many more similar situations would lead to larger conflagrations. Resentment of Westerners incited violence against missionaries, which triggered diplomatic pressure and governmental repression, leading to more resentment and hatred: thus went the vicious cycle. Anti-Christian violence reached a crescendo in the closing years of the nineteenth century with the murder of two German Catholic missionaries in Juye, in the province of Shangdong.
The defeat of Qing China by Meiji Japan in the war of 1894–5 unleashed another scramble for concessions by foreign powers in China. Shandong fell under the sphere of influence of imperial Germany. A latecomer to the global competition for colonies and power, the German empire pursued an especially aggressive foreign policy. Taking its cue from the British empire, which many saw in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as favoured by God as the instrument of global Protestant evangelization, as Stewart Brown has argued,Footnote 25 Kaiser Wilhelm II mobilized popular support at home for missionary fervour and implanted German Protestantism in the Holy Land in 1898 with the construction of a German Lutheran church in Jerusalem during his visit. In its support for both Protestant and Catholic missions, imperial Germany differed from the Protestant identity of the British empire, although both shared the providential view of Christian imperialism. This sense of empire and missions was also shared by France of the Third Republic. Although the role of protector of Catholic missions overseas was undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon III in order to garner the support of French Catholics, this policy was continued under the Third Republic despite the change in constitution after 1871.Footnote 26 The late nineteenth century was the period of Christian imperialism par excellence.
The two murdered German missionaries had belonged to the Societas Verbum Dei, one of the many Catholic and Protestant missionary societies created in the nineteenth century for global evangelization. Their deaths in Juye turned out only to be the beginning of bloodshed. In the following years, anti-Christian and anti-Western militia organizations sprang up in northern China. Called Boxers, they targeted Westerners and Chinese Christians. Unable or unwilling to suppress them, the Qing government instead manipulated the Boxers for its own political ends. Rural attacks escalated into the siege of the foreign legation district in Beijing. A force of eight foreign powers consisting of Japanese, Russian, British, French, American, German, Austro-Hungarian and Italian troops (in order of strength) invaded Beijing. The imperial court fled to Xian. There were widespread looting and atrocities, and the Boxers were suppressed. In their anti-Christian campaign, the Boxers had killed 136 Protestant missionaries, 47 Catholic clerics, 30,000 Chinese Catholics, 2,000 Chinese Protestants, and several hundred Russian Orthodox Christians in Beijing and the northern provinces. It was the most bloody phase in the history of Christianity in China.Footnote 27
One of the consequences of the Boxer Uprising was the eventual demise of the imperial regime in China. Seen as incompetent and powerless before a foreign onslaught, the Qing government failed to recover its authority after the debacle of 1900. Another effect of the violence was to prompt some soul-searching among the Christian missionaries themselves. In time, this would give greater voice to those who advocated the indigenization of Christianity. If the Protestant and Catholic churches were to succeed, and if Chinese patriots were not to think of Christianity as arriving on the backs of gun shells, Christianity must become Chinese. More Chinese priests must be ordained, more Chinese ministers trained, more churches be built in Chinese style, and in time, the ecclesiastical leadership itself would become Chinese, and the mission would become an established church. In the 1920s and 1930s, changes were underway. The Protestants established a network of universities, schools and hospitals, making substantial contributions to modernizing Republican China. While lagging behind in the educational field, the Catholics pushed for indigenization, ordaining more priests and the first group of Chinese bishops, policies implemented after the 1922 visit to China of Bishop Celso Costantini (1876–1958), who would later become a cardinal and secretary of the Congregation of the Propagation of Faith.Footnote 28
Still the pace of change was not fast enough for many Chinese nationalists. The Anti-Christian movement of 1925–7 signalled that rising Chinese nationalism was also hostile to Christianity, which remained identified with Western imperialism. The rising left wing in Chinese republican politics was also hostile to Christianity, for the same reasons. Having survived the civil wars and the Japanese invasion relatively unscathed, the Chinese Christian churches would eventually succumb after the victory of the communists in the civil war that ended in 1950. The new regime, the People's Republic, embodied a secular, nationalist and anti-Christian force that expelled all Western missionaries and required the domestic churches to submit to its authority. This led to a schism in both the Catholic and Protestant camps. While many under communist direction joined the Patriotic Catholic Church or the Autonomous Protestant Church, others fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, where they denounced the religious persecution in the People's Republic of China. The hostility between Christianity and Communist China would continue into the 1980s and beyond.
With the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, Christianity was firmly in the embrace of empires. Whether it was the campaigns of Charlemagne against the pagan Saxons or the conquest of Mesoamerica by the Catholic monarchs of Spain, the spread of Christianity came to depend on imperial expansion. This was, nonetheless, not the only pattern of evangelization in the history of Christianity. The example of the Jesuit mission to Late Imperial China between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrates that Christianity could accommodate to the political exigencies of non-Christian empires. The failure of that mission resulted not so much from the clash between Christianity and empire, but rather from the quarrels within the Catholic Church that subverted its global mission in the early modern world.
