Footsteps in Deserted Valleys: Missionary Cases, Strategies and Practice in Qing China, and: Authentic Chinese Christianity: Preludes to Its Development (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries), and: Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan (review)

Many different perspectives are possible when approaching a study of Chinese history, which may be organized and interpreted from the standpoint of, for example, political science, sociology, or linguistics. The importance of the three volumes under review here from the Leuven Chinese Studies series is that they offer a serious, if at times somewhat disconnected, attempt to interpret the period of Christian missionary enterprise in China and Taiwan from the Qing dynasty through the mid-twentieth century, not as a typical example of Western imperialistic encroachment but from the perspective of the legitimacy of Christian faith as authentic human experience.

We begin with volume 8 of the series, Footsteps in Deserted Valleys: Missionary Cases, Strategies and Practice in Qing China. Ku Wei-ying's opening chapter, "Conflict, Confusion and Control: Some Observations on Missionary Cases," tackles the problem of missionary case grievances brought before local officials in Taiwan. The reason why missionaries were beaten, their personal belongings stolen, and their church buildings destroyed was not because of anti-imperialist sentiment but rather because of the failure of local Chinese to understand, accept, or respect Western cultural values and religion. By de-emphasizing the political motives for the cases brought to the local magistrates, and through a closer analysis of the complete records behind the cases, Ku posits that the conflicts experienced by the missionaries (and local Chinese Christian believers) were the result of fear and opposition to the Christian faith.

In "Body and Soul: Professional Health Care in the Catholic Missions in China between 1920 and 1940," Dries Vanysacker investigates the methods of the Catholic Church's medical missions, focusing on two North China mission congregations to illustrate changes in professional health care: the Belgian-Dutch C.I.C.M. Fathers in Suiyuan and the German Capuchins in East Gansu. The author interprets the changes that occurred to be part of a larger strategy of introducing the Chinese to the teachings of the Catholic Church. It was hoped that the Church's new approach to medical missions would offer a compelling moral example that would lead to conversions.

Angelos S. Lazzarotto's "A Strategist of Missionary Development in Henan: Bishop Joseph Noe Tacconi (1873-1942)" summarizes the work and major accomplishments of a missionary who worked in Henan Province from 1895 to 1940. While Lazzarotto's focus throughout this chapter is on Tacconi, he develops a rich backdrop by contextualizing Tacconi's work within the larger social and political events of the day and by examining the lives of a few of Tacconi's missionary forerunners. The chapter ends without a substantive conclusion and is further weakened in its focus by the addition of disturbing accounts of murders and persecutions, which are thrust upon the reader in the last few paragraphs.

This volume succeeds in sensitizing the reader to the importance of a multi-perspectival approach to Chinese studies—an approach that legitimizes Christian faith as part of the Chinese experience. But chapters like Shih Lilan's "The Missionary Cases of Taiwan in the Nineteenth Century" lack a statement of purpose and are devoid of sound structural organization, and Koen De Ridder's "Congo in Gansu (1898-1906): 'Missionary versus Explorer/Exploiter,'" in which the author often merely records random observations on the geography of Gansu...