This fascinating book opens up new terrain not only in the study of Christianity in late imperial China but also in the study of religion in China more broadly. Through a detailed examination of Chinese Catholicism in the Fuan region of northeastern Fujian (abbreviated as Mindong, “east Fujian”), Eugenio Menegon explores how Catholicism intersected with locality, lineage, and gender to become embedded into the identity of many in the region over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, despite community opposition and state repression. Drawing on an impressive array of sources in Chinese and multiple European languages, his book is also richly suggestive for other sectarian religious movements in late imperial China, and for our understanding of the persistence and growth of religions in present-day China.
Catholicism in Mindong dates back to 1632, when literati converts of the Jesuits invited Angelo Cocchi, a Dominican missionary in Manila newly arrived in Fuzhou, to come back with them to their remote home region, five days' journey from the provincial capital. This chance encounter made Fuan the unlikely center of the Dominican mission in China, and therefore also the site of important developments in mission policy and practice, including the Dominican attacks on Jesuit mission policy that developed into the Rites Controversy. Over the succeeding decades, Catholicism became firmly entrenched within local society in Mindong, and remains so today. Menegon sets out to understand how Catholicism became a Chinese religion in this local context. He organizes his account effectively into three chronological and four thematic chapters, plus a concise and insightful historiographical introduction, a first background chapter, and an interesting few pages on the recent history of the Mindong church.
The chronological chapters trace the establishment and development of Mindong Christianity through the turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and the relative toleration of the Kangxi reign, with special attention to the ways in which the political context created opportunities (e.g., the weakening of lineages through war and the coastal evacuation order) and perils (e.g., support for the losing side) for the new religion. The third chronological chapter recounts the long century of suppression from 1723 until the treaty-port era, portraying it as a mix of benign neglect or official extortion punctuated by sporadic campaigns of active persecution. The four thematic chapters discuss the social constitution of the Christian community in relation to lineage and locale; what Catholic piety and practice meant experientially to Chinese Catholics in Mindong; how Catholics reinterpreted and reshaped Chinese ancestral rituals; and the gendered experience of Catholicism, in particular the institution of the lay religious order of women known as beatas, who remained in their communities but refused marriage and took vows of chastity to devote themselves to religious life. An important theme that emerges is the importance of lay devotion and lay organization, which remains a significant feature of Chinese Catholicism (and Protestant Christianity) today, for some of the same reasons (shortage of clergy in a context of state repression).
Historiographically, Menegon's study both builds on and transcends previous efforts to understand Chinese Christianity in Chinese terms. Much of the scholarship for the pre-1800 period has concentrated on the “Confucian Christianity” of the Jesuits and their more prominent scholar-official converts. By investigating the chief opponents of the Jesuits and the non-elite Catholics associated with their mission, Menegon brings us much closer to understanding the appeal of Christianity to non-elite Chinese. Through his dense micro-historical investigation of the intersection of Catholic identity with kinship ties, lineage organization, and the spatial distribution of Catholic communities, Menegon shows better than any previous study the local and family dynamics behind Catholic conversion and persistence. Similarly, his chapter on ancestral rituals shows how the Dominican critique of Chinese rituals was absorbed into a new discourse of Christian filial piety that included devotions by the living on behalf of their deceased forebears in purgatory. Insights like these pack all the chapters, and together enable the reader to comprehend what often remains shadowy or mystifying in other accounts: why ordinary Chinese accepted Christianity and what it meant to them.
Menegon is able to do this because of the extraordinary richness of his sources, and his virtuosity in employing them. Missionary sources in general include a wealth of detail on Chinese social life and individuals (including non-elite women) that usually remain obscure or invisible in Chinese sources, but that detail is difficult to leverage, due to (among other things) the challenge of correlating names of persons and places in European-language missionary sources with those in Chinese sources (to say nothing of the effort entailed in collecting them from several continents and countries, as Menegon has done). Menegon shows the potential depth and detail that can be opened up when this correlation can be made effectively, and his account of Mindong Catholics also adds to our understanding of how other sectarian movements and secret societies flourished and transmitted themselves across generations despite Confucian disapproval and state repression in late imperial China. This important exploration of the limits of governmentality also has implications for contemporary China, where Christianity (including underground Catholicism) continues to flourish. One can see contemporary relevance in Menegon's portrayal of how kinship and local ties contributed to hiding Spanish priests in the Mindong countryside throughout the eighteenth century, or how Catholics employed in the local yamen helped circumvent activist officials, who were usually more concerned in any case to protect their careers than to enforce a dubious prohibition against a basically peaceable minority.
In short, this is a superb and highly readable book with broad implications. It should be widely read by China specialists and anyone interested in the comparative history of religions, religion and the state, or women and gender in late imperial China, including advanced undergraduates. It has recently received the Association for Asian Studies' CIAC Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900 category), which is a fitting recognition of its scope and importance for the field.
