I

In China's long history, when certain oppressive emperors died, the earth stirred with anticipation and hope. At the time of Mao Zedong's death in 1976, the history of Christianity in China occupied an obscure corner of scholarship. Former Christian missionaries in China were tainted by colonialist affiliations and very few secular scholars were attracted to the study of their history. It had become an idiosyncratic niche field for clerics and a few scholars scattered throughout the world. This situation was a consequence, in part, of recent historical events. The new China (since 1949) was officially atheistic, Marxist, and anti-imperialistic. Anti-Christian policies intensified in 1950 when Chinese and American soldiers began killing one another (including Mao Zedong's son) on the battlefields of Korea. When the United States and other Western nations imposed an embargo on China and froze Chinese assets in the US, Mao reacted by expelling most missionaries from China in 1951.Footnote ¹ Chinese hostility toward Christianity lingered and, in the midst of the Vietnam War, reached a fever-pitch during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Conditions began to improve in 1979 when the US established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and the Chinese government allowed the resumption of limited religious activities.

There were also underlying reasons for the scholarly marginalization of the history of Christianity in China. In spite of well-meaning efforts by Protestants in education and social welfare services and by Catholics in orphanages and in universities, nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to China were evangelists not only of religion but also of a triumphant form of Westernization. The influx of Western missionaries into China following the treaties of China with Britain (1842) and France (1844) overwhelmed the indigenous Chinese churches with a foreign clergy and ecclesiastical structure.Footnote ² This foreign influence was epitomized by the new French Jesuits in Shanghai who, in collaboration with the eminent Catholic scholar Ma Xiangbo (1840–1939), established Zhendan University (Université l'Aurore) in 1903.Footnote ³ However, Ma's wish to establish a university that blended the traditional Chinese shuyuan (academy) with American and French educational elements came into conflict with the French Jesuits' aim of creating a university modelled on those in France, with all courses taught in French.Footnote ⁴ Ma resigned in 1905 and founded Fudan University in Shanghai. Later, in collaboration with Ying Lianzhi, he established the Catholic school, Fu Jen University in Beijing.Footnote ⁵

In contrast, the Jesuit missionaries prior to 1800 had been broader in their approach to China and less convinced of their cultural superiority. They were scholars, artists, and technicians as well as evangelists. They cultivated friendships with their intellectual and social counterparts in China – the literati – and they served at the imperial court. At the same time, they conducted long-distance correspondence with some of the leading minds in Europe, such as G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716), who were intensely curious about China. In order to revitalize the study of Christianity in China, the Jesuits had to be rediscovered in their original breadth, which would distinguish them from the narrower perspective of their post-1800 missionary successors. This rediscovery process began in the 1970s both in China and the West by focusing on the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). It is no coincidence that the Chinese government's decision in 1979 to allow the resumption of minimal religious activities coincided with an article praising Ricci as a ‘pioneer in linking Chinese and Western cultures’ that appeared in the leading Chinese newspaper, Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), in November 1979.Footnote ⁶

The history of Christianity in China as a field was transformed by the demise of Eurocentrism. As long as China was viewed as a mission field cultivated by Western missionaries, the story of Christianity's development in China was merely another chapter in a long series of mission histories emphasizing Western concerns. While crude forms of racial superiority had been replaced by more subtle rationalizations about different stages of socio-economic development, the fact remained that it was Western (European and North American) churches who through their missionaries dominated not only the governance, teachings, and financing of Chinese churches, but also the intellectual modes of thinking about the history of the Chinese church.

While the role of Western imperialism is commonly recognized, the role played by the objectivity of historians is more difficult to analyse. Strong degrees of sympathy or antipathy to Christianity have distorted our view of the church in China. Though historians have been highly sensitive to the distortions produced by pro-Christian attitudes, less has been said about the distortions of anti-Christian views among academics. The degree of this bias paralleled the intensity of anti-Christian bias among the Chinese themselves. In the 1980s, as hostility to Christianity receded in China, the hostility of Western scholars toward studying Christianity in China also began to decline. Another factor was the underground resilience of Chinese Christians throughout the years of Communist persecution and the remarkable growth of Christianity, particularly in its indigenous forms, which paralleled the decline of Communist fervour and the emergence of a moral and spiritual vacuum in China.

A pivotal point for me was my time as a graduate student with Professor Joseph R. Levenson at the University of California at Berkeley in the last two years prior to his accidental death in 1969. For a newly arrived graduate student who knocked on his door and asked to study with him, Levenson was remarkably generous with his time, giving me hours of individual contact over the next two years. Levenson was a devout Jew who thought deeply about religion and I was drawn to him as I wandered through the spiritual maze of Christianity and Buddhism and New Age religions that were then making their appearance, along with the Flower Children, in the San Francisco Bay Area.Footnote ⁷ I was particularly absorbed by his concern for the fate of Confucianism and Christianity in modern Chinese history. Levenson's pessimism about their status was reflected in the phrasing of the title of his most important book, Confucian China and its modern fate: a trilogy. However, I resisted the pessimism of his conclusions.

There was one phrase of his that struck me with particular meaning. In volume one of his trilogy, in a section revealingly entitled ‘The Christian failure to succeed a dying Confucianism’, he referred to the missionaries' failure to create a viable ‘Christian-Confucian syncretism’.Footnote ⁸ Syncretism was a word that preoccupied Levenson and the contrast between syncretism and eclecticism would become the theme of his last graduate seminar in Chinese history. In that seminar, I wrote my research paper on syncretism in the Song dynasty, but later with my doctoral dissertation and first book, I applied it to the Jesuits' attempt to establish Christianity in China. However, I eventually altered Levenson's phrase ‘Christian–Confucian syncretism’ in two significant ways. First, I reversed the order of Christian–Confucian, giving Confucianism priority. The difference was subtle. By placing ‘Christian’ first, Levenson was emphasizing the intrusive, domineering, and colonialist nature of the missionaries, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which helped to doom the effort to failure. By reversing the order, I was recasting the phrase in a more positive light and shifting it toward the approach of the pre-1800 Jesuits. ‘Confucian–Christian’ implied giving priority to the indigenous sensitivities of the Chinese in terms of the need to assimilate Christianity. The second change I made to Levenson's phrase was to convert ‘syncretism’ to ‘synthesis’. A synthesis is more intellectually integrated and coherent than a syncretism and implied a greater assimilation into Chinese culture. The resulting phrase ‘Confucian–Christian synthesis’ appeared in my first book, Leibniz and Confucianism.Footnote ⁹ The term later received expanded development in my Curious land: Jesuit accommodation and the origins of Sinology, and became part of the effort to reconceptualize the history of Christianity in China.Footnote ¹⁰

II

The post-Second World War doyen of American China historians, John King Fairbank (1907–91), retained a strong interest in nineteenth and twentieth-century China missionaries and provided encouragement to students with those interests.Footnote ¹¹ However, very few younger scholars continued to pursue research in that area after completing graduate school. In the period 1950–66, seventeen students produced research papers either as senior honours theses or graduate seminar papers at Harvard on China missionary subjects. Seven of these papers were published in a volume edited by Kwang-ching Liu.Footnote ¹² Anti-Christian movements in Chinese history was a timely topic that drew interest. Paul A. Cohen's doctoral dissertation ‘Chinese hostility to Christianity: a study in intercultural conflict, 1860–1870’ (1960) began as one of these Harvard seminar papers and evolved into a book.Footnote ¹³ The first chapter remains to this day one of the most lucid descriptions of the anti-Christian tradition in Chinese thought.

The interest in Chinese intellectual opposition to Christianity among Western scholars culminated two decades later with Jacques Gernet's Chine et Christianisme, action et réaction (1982).Footnote ¹⁴ This widely read book – commonly praised as ‘brilliant’ – was published in German, Italian, English, and Chinese editions.Footnote ¹⁵ Gernet made a pioneering effort in gathering numerous seventeenth-century Chinese texts critical of Christianity in an attempt to explain the causes of Chinese hostility. For Gernet, the Chinese language contained a logic and view of the world that was irreconcilable with the Indo-European languages of Christian scriptures. While his use of Chinese texts was highly praised by scholars, Gernet's theory of the linguistic basis for anti-Christian hostility attracted criticism. Moreover, developments of Christianity in China since the book's publication have undermined much of his argument. Like Levenson, Gernet allowed himself to be drawn too much into the present and vested too much significance in developments which turned out to be transitory.

The intense anti-Christian hostility of mid-twentieth-century China was mistakenly viewed by many historians as a continuation of long-term historical developments when in fact it was more of a temporary aberration in the historical continuum. In retrospect, mid-twentieth-century Chinese history seems more akin to the brief regime of the Qin dynasty First Emperor (221–210 bc) whose revolutionary totalitarianism and hostility to tradition were reproduced in the regime of Mao Zedong. Contrary to what was widely believed at the time, Christianity (along with Confucianism) had not died out in Communist China, but had gone underground.Footnote ¹⁶ When it began to re-emerge in the 1980s, it was far more Sinified than when it had been dominated by Western missionaries and mission boards prior to 1951. During the intervening years, it had deepened its roots in Chinese culture.

The history of Buddhism in China presented a comparable model to Christianity in China. Putting aside earlier unsuccessful beginnings, such as the entry of Nestorian Christianity in the early seventh century, the continuous history of Christianity in China can be dated from the missionary trip to Canton of the first China Jesuit, Michele Ruggieri, at Macau in 1580. This means that the history of Christianity in China had attained approximately 400 years by the time Gernet wrote Chine et Christianisme, action et réaction. At that time, 1982, it appeared to have been eradicated from China. However if, by comparison, one assumes that Buddhism entered China in the first century, by the year 400, it was – chronologically speaking – still three centuries away from its full development in the Tang dynasty. If one applied the same timeframe to Christianity, Gernet's judgement in 1982 that Christianity could not be adapted to Chinese culture was premature. In fact, Christianity was then on the threshold of a revival from its underground existence and for growth beyond what it had ever previously experienced among the Chinese. In the second edition of Chine et christianisme, Gernet tried to temper his thesis by changing the subtitle from ‘action et reaction’ to ‘la première confrontation’.Footnote ¹⁷ The implication was that instead of claiming that Chinese culture was inherently unreceptive to Christianity, he was modifying his argument and limiting it to only the first encounter of Christianity and Chinese culture in the seventeenth century. However, his thesis would be contradicted by later scholarship in regard to both the first historical encounter and the long term.

Ironically, one of the leading scholars who had devoted his early career to studying the entry of Buddhism into China, though initially agreeing with Gernet, would eventually come to a conclusion about Christianity's historical adaptation to China that contradicted Gernet's argument. Erik Zürcher's dissertation was a highly regarded study of the entry and adaptation of Buddhism in China.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1988, Gernet invited Zürcher to lecture at Paris on why Buddhism, introduced by foreign monks, succeeded in being assimilated into China while Christianity, introduced by foreign missionaries, failed.Footnote ¹⁹ In his lectures, Zürcher argued that the decentralized monastic organization of Buddhism had allowed the Chinese Buddhists to adapt to local customs and to blend with Chinese culture in syncretic fashion whereas the highly centralized Counter-Reformation church was less willing to tolerate local adaptations of Christianity than earlier forms of Christianity. He contrasted the two approaches as ‘expansion spontanée contre propagation dirigée’ (spontaneous expansion versus directed propagation).Footnote ²⁰

In the preface to the revised, second edition of Chine et Christianisme, Gernet cited Zürcher's argument to rebut critics who compared the development of Christianity in China to that of Buddhism.Footnote ²¹ Gernet argued that Chinese Buddhism ‘was produced little by little, between the second and seventh century of our era, a slow and complex phenomenon of reciprocal adaptation of Buddhism to China and China to Buddhism. In all areas, the choice was spontaneously effected’ whereas ‘the dogmatic rigour characteristic of the Christianity of the Counter-Reformation in reality excluded all grafts’ (my translation).Footnote ²² But, of course, if Gernet had granted the same five or six centuries to the development of Christianity that he had granted to Buddhism, he would have seen a phenomenon of reciprocal adaptation between Christianity and China in which the expulsion of the missionaries in 1951 allowed for greater spontaneous growth of indigenous Chinese Christian churches. He also would have seen ‘Culture Christianity’ become a creative force in contemporary Chinese culture which, according to the Chinese theologian Liu Xiaofeng, reveals the debate about the Sinification of Christianity to be irrelevant and ‘out of date’.Footnote ²³ For ‘Culture Christians’, the discussion is no longer a matter of Christianity becoming part of Chinese culture, but rather of Chinese cultural phenomena becoming a part of Christianity. It could be argued that the spiritual life of Christianity in China today has a vibrancy that Europe lacks, a reversal constituting one of the great ironies of Sino-Western history.

Meanwhile, Zürcher's views were evolving and diverging from Gernet's point of view on one crucial point. As he moved more deeply into the seventeenth-century interaction of the Jesuit Giulio Aleni with the literati in Fujian province, Zürcher came to new insights. By 1990, he wrote that the reception of Jesuit accommodation in Fujian province ‘contradicts the thesis (brilliantly presented by Jacques Gernet) that the Chinese, due to their ingrained cultural preoccupations, virtually were unable to assimilate the basic ideas of Christianity – the Diary [Kouduo richao] shows us striking examples of the opposite’.Footnote ²⁴ Recently other studies on Fujian have also confirmed the development of local forms of Christianity. The Chinese scholar Zhang Xianqing used an anthropological approach to demonstrate how Catholicism had taken root in seventeenth-century rural Fuan and continued into later centuries.Footnote ²⁵ Eugenio Menegon's study of the seventeenth-century Dominican missionaries in Fuan county also contradicts Gernet's claim that Christianity could not be adapted to Chinese culture.Footnote ²⁶

Brilliant books like those by Levenson and Gernet may win the praise of their contemporaries, but their arguments are sometimes flawed and fail to pass the test of time. One wonders if such books are sometimes praised as brilliant because they capture the spirit of an age with such striking clarity that they elicit a reflexive chorus of praise that reverberates louder and more confidently with each repeated ovation? Meanwhile, other books less in tune with their age, but perhaps more in accord with long-term developments, are shunned. It is a concern that has long preoccupied historians.

III

Over a half century ago, the historian C. R. Boxer presciently noted: ‘Of the making of books about Ricci and the Jesuits at the Court of Peking there is apparently no end.’Footnote ²⁷ However, such was not always the case. For many years after Ricci's death in 1610, his praises were not sung because of ecclesiastical politics which were averse to his message.Footnote ²⁸ Greater attention began when his hometown of Macerata formed a national committee in 1910 to promote Ricci on the three hundredth anniversary of his death. His accommodative missionary strategy received greater acceptance with the second Vatican Council (Vatican II) (1963–5) and the need to reconcile the church with greater secularity. Ricci was an ideal figure to study for those disillusioned with China missionaries because his worldly achievements were as great as his missionary activities. In 1954 Joseph Needham, the eminent historian of Chinese science, praised Ricci as ‘one of the most remarkable and brilliant men in history’.Footnote ²⁹

The pendulum of this sort of interpretation inevitably swung too far and Ricci's secularity became so exaggerated that one young scholar compared him to the Protestant missionary W. A. P. Martin (1827–1916), dubiously claiming: ‘neither seems to have had an intense religious experience … their emotional commitment to Christianity was less strong than their emotional commitment to Western secular culture’.Footnote ³⁰ Ricci's achievements were so notable that he soon became an object of universal praise and attention. Hagiographical books about Ricci for popular audiences were published with titles like The wise man from the West and Il ‘Saggio d'occidente.’ (The ‘Sage of the West’).Footnote ³¹

The earliest of Ricci's written works to gain prominence was a history of the China Mission that he had written in Italian in 1608–10 near the end of his life at the request of the Jesuit Father General Claude Acquaviva. After Ricci's death, the manuscript was carried back to Rome by the Jesuit Nicolas Trigault who extensively edited and translated the manuscript into Latin, publishing the work as De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas (Augsburg, 1615).Footnote ³² The original Latin edition was republished several times, followed by translations into French (1616), Spanish (1621), Italian (1622), and English (1625).Footnote ³³ Ricci's original manuscript lay untouched for three centuries in Rome until it was rediscovered by Fr. Pietro Tacchi Venturi in making preparations for the 1910 Macerata commemoration of Ricci's death. The work was published by Tacchi Venturi as Opere storiche del P. Matteo Ricci in two volumes (Macerata, 1911–13). Since Tacchi Venturi could not read Chinese, the Jesuit sinologist Pasquale M. d'Elia published a culminating edition of Ricci's original manuscript, which has become the standard edition for consultation by scholars.Footnote ³⁴

Ricci's remarkable linguistic skills enabled him to compose, with the collaboration of literati friends and converts, a number of works in Chinese. Several of these have been translated. His most famous Chinese work, Tianzhu shiyi (The true meaning of the Lord-of-Heaven), was translated in 1985.Footnote ³⁵ His essay on mnemonics, Xiguo jifa, was translated into German in 1986.Footnote ³⁶ His essay on friendship, Jiaoyou lun, was translated in 2009.Footnote ³⁷ Some of Ricci's more important letters have been published in the original language and in translation.Footnote ³⁸ Ricci attained a new level of poplar recognition with Jonathan Spence's imaginative portrayal in The memory palace of Matteo Ricci in 1984.Footnote ³⁹

The production of books on Ricci has become a cottage industry whose fascination extends beyond China and the West. A new edition of a seventeenth-century Persian translation of Ricci-Trigault's De Christiana expedition apud Sinas (1615) was published in Tehran in 2008.Footnote ⁴⁰ Three newly published biographies of Matteo Ricci have appeared in the last year. All three are oriented toward popular audiences in differing degrees, indicating that Ricci has become a well-known historical figure whose name assures publishers of profitable sales. All three use Italian sources, though only R. Po-chia Hsia uses Chinese sources.Footnote ⁴¹ Michela Fontana is a science journalist whose book, originally published in Italian, has been translated into both French and English.Footnote ⁴² She succeeds admirably in popularizing science although she concedes her deficiencies with the ‘hope that the specialists will forgive me for according priority to the narrative and not always bothering to keep up with the historiographic interpretations’.Footnote ⁴³ Mary Laven's novelistic account of Ricci's work in China is a delightfully creative re-telling of the well-known story.Footnote ⁴⁴

The most scholarly of the three books is R. Po-chia Hsia's A Jesuit in the forbidden city. This is a book filled with new details about Ricci's life and milieu in both Europe and China. Hsia has applied his impressive linguistic talents to culling materials from a broad range of historical documents in Chinese, Italian, and Portuguese – the three main languages that Ricci used. The result is a richly detailed narrative that has broad general appeal. However, it is a work that expands rather than revises our view of Ricci. There are few surprises in Hsia's book. Rather, he elaborates upon the established facts of Ricci's life. These details deepen our understanding of Ricci and his milieu, but they do not fundamentally change our interpretation of him. Given the quality of Hsia's narrative, one is surprised at the historiographical lacunae, including his omission of the works of a leading scholar in the field like Nicolas Standaert.Footnote ⁴⁵ Standaert's article ‘New trends in the historiography of Christianity in China’ defined an important ‘paradigm shift’ from a missiological and Eurocentric to a Sinological and Sinocentric approach.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hsia refers to the important book by Jacques Gernet, but he appears not to grasp fully the significance of Gernet's argument of incompatibility.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hsia largely omits the important work of Erik Zürcher which transcended Gernet's position.Footnote ⁴⁸ These omissions are not isolated instances, but rather constitute part of a larger pattern. One wonders if Hsia has chosen to minimize Western historiographical influence in favour of Chinese scholarship on the grounds that Western scholars do not understand China? This is a view quietly shared by a number of Chinese scholars. It represents perhaps an inevitable rebalancing and the challenge of the growing voice of Chinese scholars in relationship to their foreign colleagues who previously dominated the field.

IV

As the number of books on Ricci reaches a saturation point, the most creative research has begun moving toward other subjects.Footnote ⁴⁹ English-language monographs and biographies are yet to be produced on China missionaries like Giulio Aleni, SJ (1582–1649), Martino Martini, SJ (1614–61), Joachim Bouvet, SJ (1656–1730), Giuseppe Castiglione, SJ (1688–1766), and Antoine Gaubil, SJ (1689–1759).Footnote ⁵⁰ However, ground-breaking studies on the Protestant translation of the Bible into Chinese have been produced.Footnote ⁵¹ This translation project involved extensive collaboration between Chinese literati and foreign missionaries for a century, resulting in the Union Version of the Bible in 1919. A great deal of new research on Flemish missionaries in China, including particularly Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623–88) has been published.Footnote ⁵²

With the reinterpretation of Christianity in China as a Chinese rather than foreign religion, a shift in focus is underway from foreign missionaries and Western-language texts to Chinese Christians and Chinese Christian texts. Apart from the ‘Three pillars of the early Christian Church’ – Yang Tingyun (1557–1627), Li Zhizao (1565–1630), and Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) – little has been published on Chinese figures.Footnote ⁵³ Such important Christian literati converts as Zhang Xingyao (1633 – after 1715) and Shang Huqing (1619 – ?) have received limited attention.Footnote ⁵⁴ One exception is the Chinese Jesuit, painter and poet Wu Li (1632–1718) who has been the subject of two monographs.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Christian literatus Zhu Zongyuan (ca. 1616–1660), whose official career was disrupted by the Manchu conquest of China in 1644, was the subject of a monograph in German that is now being revised and translated into English.Footnote ⁵⁶ Chinese inculturation of Christianity among the common people in 1720–1850 has been studied by Lars P. Laarman, whose work is distinctive in making use of Chinese documents from the former imperial archives (First Historical Archives).Footnote ⁵⁷

Indigenous Protestant movements in early twentieth-century China are an important topic – neglected because historians focused on European-language materials while the documentation of these indigenous churches is almost entirely in Chinese.Footnote ⁵⁸ Lian Xi's Redeemed by fire is the first detailed study devoted to these indigenous movements.Footnote ⁵⁹ Lian draws on a large number of Chinese materials to reconstruct how distinctive forms of Chinese Protestantism emerged in 1916–49. Although almost all the leaders of indigenous churches in China began their religious careers in foreign mission churches, their attempt to separate themselves from these mission churches was a crucial part of their development. They cultivated an autonomy and independence from foreign missions that sometimes bordered on hostility.

Lian goes beyond describing the missionary origins of indigenous Chinese Christianity to identify native Chinese cultural traditions that were crucial to the assimilation process. Although the nineteenth-century Taiping movement of Hong Xiuquan is often disregarded as an unorthodox Christian sect, Lian shows that Taiping supernaturalism and messianic visions actually foreshadowed these later Christian movements. They all shared a popular character and were fiercely independent. They distrusted seminary training, because it was subject to alien control – before 1949, the Protestant seminaries were controlled by foreign missionaries and after 1949, by the Communist government's Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

Indigenous Chinese Christianity covered a spectrum of popular Protestantism. The True Jesus Church (Zhen Yesu jiaohui) has become the largest Chinese Pentecostal church in the world.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was founded by Wei Baoluo (1876?–1919), a semi-educated, obscure Beijing merchant who was influenced by the late nineteenth-century American Holiness Revival (Pentecostalism), which taught that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. In 1917. Wei had a vision and personal encounter with God similar to the famous vision of the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan in 1837 in which he was commanded by the Heavenly Father to kill demons.Footnote ⁶¹ Like Hong who found the vision so transformational that he changed his given name, Wei changed his name from Enbo to Baoluo (Paul) and followed God's command to reform the Christian movement in China. Anchored in the interior provinces of Henan and Hunan, the True Jesus Church emphasized the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’, prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, and millennialism.

The Jesus Family (Yesu Jiating) was a Pentecostal movement founded in rural Shandong province around 1927 by an educated man from a moderately prosperous gentry family named Jing Dianying (1890–1957). The group practised communal living with a Daoist slant and practised speaking in tongues, visions, dreams, prognostications, and sought to be ‘raptured’ whereby the spirit left the body to be ‘transported to heaven to meet the Lord face to face’.Footnote ⁶² Being filled with the Holy Spirit bore remarkable resemblance to traditional spirit possession practised in Shandong by the late nineteenth-century Boxers (Yihequan) and is traceable to the followers of the Eight Trigrams tradition.

Some leaders in the indigenous Christian movements chose to be independent preachers rather than found church bodies. Wang Mingdao (1900–91) became the most famous of these individual pastors because of his courageous resistance to the Japanese occupation authorities in the 1940s and later to the Communist authorities, which led to his long imprisonment from the 1950s until 1979.Footnote ⁶³ Wang was expelled from a mission school in 1921 because of his clash with superiors. He became harshly critical of the missionary establishment and his Confucian decorum was offended by unrestrained Pentecostal exuberance. He became an itinerant evangelist, preaching in twenty-four of twenty-eight provinces. In 1925, he established a single congregation of his own in Beijing, called the Christian Tabernacle (Jidutu Huitang). He was harshly critical of the theological liberalism of the YMCA and called their Social Gospel ‘fake medicine’.Footnote ⁶⁴

John Sung's theatrics were in complete contrast to Wang Mingdao's decorum. Born Song Shangjie (1901–44) in the town of Xinghua in Fujian province, Sung remained a provincial in speech, dress, and manner even though he spoke fluent English. His coarse voice and frequently incomprehensible Xinghua accent were overcome by his intensity and mesmerizing preaching.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sung studied in the United States from 1920 to 1927 and then returned to China to preach. Like Wang Mingdao, he criticized mission schools and the efforts of Social Gospellers, including the mass education movement of James Yen. For Sung, the key to mass revivalism was a two-pronged approach of attacking sin and public confession. Unlike the YMCA-YWCA and other Social Gospellers, the indigenous Protestants were pessimistic about the political and social situation in China. While mission churches after 1937 launched war-relief efforts, Wang Mingdao and John Sung intensified their preaching of otherworldly salvation.Footnote ⁶⁶

After the Japanese attacked China in 1937, the rich fled inland while Sung followed the flow of refugees into war-torn areas. In Shandong, he noted ‘the poor are fleeing to God’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Crowds flocked to his exuberant revival meetings in which his hyperkinetic preaching involved jumping on and off the stage and climbing in and out of a coffin onstage. He became exhausted and the need to change his sweat-soaked clothes three times a day gave way to changing his blood-stained underwear. The haemorrhoid surgery from his student days had never healed properly and later progressed into anal fistulae which bled. By 1940, the fistulae had become malignant and he died in pain in 1944, humming ‘in the Cross, in the Cross, be my glory ever’.Footnote ⁶⁸

The best-known leader of indigenous Chinese Christian movements of the 1930s and 1940s was Ni Tuosheng (Watchman Nee, 1903–72), founder and leader of the Christian Assembly (Jidutu Juhuichu), commonly known as the Little Flock (after Luke 12:32) which had its headquarters in Shanghai.Footnote ⁶⁹ Ni was one of the first indigenous Chinese church leaders to acquire a worldwide reputation and to provide inspiration to Western Christians from the 1930s. He was born into an educated family whose ancestral home was in Fujian. Ni was deeply influenced by Christian women, including his mother, the female revivalist Yu Cidu, and the English missionary Margaret E. Barber (1869–1930).Footnote ⁷⁰ Ni was frail in health, but had a magnetic personality and a unique ability to speak in the profound end-of-time mystical language that mesmerized his followers. As Little Flock assemblies spread into major cities along the Chinese seaboard, they tended to attract a higher percentage of educated people than the other forms of popular Chinese Christianity.Footnote ⁷¹ While Wang Mingdao and John Sung were preaching in war-torn and impoverished parts of China, Ni remained in the International Settlement in Shanghai.Footnote ⁷² In the 1950s, the Communist government dispersed both the True Jesus Church and the Christian Assembly as counterrevolutionary and their leaders were jailed. Nee died a martyr's death in prison.Footnote ⁷³

One might compare the spiritual depth of indigenous church leaders to the foreign-mission Christianity of Zhao Zichen (C. T. Chao, 1888–1979). Educated at the missionary institution Soochow University and later at Vanderbilt University in the United States, Zhao was one of the most prominent leaders of the Sino-foreign Protestant establishment from the 1920s to the 1950s.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the early 1950s, Zhao was attacked and removed from power. Unlike Ni Tuosheng and Wang Mingdao whose persecution strengthened their faith, Zhao lived in obscurity and seems to have lost his faith before his death.

V

Prior to 1949 there were several mainland Chinese scholars involved in the study of the history of Christianity in China.Footnote ⁷⁵ They included Chen Yuan (1880–1971), his student Fang Hao (1910–80), Xu Zongze, SJ (1886–1947), Chen Shouyi (1899–1978), Xiang Da (Hsiang Ta) (1900–66), and He Zhaowu (b. 1921).Footnote ⁷⁶ After 1949, revolutionary politics intervened, dispersing some scholars to Taiwan and abroad and disrupting the usual teacher–pupil transmissions that would have otherwise occurred. Consequently, the next generation of Chinese scholars in this field was largely lost. The revival of interest among Chinese scholars in the history of Christianity in China began on the periphery of the mainland in the 1970s. John Dragon Young (1949–96) was in the vanguard of this group. Cross-cultural studies for him were linked to his involvement in the democracy movement in Hong Kong. He was born in Beijing one month after the Communist Liberation into a prominent academic family, whose branch fled to Hong Kong.Footnote ⁷⁷ His dissertation was directed by K. C. Liu, one of Fairbank's former students, at the University of California at Davis. It was completed in 1976 and later published as Confucianism and Christianity: the first encounter.Footnote ⁷⁸

On the Chinese mainland, Ma Yong (b. 1931) was one of the first to publish on the China Jesuits in a leading official publication. Ma was a research fellow in the Historical Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, which was known for its liberal tendencies. In 1980, he published an article on the Italian Jesuit Martino Martini (1614–61).Footnote ⁷⁹ Martini was appropriate for treatment in an official publication because, like Ricci, he wrote an essay on friendship.Footnote ⁸⁰ Ma continued the teacher–student transmission by training Lin Jinshui. Lin presented a paper focusing on Fujian literati at the 1992 San Francisco symposium on the Rites Controversy, which was later published in the symposium volume.Footnote ⁸¹ In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal provided a forum to reprint Chinese articles by several pioneering scholars in Sino-Western history and to disseminate them to scholars outside China.Footnote ⁸²

Scholars in Taiwan have been more deeply influenced by Western scholarship than scholars on the Chinese mainland. Huang Yilong initially studied physics at Columbia University in New York, but after returning to teach in Taiwan, he began in the 1990s moving toward the history of Christianity in China.Footnote ⁸³ Later, he published several of his articles in a volume entitled Liangtou She (Two-Headed Snake), a monstrous creature killed by the sixth-century BC prime minister Sunshu Ao.Footnote ⁸⁴ Huang uses the metaphor to refer to the irresolvable conflicts experienced by the first generations of Chinese Christians in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. The conflicts were between Christian monogamy and Confucian concubinage (practised to guarantee continuation of the ancestral line), between Confucian and Christian values, and between issues of the Rites Controversy. The Taiwan scholar Li Shixue received his doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago and produced one of the most erudite literary studies in the history of Christianity in China, entitled Zhongguo wan Ming yu Ouzhou wenxue – Ming mo Yesuhui gudian xing zhengdao gushi kao quan (European literature in late Ming China – an examination and interpretation of the sources and forms of [Christian] parables used by the Jesuits in the late Ming).Footnote ⁸⁵

Han Qi (b. 1963) began his work in the history of sciences in the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and has published a number of works on the history of Christianity in China. In collaboration with his wife, Wu Min, he searched for Chinese documents in libraries in Europe (archives of the Missions Étrangères de Paris, the Franciscan and Jesuit archives in Rome, the Vatican Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France).Footnote ⁸⁶ From these collections, he culled and reprinted nearly 100 Chinese documents from the Yongzheng (1723–35) and Qianlong (1736–95) reigns which show how the forward momentum of Christianity was stalled by the Rites Controversy.

As for sources for research on the history of Christianity in China, Paul Pelliot's 1922 mimeographed inventory of Chinese works in the Vatican Library was supplemented and published by the Japanese scholar Tokio Takata in 1997.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Chinese books and documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome were surveyed in a thoroughly annotated catalogue produced by Albert Chan, SJ.Footnote ⁸⁸ Another rich source in Rome for manuscripts and books on the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century China Mission is the Biblioteca Casanatense.Footnote ⁸⁹ There is also an excellent collection of Chinese materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris as well as in the Archives des Missions Étrangères de Paris.Footnote ⁹⁰ The online Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-Database) compiled by Ad Dudink and Nicolas Standaert at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) lists primary and secondary sources (including new Chinese publications) involving cultural contacts between China and Europe (1582–1840).Footnote ⁹¹

The two main collections of historical texts dealing with Christianity in China – the Beitang Library in Beijing and the Zikawei (Xujiahui) Library in Shanghai – remain largely inaccessible in storage sites, where they were placed to protect them from destruction by the Red Guards.Footnote ⁹² The Dutch scholar Ad Dudink has produced preliminary catalogues of Chinese Christian books in these collections.Footnote ⁹³ Initially, this involved an article on the segment of the Zikawei collection that had been shipped to the Philippines in 1951 and was later transferred to Taiwan.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 2009. with the assistance of Nicolas Standaert, Dudink was able to gain access to the Chinese books of the Zikawei Library stored in the Shanghai Library Book-storage facility near the Botanical Gardens and recently he published a partial catalogue.Footnote ⁹⁵

Research on women in the history of Christianity of China has been uneven. The considerable attention devoted to Protestant women has not been matched by the treatment of Catholic women. Several articles on the famous Catholic benefactress Candida Xu (1607–80), granddaughter of Xu Guangqi, have been published by Gail King.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Christian Virgins have received limited attention from Robert Entenmann.Footnote ⁹⁷ Eugenio Menegon's research shows that Fuan women were responsive to the Spanish model of the beatas. Based on virginity, the model was modified to fit local circumstances in China by shifting the focus to celibate chastity.Footnote ⁹⁸

Some aspects of the history of Christianity in China remain highly controversial and intimidating to scholars, such as female infanticide. Conflicted by the abortion debate in the West and fear of criticizing the one-child policy of the Chinese government and thereby endangering their future chances to obtain visas and do research in China, most scholars avoid the topic. Historically, female infanticide produced extensive Catholic efforts to save children, initially through the baptism of moribund infants, but later through the establishment of orphanages. These foreign institutions were resented by Chinese who had created short-term hospices for abandoned children. Europeans created an organization in 1843 in France to fund their efforts. However this Society of the Holy Childhood (Société de la Sainte Enfance) was blatantly Eurocentric and seems to have become an embarrassment to modern Catholics. Protestant involvement in saving Chinese children was far less active and limited both by the rejection of the salvific efficacy of infant baptism on theological grounds and the refusal to believe that the Chinese were exterminating infant girls in large numbers.Footnote ⁹⁹ A debate continues over the number of girls killed through female infanticide. In one of the few recently published articles on the topic, Henrietta Harrison plays down the number of deaths through female infanticide by claiming that abandonment probably occurred more frequently than infant drowning.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, in another article, Weijing Lu notes that some studies estimate the ratio of baby girls killed at one fifth to one quarter of all females, a number that visible abandonments could not account for.Footnote ¹⁰¹ More extensive research on the topic has begun and probably will appear in the near future.Footnote ¹⁰²

Today, the Western scholarly dominance of the history of Christianity in China is being increasingly challenged by accelerating Chinese scholarship. To a certain extent, this merely reflects an inevitable adjustment in the relationship between a re-ascendant China and the previously dominant West. As we look ahead, it might be helpful to recall the words of our predecessor Matteo Ricci, who wrote in his Essay on friendship (Jiaoyou lun):