A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 by John Craig William Keating (review)

John Craig William Keating began learning Chinese at the age of eleven. He was with the first group of his university in Australia to study Chinese in Nanjing in 1982 and now holds an MA in Chinese studies and a PhD in Chinese history. He has lived and worked in China, traveling widely and visiting every province and autonomous region in the country, including more than 120 cities. He mentions that his wife is “Shanghainese” (p. 28), and they have four daughters (p. ix). Their home is in Melbourne, Australia, where Keating has taught Chinese language and history in private schools for almost thirty years. A Protestant Church in China is his historical study of one urban church in China, the Moore Memorial Church (MMC) in Shanghai, a project that has occupied him for more than a decade. This book required traveling, researching archival materials, and interviewing people who have had relationships with the MMC in China, the United States, and elsewhere. Keating has copiously read decades of books, journals, and many church publications on China.

“What I am concerned with in this work,” Keating writes, “is not so much a study of the church itself, but rather what the church and the people involved in it can tell us about China. An in-depth study of this church can reflect more broadly on the nature of the relationship between Christian church and the government in China” (p. 3, emphasis added by reviewer). In short, his book is about churchstate relations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a communist country. Keating researched archival material, both institutional and personal, much of which, he repeatedly claims, has never been seen by others (pp. 6, 7, 225). His contacts were face-to-face interviews, telephone conversations, faxes, or e-mails—all done between 1999 and 2006.

Though the MMC dates its humble beginning to the year 1887, the bulk of Keating’s data is from 1921, when Sidney (1889–1978) and Olive (1890–1978) Anderson arrived as new missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. The Andersons are seen as the central leadership of the MMC, with its dynamic program of Christian nurture and social concerns, for the next three decades. Under the ethos of the International Settlement of Shanghai, a virtual Western paradise and also the headquarters of Protestant missions in China, their work went well. The social involvement and national consciousness of the MMC are represented by the Reverend Anderson testifying against the British police after the incident of May 30, 1925. The police had fired on a student crowd, killing ten people who were demonstrating in response to a Japanese cotton mill labor dispute. This incident resulted in the Japanese murder of the Chinese labor organizer.

The smooth operation of the MMC was interrupted by the Japanese encroachment on China, with refugees pouring into the safety of the International Settlement, thus intensifying the relief work of the MMC. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Japanese invasion that conquered much of the eastern shore of China, including Shanghai, changed the situation considerably for the MMC. Sidney was among the Westerners imprisoned by the Japanese army; Olive and their children had already departed for America. The main focus of the book, however, is the Communist period, which includes the three Maoist decades of revolutionary fervor (1949–1979) to the period of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and disclosures of the country to the world (1979–1989), with implications for present-day China.

In the four decades of the MMC’s history, Keating provides scores of names of Chinese and Western church workers related to the MMC as well as a wide assortment of China specialists who had written either superficially or in-depth about China and its churches in different periods of history. From these writers...