Recent scholarship on the history of Christianity in China has seen continued attention on the Chinese actors, with fine examples such as Daryl Ireland's study of John Song and Melissa Inouye's investigation of the True Jesus Church. Concerning the Christian missions, new monographs tend to center on the Jesuits in late imperial China rather than on their more recent Protestant counterparts. In this regard, Joseph Ho's book adds a welcoming balance to the field. His Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China examines Protestant and Catholic missionaries from America and the transnational cultural history they created between various US and Chinese communities from the 1920s to the early 1950s. The book's highlight is examining this shared history through an underexplored medium: image-making. Whether for the modernist agenda or the conversion of souls, cameras in the missionary hands, with the still and moving images recorded, helped frame the nature of missionary experience in China and American reaction toward China in various contexts.

Ho begins the book with a modern-day visit to the remnant of the Presbyterian mission station in Xingtai, run by medical missionaries who arrived in North and East China in the 1920s. Aiding this transnational ministry was the advancement of technology. Smaller cameras promoted close interaction with the local environments, as photos also became desirable means of representation for the mission field to the American supporters. Chapter 2 draws from the visual practices of the Passionist order in West Hunan during the 1920s. It focuses on the shaping role of photography on “conversion experiences”—broadly understood—that transform missionaries from “interloping outsiders to embedded image-makers,” while weaving Catholics in the US and China into a global web of interconnections (61). The bridging effect of vernacular filmmaking is further expounded in chapter 3. Using a Kodak movie camera received from their home church, the Hanke family produced films intended for both local and US audiences, connecting two worlds through this crosscultural means of mission. While American missionary visual practices became fragmented in wartime China, some image-making did occur, as chapter 4 documents. In fact, John Magee's Nanjing film is a prominent example of missionary eyewitnesses of a China torn by violence and trauma. The final chapter traces the “hope, loss, and nostalgia” that shaped the last stage of missionary visual practices, which developed in the tumultuous years around the founding of the People's Republic of China. Photos’ symbolic essence of being “memento mori” (188) helped capture missionary and Chinese Christians’ bewilderment as they watched the crumbling of institutional Christianity around them.

The book synthesizes a rich array of perspectives and sources—both textual and visual. Among the reviewer's favorites is the Passionist photo (83), not only for its documentation of the father-son famine victims but the heated debate over the correct visual interpretation, which became a point of contention once the missionary discovered that editors at the headquarters wiped out the photo's background. A case like this problematizes the stereotype that modern imaging, when occurring to indigenous groups, is inevitably imperial, producing subjugation and dislocation. Ho demonstrates that “Christian internationalism,” embodied in the missionaries’ humanitarianism across borders, often runs against the grain of hegemonic power. Indeed, photography and filmmaking highlight the multifaceted identities in China, a certain “in-betweenness” (9), as they lived and served among political powers, religious institutions, and local communities. Fundamentally religious and transnational, these images and the people involved warrant an interpretation that takes the ideological association seriously.

Meanwhile, the concept of missionary modernity, for which the “in-betweenness” acts as a defining factor, could be further elucidated. Given its frequent appearance, a clarification of the term will help the readers grasp both what this vision of a modern China is not (the nation building envisioned by the party-state or foreign powers) and what it is. How does the concept, for example, compare to Daniel Bay's idea of Sino-Foreign Protestant establishment? Relatedly, the reviewer wonders, besides enabling missionaries to transcend national and cultural boundaries, whether their multidimensionality also made them seem out of place against their surroundings, either in China or America? What role did visual records and practices play in creating and alleviating this challenge?

My quibbles aside, this book is an accomplishment deserving scholarly attention. It is well researched with a plethora of sources in both English and Chinese and does a marvelous job in helping us understand the centrality of image-making in missionary experiences. Adding to the technical accuracy are the almost cinematic portraits that the book uses to highlight encounters, whether with historical events or persons interviewed, often connected through the portal of photographs. Such presentation gives weight to this significant piece of history in modern China and Christian missions that many hold dear despite the tragedies they endured.