Introduction
In the seventh year of his six-decade career as a China missionary, Samuel Evans Meech (1845–1937) wrote home to report that the fledgling Beijing congregation of the London Missionary Society (LMS) had held an election for their first native pastor.Footnote 1 The entire process had occupied several weeks. First, foreign missionaries had authorized and introduced this new leadership role to the Chinese church members. The veteran missionary, Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), gave an address explaining ‘the character and duties of a pastor’. Thereafter, members of the congregation discussed and voted on the following three questions: ‘Is it desirable to have a pastor?’, ‘Is this church willing to support a pastor?’ and ‘Whom does the Church desire for pastor?’ The final vote was held on 18 February 1877. Meech gave an account of the voting process: ‘The papers all carefully rolled up were collected … two names at the head of the list were again put to the vote. Each member then came singly to the back of the preaching desk and put a mark against whichever name he wished to vote for.’Footnote 2
The congregation selected Ying Shaoku—a 49-year-old Manchu bannerman and former high-ranking official in the Board of Rites who had been baptized, along with his wife and sons, seven years prior.Footnote 3
The early stage at which LMS missionaries sought to install certain institutions for self-governance within this Beijing congregation (just 16 years after the advent of mission activities in the city) highlights the significance of organizational processes, and not merely religious beliefs, as an element of cultural exchange within the liminal realm of the missionary–native encounter.Footnote 4 This church election drew on both native and foreign religious practices. For instance, some Buddhist monasteries’ processes for selecting an abbot similarly employed public processes of deliberation, nomination, and selection, sometimes through names written on slips of paper.Footnote 5 Other aspects of the election were peculiarly Christian, such as the office of ‘pastor’: 牧師 mushi, meaning ‘shepherd-teacher’ or ‘shepherd-master’. This title stemmed directly from biblical discourse of Christ as a shepherd and delineated a set of responsibilities (such as preaching, expounding scripture, and ministering to lay members) derived from biblical narratives and European Protestant traditions.Footnote 6 Another aspect of the election process—the tallies beside the name of a chosen candidate—relied on all of the voters being able to read Chinese characters reliably enough to distinguish between the two names. It points to the high priority placed on literacy (i.e. Bible-reading) within Chinese Protestant congregations, regardless of church members’ class and educational background. All in all, the election process and the form of voluntary, self-governing, textually oriented community it introduced was a distinctive addition to the Chinese religious scene.
Thirteen years later in 1890, another report by Meech concerning the LMS in Beijing seemed to indicate that this 1877 pastoral election and ordination had not yet given rise to a robust culture of native self-governance. With evident disappointment, he judged that, beyond modest fundraising to defray expenses such as cleaning the chapel and supplying books, native self-support and leadership (‘a native pastorate’) had not yet become an institutional reality.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, these glimpses into the early decades of the LMS North China Mission (chiefly concentrated in the major cities of Beijing 北京 and Tianjin 天津 and the surrounding countryside in what is now the province of Hebei 河北) give us a sense of foreign missionaries’ persistent desire to develop certain organizational modes within Chinese congregations.Footnote 8 In the early decades of the twentieth century, as congregations of the LMS North China Mission multiplied, these institutional processes not only took root within local LMS church culture, but also took on a life of their own. This article will examine how two of these organizational modes—congregational self-governance and Bible-oriented literacy—facilitated an expansion in ways of ‘doing’ Chinese community.
Organization and associational life
The market for new organizational forms in China in the early twentieth century was booming. The period from 1900 to 1930 was a time of breakneck social and political disintegration and reorganization. Amidst weakened state control over society created by the decline of the Qing, the failure of parliamentary democracy in the first years of the Republic, and the regional rivalries of the warlord era, a new associational life flourished. Numerous new forms of ‘auto-organizational’ Chinese communities sprang up.Footnote 9 Some, like chambers of commerce and charitable organizations, built on native organizational models established during the imperial era such as guilds and benevolent societies.Footnote 10 Some, like the YMCA, Girls’ Life Brigade, and athletic clubs, directly adopted Western models. Others blended native and imported forms, like the Confucian Association's use of the Bible-reading-group model to study the Confucian classics.Footnote 11
Organizational models were valuable tools, because fighting the law of entropy has always been a daunting task. As anyone who has ever tried to conquer a country, start a new club, or hold a public event knows, getting a large number of people to act together is difficult. To accomplish this task, organizers can rely on a range of forms (party congresses, Mass, panel discussions, pre-game huddles, discos) and means (purpose-built meeting spaces, vernacular language, flags). Sometimes, an unusual task sparks a novel mode or means of organization (a terrorist network, Twitter), which then enters into circulation, with the potential to disruptively influence future modes or means of organization. LMS congregations in North China in the early twentieth century introduced a self-governing institutional structure oriented around the sacred text of the Bible. The development of church polities and Bible culture introduced not only new forms of assembly, worship, and collective action, but also new centres of local community authority.
The LMS model of congregational organization that began to emerge in China in the early 1910s overlapped with existing native forms, but also retained distinctive characteristics due to biblical patterns or European Protestant traditions. Chinese-lineage and native-place organizations also connected members through corporate property or a building, but, unlike churches, were ascriptive in their membership—limited to those who were (ostensibly) blood-related or who shared a hometown.Footnote 12 Religious associations also brought a diverse group of pious volunteers to a sacred place for devotions, but their collective activities were less frequent than Christian churches’ regularized weekly schedule of worship, study, and proselytizing.Footnote 13 Brotherhood and secret-society movements also united members through rituals of initiation, expectations of mutual aid, and, sometimes, charismatic power, but their engagement with society was narrower than an LMS church's broad mission of public worship and social engagement.Footnote 14 The emerging modern secular associations dedicated to sports, patriotic action, and professional activity also united diverse constituents, but did not seek to justify their activities through cosmological claims. Membership in Protestant Christian communities was both ascriptive (through family ties, including intergenerational transmission) and voluntaristic (through conversion).
A number of organizational tools imported from European Protestantism gave church institutions an exotic flavour: leadership offices such as pastor and deacon, the regular seven-day schedule of Sunday and weekday meetings, sacred symbols such as the cross, and a sacred calendar that included foreign holidays such as Christmas. Imported texts such as the Bible, catechisms, and hymns also shaped the community's discursive life. An active culture of proselytizing created conversion-chains of family members, neighbours, teachers, and students that both reinforced and cut across typical categories of relationship. Congregations included individuals from a wide variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. In urban locations such as Beijing and Tianjin, members often came from diverse regional backgrounds. As Prasenjit Duara has noted from his study of the cultural nexus of power in North China, Christian churches were both grounded in local networks of association and linked to powerful international interests, which set them apart from other Chinese religious groups.Footnote 15
As LMS missionaries sought to establish this organizational form of self-governed Christian congregations, they also devised means to facilitate this transfer, including the use of phonetic script to promote biblical literacy. Both the organizational structures and the phonetic script were cultural technologies in the sense that they were processes or tools developed to more effectively accomplish certain tasks. As so often happens with new technologies, once established, both the model for autonomous community governance and the phonetic tool for holding these communities together through shared texts eluded the control of those who had introduced them.
Imperialism or exchange?
Examining the transmission of organizational forms and tools, as opposed to the transmission of religious beliefs, ideas, or messages, reveals new dimensions of the encounter between Protestant Christian missionaries and native peoples not only in China, but also around the world. The case of the LMS in China supports recent scholarship on empire and world Christianity that argues that Christian mission communities were a transcultural space characterized by complex and often unexpected cultural exchange and innovation. These cultural transformations could extend far beyond the sphere of formal mission institutions and congregations. This article's focus on cultural technologies helps to explain how, despite foreign missionaries’ persistent attempts to deploy specific tools to achieve specific outcomes, once introduced, these tools could be used in ways that diverged significantly from what the missionaries had envisioned.
The historiography on Christianity and empire is voluminous, from devotionally oriented accounts of early missionaries, to empirical studies of mission institutions, to theoretical perspectives relating Christian missions to modernization, industrialization, nationalism, racialist attitudes, dissent or resistance against colonization, and so on.Footnote 16 Generally speaking, scholarship since the 1990s has acknowledged not only the significance of imperialism and colonialism, but also missionaries’ and native converts’ complicated relationship to such forces, and examined the multifaceted and often unexpected changes provoked by complex cultural negotiation and recontextualization at the local level.Footnote 17
In particular, scholars have thought long and hard about the fundamental character of these transnational encounters. Were they ultimately oppressive and destructive, or liberating and productive, to those who experienced them? Numerous accounts by scholars attuned to the significant power differentials of the age of colonialism and imperialism have interpreted the missionary project as ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘the moral equivalent of imperialism’, or ‘colonization of consciousness’.Footnote 18 Subsequent scholars critiqued these arguments on the grounds that they essentialized the cultures and interactions of missionaries/colonizers and natives/colonized peoples and discounted the agency of native Christians to translate and reshape Christianity for themselves.Footnote 19 To be sure, it is clear that Western missionaries did often express feelings of ecclesiastical and racial superiority, and strove, with some success, to direct the cultural choices and religious expressions of converts within their limited spheres of influence.Footnote 20 However, the overall historiographical trend has been to increasingly show how the cultural influences of Christian mission could be both constraining and enabling, and that foreign missionaries, as well as native converts, often felt frustrated or taken aback.
The significance of native Christians’ agency and ownership of Christian culture has become more evident as scholars have begun to recognize that Christianity has become a largely non-Western religion.Footnote 21 In the words of Dana L. Robert in 2008: ‘Flaws emerged in a scholarly paradigm that saw the primary significance of the Western missionary movement to be the monolithic imposition of European domination. After all, only an excruciating paternalism would attribute “false consciousness” to the majority of Christians in the twenty-first century.’Footnote 22
Given the enthusiasm, evangelism, and influence of Christians in the Global South, it seems reasonable to look beyond paradigms of Western domination and cultural control.
In this vein, Ryan Dunch has suggested the missionary encounter was part of the ‘broader global transformation of the nineteenth and twentieth century’. For instance, certain assumptions and norms introduced by mission institutions in China such as rationality, the medicalized body, and the desirability of universal literacy were not classically ‘Western’, but in fact were relatively recent manifestations of global modernity that had provoked cultural transformation in European countries as well.Footnote 23 The emergence of transnational institutions and networks led not to increased homogeneity, but to increased perceptions of cultural difference and local cultural differentiation.Footnote 24 Advances in communication and transport technologies facilitated global flows of ideas, materials, funds, and personnel that included, but extended far beyond, Christian mission networks.Footnote 25 A ‘backflow’ of narratives, reports, images, objects, and people from the so-called peripheries transformed the culture and identity of the metropoles and the foreign missionaries themselves.Footnote 26
Hence, Christian missions were indeed thriving sites for global cultural exchange, but not necessarily centres for its control. As in the case of any interaction of complex systems, small stimuli could catalyse far-reaching, often unanticipated developments within the mission and beyond. A range of such unintended consequences can be seen in recent scholarship on native congregations in south-west India, ethnic Karen conversions in Myanmar, Hmong evangelism in Vietnam, folk Christianity in the Philippines, Christian student groups in Nigeria, independent charismatic movements in Zambia, and so on.Footnote 27
The unexpected consequences of Christian missions around the world make more sense when we consider what was actually exchanged. Foremost in the minds of foreign missionaries and native evangelists, of course, were Christianity's ideological resources: the doctrines and messages about Christ's gospel (‘good news’). These ideological resources also included Bible stories and terminology, new rhetorical forms, and the reordering of meaning and self-perception involved in Bible discussion and translation.Footnote 28 On the opposite end of the spectrum of missionary imports are the scientific or material technologies that had independent secular applications, such as medical procedures and printing equipment.Footnote 29 Such technologies had not been invented for the purpose of Christian missions, but were general tools for a variety of applications.
In between these two poles of ideological and material resources were a host of cultural technologies that were more tangible than a doctrinal precept but less material than a nuts-and-bolts printing press. These in-between resources included religious rituals, linguistic tools, literary forms, pedagogical devices, and collective procedures, all designed to facilitate the purpose of Christian evangelization and salvation. Recent scholarship has shown the many ways in which missionaries initially deployed these cultural technologies, which include rites such as baptism and confession; customs such as taking Christian names; hymns and other musical practices; new alphabets, scripts, and texts to facilitate Bible-reading; types and orders of church meetings; structures of church government; and so on.Footnote 30
Sometimes, these newly introduced cultural technologies produced the very kinds of outcomes the missionaries sought. For instance, nineteenth-century congregations of the Swiss Basel Mission in south-west India developed thriving communities held together by missionary-introduced procedures such as electing church elders, collective consulting on ecclesiastical policies and lifestyle regulations, and joint industrial production.Footnote 31 Missionaries in twentieth-century Korea proudly reported that the meetings of the Woman's Aid Society (founded in 1900 and modelled on an American Methodist women's organization) always followed the orderly procedures of roll call, inquiries after absent members, reading of previous minutes, and verbal committee reports. It was music to missionaries’ ears to hear Korean women declare that, after living for decades without a name, on the day of their baptism within the mission church, they had received a personal name that gave them an independent identity as a follower of Christ.Footnote 32
At other times, however, these cultural technologies facilitated ventures that the missionaries found undesirable. For example, early Korean charismatic movements that grew out of mission churches beginning in the early 1900s relied heavily on the revival meeting format introduced by Methodist missionaries. These revival meetings had a distinctive timetable and slate of activities, including Bible study, congregational prayer, public confession of sins, and healing, coordinated to foster an atmosphere of emotional intensity and spiritual receptivity.Footnote 33 Missionaries initially encouraged these revivals, but revival movements later grew into fully fledged, independent Pentecostal and charismatic movements that became competitors of missionary churches.
When missionaries’ cultural technologies became diverted, these diversions did not always lead native Christians out of the missionary church entirely, but they often resulted in distinctive patterns of piety that undermined or differed substantially from what the missionaries had initially tried to institute. Indigenous Punjabi Christianity was centred on the singing of hymns and psalms to native melodies, despite missionaries’ attempts to emphasize theology, church government, and Christological doctrines.Footnote 34 Folk Christianity in the Philippines similarly developed strong musical traditions that served as potent resources for resistance to Spanish ecclesiastical and political control.Footnote 35 In some instances, the technological redeployments diverged dramatically from the original context, such as in Zambia when native Christians selectively adapted mission-church rites, such as baptism, for witchcraft-purification rituals within their new charismatic movement.Footnote 36
In sum, this article builds on the premise that missionaries and native Christians engaged in lively cultural exchange and co-production, often with unexpected results. Although their schools, hospitals, and printing operations found ready uptake among the populations they sought to evangelize, missionaries around the world were relatively ineffective in spreading their orthodox Christian ideologies, whether one chooses to call them ‘imperialism’ or ‘good news’.Footnote 37 However, adaptive cultural technologies introduced or engineered for evangelistic purposes often took on lives of their own. They facilitated not only flourishing indigenous Christianities, but also a range of transformations beyond the mission setting.
Control and transformation
In theory, the goal of Christian mission was self-amortizing. The ideal of independent, self-governed congregations reflected the strong congregational ethos within the London Missionary Society.Footnote 38 This ideal notwithstanding, as shown by LMS history not only in China, but also in other missions such as South Africa, missionaries were often hesitant to relinquish control, especially as cultural differences exacerbated differences in interpretations of religious orthodoxy.Footnote 39 More often than not, however, increasing native autonomy stemmed from operational necessity as much as from ideological choice. As churches multiplied, exchange rates fluctuated, and donors in the home country closed their wallets, mission budgets were also strained.Footnote 40 As Jay Riley Case and others have also noted, native evangelists were simply more effective than foreigners in explaining the nuances of the gospel message and cultivating vibrant Christian communities.Footnote 41 Political factors such as rising nationalism also put foreign LMS missionaries under pressure. The result of these economic and political pressures is that, despite the reassuring tone of many missionary communications to their overseas sponsors, in the archives of the LMS, one finds missionaries who had much less control than they would have liked over nearly everything. They were frustrated, vulnerable despite their relative economic and political privilege, heavily dependent on their Chinese hosts, and distracted from evangelism by pressing social concerns and natural disasters.Footnote 42 They struggled with both their lack of control over the political and natural environment and their desire to relinquish congregational control while keeping these new organizations within acceptable boundaries.
One of the reasons why certain modes or means of associating overran the bounds of missionary control is that both the missionaries and the Chinese Christians were subject to a broad, ongoing global transformation. This modern transformation facilitated people's ability to imagine themselves as belonging to large communities orders of magnitude larger than circles of village and kinship. Benedict Anderson has theorized that vernacular printing played a role in allowing people to imagine countless others reading the same words, at the same time, about the same events, places, and stories.Footnote 43 This fostered not only nationalist thinking, but even more expansive imagined communities such as the transnational missionary societies themselves. Hence, the local church governments and phonetic scripts sowed the seeds for organization and identity on a mass scale by giving people new ways to imagine how they belonged: not just to villages, but to congregations, the national and international fellowship of Christians, and to the great stream of Christian history itself. The Chinese state during this time was also working to kindle a sense of shared national identity. However, the kinds of communities that grew out of church governance and phonetic literacy projects established collective visions quite different from official national imagining. These communities were both deeply rooted in face-to-face relationships and visibly connected to transnational networks. They were centred on a distinctive set of collective rituals, symbols, and institutions that represented an alternative source of governance and ideological authority.
Church governance
Although the LMS missionaries in North China around the turn of the century were not as influential as the cultural imperialism interpretation would argue and indeed not as influential as they themselves would have liked to have been, they eventually succeeded in introducing their model of church organization: self-governing congregations linked by higher-level councils or synods.Footnote 44 Generally speaking, the model for LMS congregational self-government worldwide entailed local variations on a set of shared structures and terms, including units for ecclesiastical governance such as ‘councils’, ‘committees’, and ‘districts’, and leadership positions such as ‘pastors’, ‘elders’, ‘deacons’, and ‘representatives’.Footnote 45
We can see examples of how a shared society-wide logic of self-governance played out in LMS communities in Samoa and India around the turn of the twentieth century. Local congregations in Samoa were run by native pastors beginning in 1875 and governed by lay representatives beginning in 1893. For some time, important responsibilities, such as calling a pastor to a village, were executed by these native leaders at the level of the individual church. However, because of the close overlap between the local church and village communities, and the influence of village chiefs within a local congregation, LMS administrators in Samoa in 1907 felt it necessary to make a ‘constitutional’ adjustment that better facilitated the congregational ideal of a separated church meeting that was distinct from the local community. They created a ‘District Meeting’ of representatives from several adjacent villages and transferred some important responsibilities, including calling a pastor, to this new body.Footnote 46 In the relatively less mature LMS missions in India, although the institution of church council had existed in Travancore since at least 1901, and in other areas where church councils did not exist, LMS administrators established ‘Joint Committees’. These committees consisted of both missionaries and native church representatives. This organizational model was itself adapted from another mission institution in India—the American Marathi Mission—and also resembled the practice of the LMS in some parts of China.Footnote 47 Hence, the LMS model of congregational self-government consisted of a shared organizational logic and ideal that was adapted within diverse local contexts.
Due to years of civil disruption, structures of self-government were not uniformly integrated across the LMS missions in North, Central, and South China, but, in the North China missions, the native church councils were in place by the end of 1910.Footnote 48 Such organizational forms not only satisfied practical incentives (demonstrating institutional maturity, saving money, and deflecting anti-foreign opprobrium), but also potentially embodied a set of new assumptions about the nature and value of religious community. The first was that a church was a tightly knit, socially integrated community, not simply a place of worship with regular patrons. Meech spoke of the need for this corporate life in 1917:
So many of the Christians have only realized their own individual salvation. They have yet to learn the advantages to be derived from a corporate church life, for their own sakes, and for the better doing of the work they are in the world to accomplish. The same evil, for an evil it is, shows itself in their unwillingness to contribute to Church work and extension.Footnote 49
The value—indeed, moral value—Meech attached to this corporate, highly integrated, time-intensive religious life was novel. Other kinds of corporate religious life in China included Buddhist monastic life, in which religious professionals worked together under a local community hierarchy, or temple associations, dedicated to a particular cult, in which flexible groups formed at times throughout the year to go on pilgrimage, raise funds for braziers or stelae, support festival performances, or to perform temple maintenance.Footnote 50 Christian churches demanded weekly attendance as a baseline, along with a steady stream of contributions and, ideally, additional time as a lay volunteer. The church model of democratically elected leadership bodies and a collectively shared responsibility for religious instruction, evangelism, worship, and community governance was initially not well received. In 1930, one missionary, A. M. Jowett Murray, recalled that ‘some years ago the Mission attempted to set up a system of Church councils’ but, at the time, such an organization was seen as an ‘entirely exotic’ and did not take hold.Footnote 51
Although the phrase ‘self-led, self-supported, and self-propagating’ 自治、自養、自傳 has in recent years been closely associated with the ‘Three-Self’ 三自 formulation used to categorize PRC state-sponsored churches, its origins were in Western mission discourse of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 52 In 1851, Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society first laid out the three legs of this tripod as the whole purpose of foreign missionary work: ‘The object of the Church Missionary Society's mission,’ he wrote, ‘is the development of Native Churches, with a view to their ultimate settlement upon a self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending system. When this settlement has been effected, the Mission will have attained its euthanasia, and the Missionary and all Missionary agency can be transferred to the regions beyond.’Footnote 53
LMS missionaries in the North China Mission in the early twentieth century mentioned this ideal frequently, whether to bemoan what they perceived as apathy or lack of responsibility, or to cheer signs of independence. In his report for 1898, Thomas Bryson in Tianjin wrote to praise the ‘tireless zeal’ of Yang Fengxiao, the native preacher, and to celebrate the fact that three deacons had been appointed in the early part of the year. He cited ‘spasmodic work’ in proselytizing over the course of six months that was entirely initiated by a number of lay members who rented a room in a local inn to preach to the lodgers.Footnote 54
The leadership development of Chinese Christians suffered during in the Boxer Uprising of 1900–01, during which time many Chinese Christian leaders were killed. However, the Boxer indemnity funds paid to compensate families and rebuild churches and the post-Boxer political reforms, many of which aligned with existing mission projects such as schools, created a more favourable political climate for Christianity. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, as Daniel Bays has noted, the Chinese Protestant community expanded rapidly and a new generation of vigorous Chinese Protestant leaders who had been educated in mission schools, seminaries, and institutes began to come into its own.Footnote 55
Chinese Christianity grew not only in overall numbers, but also in administrative maturity. By the early years of the twentieth century, a system of church councils was being implemented in fits and starts across LMS missions in North China. Although not all church councils functioned in the way that missionaries hoped, it seems evident that many operated with a real degree of independence. In 1906, Samuel Evans Meech reported being worried when the excommunication of a deacon in the LMS congregation in the southern part of Beijing caused a vacancy in church leadership. A wealthy silk merchant who had been a member of the congregation for about three years and who had frequently donated money seemed to Meech to be the most likely candidate for a successor. This choice, in Meech's estimation, ‘was not altogether to be desired’. To his ‘great delight’, he reported, the members of the church ‘acted in an independent manner, and chose a worthy man, who is assistant to the shopkeeper just mentioned’.Footnote 56 The congregation's selection of a shopkeeper's assistant over his wealthy employer diverged from local forms of social hierarchy and established an alternative Christian structure and logic of power.
The independence of this particular Beijing congregation came to full fruition in 1911–12, in which local Protestants of means and status contributed money to convert it into an independent unit called the ‘Chinese Christian Church’ 中華基督教會, aided by a donation of the property by the London Missionary Society.Footnote 57 This congregation became part of a larger ‘Chinese Christian Church’ federation of similar churches in Beijing and Tianjin. In 1920, a second LMS congregation in the eastern sector of Beijing also became fully independent and self-supporting. With financial help from the LMS, this congregation built ‘a fine new church capable of holding some 600 people’.Footnote 58 Here, we should note the considerable investment of real estate and funds that the LMS contributed to the church buildings of these new congregations on the one hand and the substantial and widespread support of hundreds of local church members who made it possible for these congregations to maintain church leadership and collective activities on the other. Both foreign missionaries and native Christians collaborated to realize a shared organizational goal that fulfilled numerous individual agendas, interests, and priorities.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, institutions of local governance began to take root in LMS congregations all over North China. By 1916, LMS churches in the countryside around Beijing were not fully independent (largely for lack of funds to be fully self-supporting in a time of severe social disruption and economic stress), but supported local church councils that held regular meetings to manage affairs.Footnote 59 In 1923, W. T. Rowlands in Xiaozhang County reported that ‘a considerable number’, though not all, of the churches had formed a local church council, either individually or in groups of two or three smaller churches. ‘All the affairs of the Church are dealt with by this body,’ he reported, ‘including both financial and spiritual matters, and it provides a fine field for the manifestation and exercise of the spiritual gifts latent in the body of Christian believers.’Footnote 60
By 1926, Ivy Greaves in Beijing noted that all four LMS-founded congregations in Beijing, ‘formerly LMS but now independent’, had formed the ‘Peking Christian Church Federation’. Instead of being a superintendent of the churches, she now considered herself a member. ‘I have felt it a great privilege to serve on the diaconate of the Kang Wah Shih Church, and later on the Church Council of five members,’ she wrote. ‘I was there not as a missionary of the LMS but as one of the Kang Wah Shih church members.’Footnote 61 Of course, missionaries would have had an incentive to overstate the independence of Chinese congregations to donors who were eager to see their investment become self-sustaining. At the highest level, missionary-staffed governing bodies also retained power of the purse.Footnote 62 Yet the frequency with which the topic of self-government appears in missionary reports of the 1920s suggests that many Chinese Christians had the experience of participating in these governing bodies, which would have made local leadership more responsive to native congregants’ needs and more likely to value native cultural interpretations in matters of morality, doctrine, and administration.
In addition to church councils, for which members were elected, LMS churches in North China had become bustling centres of activity. In 1917, the Kang Wah Shih church in the western section of Beijing had 137 names on its membership rolls, of whom 80 attended the Sunday service. The chapel hosted numerous meetings on Sunday, multiple weekday afternoon meetings, and an evening meeting every night except for Saturday. In addition to the main service on Sunday, there were special afternoon meetings for women, Bible classes, Sunday School, children, and group prayer.Footnote 63
Not all of the organized activity at LMS chapels was devotional. Many of these non-devotional activities were initiated by Chinese members. In 1905, the LMS chapel Cangzhou became the designated meeting place for an ‘English Mutual Improvement Society’ founded by a mission school pupil who ‘posted up placards explaining his idea’. Thereafter, for several weeks, Arthur Peill recorded, at the LMS chapel, ‘there gathered a band from 12–20 of the brightest young men in the place’, including students from the government's newly founded Western-style schools who were not necessarily Christian.Footnote 64 In this case, it was the Chinese who created and advertised the educational project, using the valuable meeting space provided by the LMS chapel for their own purposes. According to Peill, the ‘Essay and Debating Society’, also founded by Chinese Christians at around the same time, spurred the establishment of a similar society by scholars in Cangzhou.Footnote 65
Chapels were places of physical shelter that Chinese Christians utilized in times of need. During a period of civil war in 1922, reported T. Howard Smith,
when bands of defeated or deserting soldiers were wandering about the countryside carrying out their depredations on a wide scale, two of our Churches, under the leadership of the preacher in charge quite on their own initiative opened up refuges for the protection of women and children, and afforded shelter to 1500 terrified women and children during the 2 to 3 days and nights that the danger of molestation existed.Footnote 66
Certainly, in this situation, not only the physical safety of the church building, but also its status as a symbol of foreign influence, were helpful in deterring danger. Chinese Christians were turning the power of foreign association to the task of protecting a larger community of non-believers.
Growing independence in Chinese Christian congregations gave rise to creative new approaches to congregational life. In 1930, Arnold Bryson reported on a village near Cangzhou in which the local Christians had decided to celebrate Christmas Day with a feast but, instead of consuming pork and other expensive delicacies, cut these items from the menu and put the money toward a combined offering of over six dollars for the benefit of the poor in the village, including 50 ‘old men, widows, and poor children’.Footnote 67 However, Bryson took a dim view of other independent initiatives that diverged from evangelistic purposes. In one Cangzhou church, two of the deacons established a primary school, for which they used the church building even though there was no Christian instruction as part of the curriculum. The missionaries were unhappy, but felt unable to interfere. After several months, financial difficulties arose and the school closed, to the missionaries’ relief.
Beyond feasts and schools, more mature church congregations began to act independently on theological matters, to the missionaries’ dismay. In one church to the south of Cangzhou in 1927, an entire LMS-originated congregation converted to the True Jesus Church (a Chinese independent church founded in 1917 by Wei Enbo 魏恩波, the wealthy silk merchant whom Samuel Evans Meech had thought unsuitable for the deaconate in the LMS congregation in southern Beijing in 1905).Footnote 68 ‘We were unfortunately all away when the movement came to a head, only returning in time to face a fait accompli,’ wrote Evan E. Bryant wryly.Footnote 69 He described the congregation's newly adopted method of corporate prayer:
repeating ad lib the phrases ‘Hallelujah, Praise be to Jesus,’ each person saying it faster and faster, until the rapid united ‘praying’ becomes a wild ecstatic babble, accompanied in the case of some with physical tremours, and shakings, and other manifestations akin to Boxer, India, and Sudanese religious raptures. Those who excel in these are said to have got ‘the Holy Spirit’ and the gift of tongues.
Describing another congregation in this area in which the True Jesus Church evangelists had found a favourable reception among LMS congregations, Edith Murray expressed her frustration at the value that the congregants were now ascribing to charismatic expressions. ‘[E]veryone talked about dreams and visions. We did not experience any, because we “had not received the Spirit”,’ she wrote:
Oh how hard we strove to teach them about the holy Spirit as revealed in Scripture, and as proved in our own experience, but they would not believe us. Every meeting became a pandemonium, as soon as any attempt at prayer was made. All kneeling, bodies swaying about and trembling all over, they would start repeating, ‘Hallelujah, praise Jesus,’ but almost immediately lose themselves in inarticulate sounds. One night after an address on Isaiah LIII [53], they went on like that for forty minutes, until I really thought they were mad.Footnote 70
The shifting denominational allegiances of the congregations in Cangzhou make it clear how, once established with their own physical place of worship and local leadership, even mission-run churches lacking formal independence were not completely subject to missionary control. The institutions of democratic church leadership within local congregations responded to local preferences and desires in a way that directly clashed with missionary sensibilities. Instead of privileging the missionaries’ theological understandings, native members gave authoritative weight to their shared charismatic experiences. Organizational structures and devices originally instituted by missionaries could now be perpetuated in a new variety of independent Chinese churches by leaders who had cut their teeth as deacons, administrators, and evangelists within LMS congregations.Footnote 71
For decades, LMS missionaries had hungered for greater levels of self-governance within the North China congregations and had invested time and treasure for this cause. The LMS missionaries in North China worked hard to establish these sustainable organizational forms but, in this endeavour, greater success meant less control. Once fully realized, these forms of organization could be duplicated and adapted in a variety of other contexts that did not serve the missionaries’ original purposes.
Phonetic script and literacy
One powerful tool in facilitating organizational independence was Chinese Christians’ emphasis on the power of the biblical text and their ability to access it on their own. For instance, it was in an LMS congregation that Wei Enbo, charismatic founder of the True Jesus Church, learned not only how to exercise religious leadership, but also how to read. Previously, he had been an illiterate farm labourer and cloth vendor. Meech reported that, at the time of first encountering the church in 1903, Wei ‘could not read, but by the aid of an assistant he has been able to read and to commit to memory his catechism, and is now reading the New Testament. … His examination revealed that he had acquired a very thorough knowledge of Christian truth’.Footnote 72
Wei's eventual familiarity with the Bible enabled him to gain a reputation as a church leader and eventually found his own restorationist movement.
The emphasis on universal biblical literacy—an emphasis on competence for all classes and genders on reading, comprehending, and reading aloud a shared scriptural text—was a unique addition to modes of religious community in China. China had a long history of shared reading, memorization, and recitation of texts in the rigorous programme of study for the civil-service examination, but this shared classical tradition had been restricted to elites and aspiring elites. Within China's religious communities around the turn of the century, literacy was more compartmentalized. Catholic Christianity did not place a comparable emphasis on literacy as a requirement for full religious participation. Catholic missionaries in China tended to concentrate on establishing orphanages for the poor and ran seminaries for only those Catholic boys preparing for the priesthood. During a Catholic mass, there was a prayer book that literate congregants could read, but the less literate could simply chant the rosary.Footnote 73
Some of the earliest printed books in China and indeed the world were Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures and, in the early twentieth century, Buddhism experienced a boom in the publication of both scriptures as well as exegetical guides.Footnote 74 However, it was not considered necessary for every person who wanted to devoutly take refuge in the Buddha to read Buddhist texts. The financing of religious publications was regarded as a meritorious act, but only highly committed lay adherents or professional practitioners were expected to read scriptures, liturgies, and commentary. Popular ritual handbooks circulated throughout daily religious life in specifying the proper procedures for ancestral rites, divinations, and so on, but they could be very eclectic. People, men and women, could visit a temple or shrine, participate in a local religious cult, or use phrases from Confucian classics or other moral maxims without having to acquire them from a text.
Undoubtedly, literacy was so important to the Protestant missionaries because of the historical roots of Protestantism as a popular rebellion against centralized priestly authority and in favour of churches, centred on a ‘priesthood of all believers’. In the first decades of the Reformation, Protestants called for the translation of the scriptures from Latin into vernacular languages like German or English.Footnote 75 The Protestant emphasis on the biblical text instead of on the priestly hierarchy as the only authoritative source for God's truth created an ethos of Bible-reading that spurred LMS literacy efforts in China and around the world.Footnote 76 In their efforts to promote biblical literacy, LMS missionaries not only invented new tools to expand literacy, but also introduced a new form of textual community. This textual community added an additional layer of complexity and social interconnectedness to Christians’ lives. Bible-reading could be done individually, with family, with friends, at home, at church, or abroad.
Sidney G. Peill dedicated much of his career to promoting use of phonetic script. In his report for Cangzhou in 1917, he wrote: ‘As a rule only the few men in a village who can read are held by the churches, for how can people be expected to maintain a spiritual life if they cannot even read a Gospel or a hymn book?’Footnote 77 Beginning in 1913, Peill had made adaptations to an existing phonetic script—Wang Chao, named after a reformer who had unfortunately been banished by the Empress Dowager Cixi for being too radical by creating the script.Footnote 78 Other phonetic systems were being introduced in China at around the same time, including Zhu Yin (‘bo po mo fo’), which was adopted by the Republican government and eventually eclipsed the Wang Chao system in popularity. The adapted Wang Chao script could be used to transcribe not only Beijing Mandarin, but also a range of dialects, including Jiaodong dialect (in which the gospel of Mark was printed in 1920), Hankou dialect (in which a Bible was printed in 1921), and Zhili dialect (in which a Bible was printed in 1925).Footnote 79 The funds to create the type for printing the script in Shanghai were donated by S. J. W. Clark—a wealthy businessman who regularly patronized the LMS.Footnote 80 According to Peill, in 1917, over 10,000 copies of various books in phonetic had been sold (under cost price) and over 30,000 total volumes had been printed.Footnote 81
This phonetic system and these phonetic texts were used throughout LMS missions in China—not just in classes designed to bring ‘enquirers’ into formal membership, but also in urban hospitals and rural villages.Footnote 82 Both men and women learned to read phonetic script, although the function of the script in facilitating access to literacy was much more dramatic among women than men. Peill estimated that about 10 per cent of the Chinese men missionaries encountered on a daily basis could read, compared with about 1 per cent of Chinese women.Footnote 83 During the succeeding decade and a half after this introduction of modified Wang Chao phonetic script (sometimes referred to by missionaries as Wang Peill phonetic script to reflect the modifications), ‘phonetic’ spread throughout the areas in North China where missionaries worked. The vast majority of transmitters of the script were not foreign missionaries, but native Chinese, and a significant proportion of these were not Christians.
Most non-Christians who learned Wang Peill phonetic script encountered it during an inpatient stay in an LMS hospital. Clearly, the process of learning the script helped to alleviate the boredom of being bedridden and gave some patients a sense of personal progress during their stay. In a report in 1923, for instance, Peill reported:
An illiterate girl had her leg amputated, started to learn by her own request the next day, was able to read in sentences later six days, had a Syme's amputation on the seventh, continued her reading, and went through a whole volume of Scripture Reflections. She was given a key to the Chu Yin system with printed explanations in Wang Chao phonetic; and without personal instruction she was able to the following day to write correctly from dictation (in her own dialect) in the Chu Yin phonetic.
Significantly, Wang Chao phonetic and the missionary-printed texts available in Wang Chao phonetic were not a dead end for this girl and others who learned it, but an open door. Wang Chao provided the key for her to master Zhu Yin, in which a larger number of texts (both Christian texts and secular, government-printed texts) were available.
In Peill's mission district in Cangzhou, the majority of instruction in Wang Chao phonetic was not conveyed from missionaries to Chinese religious enquirers, but from Chinese to other Chinese. He reported that, in Cangzhou, ‘[t]he greater part of the teaching in our hospitals is done by convalescent patients though we always have someone supervising’. Even these supervisors were themselves recently learners, such as a 14-year-old boy who, according to Peill, had been ‘an illiterate beggar on the point of death when he came in, but now is as happy as the day is long. He reads Wang Chao phonetic more fluently than the average Chinese “hsiaochang” (teacher) reading from character’.Footnote 84
Wang Chao phonetic was also a stepping-stone to learning Chinese characters. Mission texts were often printed in double columns, with Wang Chao phonetic on one side and Chinese characters on the other, allowing people to teach themselves at their own pace. This opened up the formerly elite world of character literacy to members of working classes. For example, Peill, in 1923, gave the example of a self-taught labourer:
A coolie on our Compound, beginning with Wang Phonetic, learnt all the characters in a big volume of selections in double column, without the aid of a teacher. He then proceeded to work on a book in Mandarin character alone, asking someone to tell him the few characters on each page which were new to him, and entering them in phonetic at the side, studying them at his leisure in the evenings. Then he attended night class for three months, studying all the uses of six hundred selected characters, and learning to write them. After having been a coolie (working all day!) for three years on the compound … he was examined by Mr Chang Po Ling, Principal of the Government University in Tientsin. Mr Chang gave it as his opinion that this coolie read Chinese characters better than he could have done if he had spent seven years in school learning in the ordinary way. He subsequently enlisted in General Feng Yu Hsiang's army where he was soon promoted to be a Petty Officer.Footnote 85
Beyond LMS mission compounds and LMS-administered hospitals, those who had learned Wang Chao phonetic through contact with missionaries could go as teachers to other hospitals. For instance, in 1923, a young boy who had learned phonetic in an LMS hospital took up a post teaching phonetic to patients in another busy city hospital. In his first three weeks of work, 13 patients had already reached the stage of being able to read in sentences.Footnote 86
While the fundamental purpose that drove the missionaries to create the tool of modified Wang Chao phonetic was to introduce non-Chinese to the Bible and to deepen the commitment of those who were already Christian, the tone of their reports suggests that they saw the teaching of the script even to those who would never become Christian as a good and worthwhile project. The shared pleasure that the visiting missionaries and native Chinese felt in expanding intellectual and cultural horizons through literacy is evident in their reports. The reported excitement of acquiring literacy felt by Chinese women, from young girls to elderly grandmothers, was especially poignant. For hundreds of years, educating a daughter had been seen in Chinese culture as not fundamentally desirable, but rather a form of conspicuous consumption. Now, illiterate girls whose feet had begun to rot due to the practice of foot-binding came to the hospital for double amputations and, within a week after their operations, were reading simple sentences.Footnote 87 In multiple LMS congregations in rural villages in the North China countryside, villagers purchased books and organized classes on their own, with those who could already read teaching those who wanted to learn.Footnote 88 As in other denominations and places in China, literacy gave Christians direct access to the source of religious authority, reduced their dependence on foreign leadership, and allowed them to participate in moralistic and intellectual exchange within the community.Footnote 89
For many Chinese women, biblical literacy (even if ‘just’ in phonetic) opened up a new career opportunity as a Biblewoman. As Ling Oi Ki has pointed out, many Chinese women's employment as Biblewomen ‘enabled them to broaden their networks and widen their concern beyond the inner chamber. It offered them a career option, which was a career with respect among Chinese Christians’.Footnote 90 Ling also observes that, beyond the paid compensation that these women received for their efforts, they were also viewed as teachers, instructors, and leaders among women in the church. Committed women could very quickly master the Bible in phonetic and be in a position to expound its teachings to others.
The culture of Bible-reading facilitated not only the spread of a valuable cultural commodity and desirable symbol of social status, but also a new understanding about individuals’ spiritual and hence intellectual capacity and how these gifts could benefit the community as a whole. In 1930, Arnold Bryson in Cangzhou wrote:
As a result of our persistent use of the Wang-Peill phonetic script among illiterates and the steady teaching of the lesson courses for enquirers and candidates for baptism in every outstation, there is a far higher standard of intelligence among Church members than ever before. By a unanimous resolution, passed in our District Church Council eight years ago, every illiterate enquirer must learn to read the script. Fifteen years ago only 20% of our communicants were able to read the difficult Chinese characters but today 90% of the converts are literate, i.e. they are able to read the Gospels and sing hymns, using either phonetic or character and, what is more, are able to teach the accomplishment to others in their own village. This is an incalculable gain.
Here, Bryson uses the word ‘intelligence’ to describe an intellectual capacity that can be developed, as opposed to pre-existing aptitude. Engagement with texts introduced converts to more sophisticated modes of participation in church life. Chinese Christians such as the District Church Council in Cangzhou seem to have embraced this assumption when they mandated literacy as a near-universal requirement for participation in the Christian community. Through reading and engaging autonomously with narratives, moral commandments, and archetypes in the biblical text, men and women in villages, districts, regions, and all over China were able to engage in intellectual exchange. Within these communities, biblical mastery circulated as a new form of social and moral capital.
Literacy powerfully facilitated another form of community through texts, namely congregational hymn-singing. Hymns were a powerful symbol of the Christian community—the audible equivalent of a flag. They were a major part of the culture of not just the LMS, but nearly all Protestant churches in China. Hymns were collective performances drawn from a wide reservoir of lyrics, tunes, and ritual purposes that literate members of the congregation could produce simultaneously, on demand. Congregational singing made its way into nationalistic government ceremonies, the World-Wide Ethical Society's ‘Ode to Confucius’ (written in numerical musical notation, like Christian hymns), and—in the form of a chant—into the May Fourth-era Mutual Aid Society of anarchists in Wuhan.Footnote 91
This access via literacy to the biblical text and the hymn texts enabled Chinese Christians of all ages to envision themselves as members of a larger imagined community stretching far beyond the walls of their own village or city neighbourhood. The greater autonomy and religious individuation enabled by access to the biblical text also had the potential to bind Chinese Christians together into a unified national and international community. The increasing potential for scalability enabled by native Christian literacy is evident in a comment that W. T. Rowlands made in 1923 when he said that, in these conditions of illiteracy, ‘the result was that most Christians had, in all spiritual things, to be carried by others. No really intelligent or vigorous church was possible … at any rate, over a large area’.Footnote 92
Rowlands's complaint is expressed in the language of independence, or, in this case, the lack of it (having to be ‘carried’), which limited the size of the Christian community network that could be created. LMS literacy efforts enabled the formation and sustained growth of larger and larger communities, all held together by the authority, symbols, and narratives contained within the Bible (and sometimes embodied in the physical book itself). The booming Chinese Christian periodical culture of the first few decades of the twentieth century was the first such explosion of popular print culture of its kind in China, and similar booms in Buddhist and other forms of religious publishing followed in its wake.Footnote 93 The Bible allowed hundreds of believers to read the same verses and sing the same hymns, in print or in person. Hence, in addition to the many functions of literacy, such as making Bible culture accessible to older women who played an influential role in families,Footnote 94 or fulfilling a domestic ideal of an educated mother,Footnote 95 or facilitating upward social mobility,Footnote 96 literacy also introduced a new kind of large-scale community on the Chinese scene. It was a textual community that gave unprecedented authority to lay members, stretched across international and chronological boundaries, and was internally self-governing in a moral and administrative sense.Footnote 97
Benedict Anderson's discussion of the emergence of one kind of community, the nation state, notes that, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, ‘a “model” of the independent national state was available for pirating’.Footnote 98 This ‘pirating’—more often called ‘sheep-stealing’ in the Chinese Christian community—became another significant unintended consequence of LMS efforts to spread literacy. By facilitating broader Chinese Christian access to the biblical text and establishing the Bible as the source of ultimate spiritual authority, LMS missionaries enabled biblically based schism and competition from Chinese independent churches such as the True Jesus Church. The leaders of these churches, such as Wei Enbo, who had been taught to read the Bible in Meech's LMS congregation, used their superior cultural fluency to show how Western mission denominations were in fact not adhering to the words of the Bible as closely as they should.Footnote 99 This co-optation of the biblical textual community not only proved an ongoing headache for LMS missionaries, but was also responsible for the huge boom in the growth of Protestant Christianity, mostly within Chinese-founded congregations, in the late 1930s and again further on down the road in the 1980s and 1990s.
In sum, LMS missionaries’ aggressive promotion of literacy for the devotional purpose of reading the Bible and singing hymns influenced local Chinese communities in a number of ways, some of which overran the original devotional scope that the missionaries intended. Sometimes, the missionaries were delighted to see that this new linguistic tool was taking root, independently of their involvement, in individual minds and larger communities, as in the case of the illiterates who came into the hospital as beggars and amputees and who departed as instructors and teachers. Sometimes, this new form of textual community was duplicated in rival independent churches whose culturally fluent command of the Bible could challenge missionaries at their own game. In both instances, the missionaries’ lack of total control, whether deliberate or unintended, was significant. Having introduced the linguistic tool of modified Wang Chao phonetic script, they could not control the numerous ways in which the script itself and the textual communities it enabled were used, adapted, and reproduced.
Conclusion
Despite their connections to Western imperialist powers and the condescending superiority that frequently characterized their attitudes toward their Chinese hosts, LMS missionaries in North China rarely ‘got what they wanted’ in terms of a straightforward, coercive ‘cultural colonization’. What they had was decades of living in China and immersion in Chinese communities. Over the course of their lives, in collaboration and in dialogue with their Chinese hosts, they developed cultural technologies for developing autonomous communities, including structures of local church governance and phonetic scripts for biblical literacy. As we have seen in the case of the True Jesus Church founded by former LMS member, Wei Enbo, such cultural technologies quickly escaped missionary control and found their way into numerous other applications.
These two strong traditions of local autonomous organization and Bible-centred piety have played a role in shaping the character of Chinese Christianity throughout many tumultuous political eras. When the public sector has been thriving (i.e. when there have been spaces in Chinese civil society open to the participation of diverse groups and organizations, due to either a liberal or a weak state), Chinese Christian Church communities have played a robust role, in part because of their strong internal organizational structures. When the public sector has been suppressed, Chinese Christians have been able to fall back on more private, small-scale practices centred on Bible-reading and hymn-singing.Footnote 100
This sort of cultural technology transfer could occur not only within LMS missions in North China, but also within other Christian communities in China. Even outside of a Christian religious context, those who saw the potential of Christian organizational models could apply them to their own projects. Shakhar Rahav has shown how, as a young man, the anarchist bookseller Yun Daiying derived significant organizational inspiration from a YMCA camp.Footnote 101 Yun's later work in the anarchist Mutual Aid Society and, by early 1922, the Chinese Communist Party built on organizational tools that Yun had acquired from his YMCA experience.Footnote 102 Mao Zedong himself also gained organizational experience with the YMCA. In 1922, Mao participated in a ‘mass education campaign’ sponsored by the YMCA in Changsha. Mao and his communist associates adapted some of the vocabulary in the 1,000-character primer so that students learned about peasants and workers as the producers of society's riches and absorbed the history of the Russian Revolution.Footnote 103 However, the structure of the primer, as well as the organizational framework within which the campaign occurred, came from the YMCA.Footnote 104 Given this early cross-pollination, it is perhaps not surprising that the peak of mass communism in China was achieved through mass Bible-study-style reading of The Quotations of Chairman Mao and singing of songs with a Western harmonic structure like ‘The East Is Red’.
Not only in China, but also around the world, the ripples set off by the introduction of Christian ecclesiastical structures and textual culture continue to spread. One example is the present-day New Life Assembly of God in Chennai, India—a Pentecostal megachurch of about 18,000 worshippers, with services in Tamil and English, a medical ministry, and slum outreach programmes. At the local level, church life centres on around 2,000 ‘care cells’ meeting in homes. This ‘cell system’ of church organization was borrowed directly from Yoido Full Gospel Church—a Korean megachurch with a membership of several hundreds of thousands.Footnote 105 Young-Hoon Lee's periodization of Korean Christian history identifies the Yoido Full Gospel Church as representative of the fifth, most recent stage of the charismatic Christian movement that arose out of Methodist missionary Bible study, prayer, and revival meetings in the early 1900s.Footnote 106 Hence, over time, subsequent generations of innovative and insightful Korean Christians revised the church governance structures introduced by missionaries, often to great effect.
Despite the LMS North China missionaries’ sense of cultural, religious, and racial superiority, they were committed to the self-amortizing goals of mission. Between 1900 and 1930, they began to achieve demonstrable success in facilitating native communities’ independence in administration and literacy. What they failed to anticipate were the unintended consequences of introducing these cultural technologies. Chinese Christians and non-Christians exercised ownership and initiative in applying these new modes of organization and literacy. Passing from one person to another, from inside the church to outside, in the hands of enterprising individuals, these tools found diverse and often unexpected uses.
