Wong Man Kong and George Kam Wah Mak have produced an interesting and important edited book. Its essays provide new insights on the links between Christianity and education in modern China. Most notably, this book moves beyond the missionary narrative and focuses on new areas and the contributions of Chinese Christians to education. A second notable element of the book that emerges in a few of the articles is a focus on both faith and a desire to strengthen the society as important motivating factors in the educational work of Christians. This fits well into the growing scholarly literature on Chinese Christian actors in the development of modern China which the authors outline well in the introduction as it relates to education.

The book is well organised into four parts, starting with ‘The Contexts’ which provides a solid base for the later sections of the book with two articles by Thomas H. C. Lee and Brian Stanley. Part ii, ‘Christian Educators’, focuses on the work of Christian educators in articles by Wan Luen Kwok, Man Kong Wong, Jianming Chen and Jiafeng Liu. This section starts with the foreign missionaries but quickly switches to the work of Chinese Christians in the 1920s and 1930s. Part iii, ‘New Initiatives’, continues the focus on Chinese actors with articles by Peter Chen-main Wang, George Kam Wah Mak and Di Wang. As the title denotes, the three articles focus on new ideas and trends that entered education during the 1910s through the 1930s. Part iv, ‘The Legacies’, provides a good book-end to the edited volume with three articles by Min Ma, Leah Yiya Lee and Wai Ching Angela Wong. These articles not only continue the story of Christian education in Taiwan but also consider the legacy of the pre-1949 era of Christian education on the mainland. All four parts of the book follow the theme of the book well and bring new individuals into the story of education in modern China. This reviewer was specifically drawn to the articles in parts ii and iii that took the focus of the book from the missionaries to the Chinese Christian actors that are left out of many studies. However, the articles in parts i and iv also provide important voices to this story.

The more patriotic impulse can be seen early on with the article by Lee that looks closely at the changing view of China’s place in the world and its influence on the desire to engage with the west through the work of individuals like Zhang Zhidong and Liao Ping (pp. 24–5). Lee argues that the nineteenth century was significant for the Chinese realisation that ‘China was no longer a universal state and the center of all under heaven’ (p. 29). The articles by Jianming Chen and Jiafeng Liu also engage with the theme of faith and a desire to improve society as factors in the work of Christian educators. The article by Jianming Chen focuses on the work of Zhang Xueyan and Xie Songgao during the Mass Education Movement which was championed by some, such as Y. C. James Yen and Tao Xingzhi, who founded the Chinese National Association of the Mass Education Movement, and motivated by their faith to improve the lives of the people through education (pp. 90–1). Both Xie and Zhang focused on improving literacy through their work on educating the lower classes. Xie concentrated on commoners in the urban areas (p. 101) and Zhang the rural population with his publication the Christian Farmer. This latter publication was a tool to increase literacy and the author notes that Zhang used ‘simple words and material that was easily understood, to match its audience’s reading level’ (p. 97). Liu’s article focuses on the work of Zhu Jingnong who was involved in the issue of the restoration of educational rights, arguing that schools linked to a church should be allowed to continue after registration because the ‘more schools China had, the more educational opportunities children would get’ (p. 117). Additionally, Zhu advocated for changes in China’s schools by combining ideas of the Three People’s Principles and science education into Chinese schools because it was the ‘second-most influential educational thought in the modern era’ (pp. 123, 125). Peter Wang’s article is on Yu Rizhang’s new emphasis on ‘social education’. He notes that Yu focused on the ‘character-building movement, mass education movement, and citizenship education movement’ connected to YMCA lecture programmes (p. 157).

The other articles in the book are no less important for their contributions to a better understanding of the contributions of Christians to education but the focus of the articles noticeably shifts. Di Wang’s article on the contributions of Shen Baoyuan to the use of western sociological and anthropological methods to study rural society in Chinese academia in the 1940s in Part iii is just one example. Leah Lee’s and Angela Wong’s articles bring in the idea of ‘whole person’ education and how it was incorporated into higher education institutions. Those that focus on the foreign missionaries, such as the articles by Brian Stanley, Man Kong Wong and Wai Leun Kwok also note their contributions to education at a time when missionary roles in education were shifting. These show missionaries involved in medical education, the general development of sinology or the registration of missionary schools.

Overall, the book does a great job of bringing to light the underappreciated or unknown contributions of Christians to education in modern China. Through most of its articles there is also a keen awareness of the influence of faith in their work and the desire of these individuals to improve society for the Chinese people. The book also provides a significant contribution to scholarship by mainly focusing on the work of Chinese Christians in education rather than just the foreign missionary community. It clearly shows that the missionary domination of Christian education was slowly disappearing in the 1920s and 1930s and that Chinese educators came to the forefront of this work and its policies.