In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmeier writes about Zhu Zhongyuan, a Chinese Christian who lived in the mid-seventeenth century. Sachsenmeier, who is a distinguished global historian, is fundamentally interested in “the encounter of two large systems—the globalizing Catholic Church and the Chinese state, both of which were characterized by their own cultural imperatives and hegemonic claims” (156). It is hard to know exactly how many Chinese Christians there were in the mid-seventeenth century; a fairly reliable estimate places the number at between forty and seventy thousand. That is, of course, a very small proportion of the total Chinese population, but it does represent communities of significance. European missionaries were rare; most Chinese Christian communities were led by Chinese lay persons (102). This doubtless had profound effects on the structure of belief in such communities. We are fortunate that we have the works of Zhu Zhongyuan, a member of one such community, to tell us what he believes and why. Sachsenmeier does an expert job of placing Zhu in his context.

We know little about Zhu, except for his writing, His Christian name was Cosmas Zhu; he was from the lively port city of Ningbo. We do not know his date of birth; he probably died in 1660. He was a man who almost never traveled; his most distant trip was to Hangzhou, a distance of about a hundred miles from Ningbo, yet he was enmeshed in the global network of Jesuit Christianity. Zhu describes his conversion to Christianity as awakening from a dream (39). His interest in Christianity may have come from a dissatisfaction with Confucianism as practiced by his contemporaries. He wrote that Confucian schools of his day “no longer had the right approach to the classics and could not even claim a correct understanding of the traditional texts” (98). In his writings, he insisted that the teachings of the Lord of Heaven (as he referred to the Christian God) are consonant with the teachings of Confucius, a position also held by early Jesuit missionaries. He goes so far as to say that the veneration of the Lord of Heaven is the lifeblood of Confucianism (88). Zhu was committed to the idea that real values transcended specific culture (126), an argument which would have resonated with the early Jesuits.

Zhu was not a China chauvinist. He went so far as to argue that some of the most respected people in Chinese history came from non-Chinese groups. This was not a trivial argument, given that he lived at the time of the Manchu conquest of China (122). Sachsenmeier argues that for Zhu “the notion of a unified and unchanging Chinese culture was not tenable. The implicit argument was that China was so diverse that it was impossible to categorically distinguish between the Chinese and the non-Chinese world” (110). This was not a majority view in seventeenth-century China. And many members of the Chinese elite of the generation which saw the conquest chose not to serve the new dynasty. (Confucian ethics mandated that a minister serve only one ruler.) But Zhu took, and passed, the first civil service exam offered by the Qing state in 1648 (35).

Just as Manchu rule disquieted some of Zhu's peers, threats from Europeans disquieted others. During Zhu's lifetime, first the Spanish and then the Dutch had taken Taiwan; the Spanish held the Philippines and the Portuguese, Macao. The missionaries were not the only source of Chinese information about Europe; Sachsenmeier tells us that coolies and merchants were also sources of information on the outside world and points out that in port cities like Ningbo, intermarriage between merchants and literati was increasingly common in the seventeenth century (131). One can thus imagine that elite families heard travelers’ tales of southeast Asia and the various people they met there, both local and European, tales which might elicit fear. In his Responses to a Guest's Questions, Zhu says that the Chinese need not fear these foreigners, not because they have no schemes but because they come from different countries—if there were to be a master plan, whose plan would it be? Thus, it is not European innocence but rather their disorder (and their distance) that would protect the Chinese from their violence.

While both missionaries and Chinese Christians may have argued that values were culture free, culture of course intervened. During Zhu's lifetime, the church did not permit Chinese to become priests. The highest rank a Chinese could attain was a coadjutor brother, and that rank was restricted to residents of Macau, which was at this time largely Lusophone and Christian. As Sachsenmeier puts it: “A genuinely multicultural clergy that did not share the same theological lingua franca seemed to these fathers like an erosion of the spiritual and intellectual fundaments of their religion” (151). That may be where the limits of accommodation lay.

The book is written in an engaging fashion, and it provides enough background on seventeenth-century China that it should be accessible to nonspecialists. It offers a fresh and complicated look at the processes of accommodation and ideas about ethnicity and foreignness at a time in Chinese history when foreigners from Europe were perhaps among the least of China's worries.