China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture

Foreword

vii foreword The reputation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American missionaries to China has been in very low repute in China itself for a long time. In public discourse for more than half a century, the missionaries have typically been characterized as “stalking horses for imperialist capitalism and gun-boat diplomacy.” One may still read such remarks occasionally in the press, and it is certainly to be found in some school textbooks, but no longer is it the only view. A different, far more generous accounting of the work of Western missionaries has begun to appear in the scholarship of Chinese cultural and intellectual historians. This book, which presents translated reevaluative essays by one of China’s leading academics, well represents this recent turn. Though we may have ourselves largely forgotten it, Yang Huilin reminds us forcibly that the missionaries accomplished intellectual as well as religious work of abiding value. Over the past three decades, with scholarship and reportage on both sides of the Pacific gradually increasing in both volume and interest, we have been refamiliarized with at least a portion of the legacy of nineteenthand early twentieth-century missionary activities in China. To the Western consciousness during the second half of the twentieth century, this legacy had been occluded because of the great political changes after 1949. In viii Foreword fact, many on this side of the Pacific assumed the work of the Christian missionaries had been largely extinguished by those events. After Deng Xiaoping chose a policy of openness to the rest of the world in 1979, it became apparent that Christian communities, though certainly marginalized , had not vanished. Indeed, they were still very much present all over China—and growing. Moreover, because the foreign missionaries had been gone for thirty years or more, Christians in both Protestant and Catholic communions had developed stronger indigenous leadership. Various types of assemblies and congregations flourished under more distinctly Chinese models of acculturation, though mostly in rural areas. In the 1990s Christianity began to take hold in urban China. In part this owed to the general movement of peasants and laborers to the cities , where, with a burgeoning manufacturing economy, jobs were more plentiful. But something else was going on; academic visitors to China could see that there was a dramatic growth of interest in Christianity among university students and faculty. This phenomenon was not without diverse motives and social complexities. Some of those interested made a loose connection of Christian ethics with Western prosperity, however ironic this must now seem to have been among Chinese who have become better informed about contemporary European and North American cultures; Christian ethical norms are far less influential here than they once were, even at the time when Chinese Christians lost most of their contact with fellow believers in theWest. On the other hand, ideological Marxism now has more currency in Western intellectual circles than among intellectuals in China, while in European and North American universities Christianity has been comparatively marginalized. Marxist ideology has, of course, suffered severe practical disappointments in China. A considerable number of Chinese intellectuals—disillusioned with social and economic results of the Marxist experiment, yet still possessed in some degree by its high ideals—have subsequently been attracted to the idealism and social practice of Chinese Christians. For some, disillusioned Marxist altruism seems to have served as a kind of John the Baptist to their personal engagement of Christian faith and practice. For others, independently of any personal belief, other factors, such as concern about the negative features of the market capitalism that now dominates China, have prompted academic research in Christian cultural studies. A chief feature of such study is, as one might expect, a desire to consider not only the historical development of Christian theology in Foreword ix the West, but the local history of Christianity in China particularly. The role of Christian missionaries in the founding and early development of Chinese universities is one area of strong interest, and it is producing a renewed appreciation of the work of Christian missionaries from Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits during the sixteenth century through to the European and North American Protestant missionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The translation and publication in the West of Chinese classical texts by authors such as Joshua Marshman, the Particular Baptist, and James Legge, the Scottish Congregationalist, may have been undertaken as a means of preparing missionaries...