The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932 (review)

Reviews 589 Chun-chieh Huang National Taiwan University Chun-chieh Huang, aprofessor ofhistory atNational Taiwan University, is a specialist on Mencius and onpostwar Taiwan. Lian Xi. The Conversion ofMissionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xiv, 247 pp. Hardcover $38.50, isbn 0-271-01606-x. To traditional, mission-minded Christians, a title such as the one for this book that tells of the "conversion" in China of Christian missionaries from the West may sound as intriguing as it sounds grating. The immediate question that comes to mind is to whatwere these missionaries converted—Confucianism? Taoism? Buddhism? Chinese popular religion? In some ways the answer can be none of these and at die same time all of these. In this most lucid and readable book, Professor Lian Xi of Hanover College in Indiana (who once taught English at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China) focuses on the richness and complexity ofAmerica's foreign missions in China. He wants to show that while systemically the Protestant missionary movement might have been an integral part ofWestern imperialism, not all missionaries were "imperialists" as the popular notion ofmodern skeptics would have it. While immersing themselves in the life of the Chinese, where religion, philosophy , and humanity are inextricably intertwined in one continuous syncretic process , the missionaries in Lian's selective study were themselves concomitandy experiencing a "missionary syncretism" all their own. They interacted with their Chinese hosts and with a dynamic process in which Chinese values were caught in the throes ofa Chinese nationalistic struggle to respond to die challenges ofthe modern world. Although the missionaries as missionaries did not depart from the Christian tradition itself, they nevertheless could no longer remain within die narrow confines oftheir original American culture-bound goal to evangelize China. Initially they were zealous in their evangelism and ignorant and insensitive to© 1998 by University Chinese culture. However, the consequence oftheir years in China, with unanticiofHawai 'iPresspated changes in their life and work, was, according to Lian, "a major crisis in the missionary enterprise in the late 1920s and early 1930s," and this became part of the "reverse missionary impulse" that contributed to a deeper understanding of 590 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 not only Chinese religion, culture, and history but ofChristian faith itselfas well. Some ofthese missionaries, like their earlier peers such as James Legge and W. E. Soothill, even became scholars of the "pagan" Chinese classics. For these missionaries and their Chinese recipients, evangelization was truly a two-way street where both the bearers and the hearers of Christ's message were equally transformed in the process ofexchange to the betterment oftheir historically and culturally embedded selves. The research method that Professor Lian employs in this book is one ofmeticulous archival study and analysis of the writings and documents related to three representative missionaries of this period: Edward Hicks Hume (1876-1957), Frank Joseph Rawlinson (1871-1937), and Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (1892-1973). True to the goal of sharing "Christ and civilization" of the Yale Foreign Missionary Society, educator and medical doctor Edward Hume set out to make the Chinese people "cleaner, happier and more Godlike." However, his years ofindepth encounters with Chinese friends, the Chinese classics, and Chinese nationalism enlarged and enriched his conception of Christianity. "I was learning day by day, more and more," he wrote, "of the many words in the Chinese vocabulary for peace and serenity, for concord and human harmony." After his death in 1957, Yale University set up an "Edward H. Hume Memorial Lectureship" in his honor to bridge the divide between East and West. Frank Rawlinson went to China as a fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist missionary who wanted to lift the Chinese out of their "struggling in chains on a low level of civilization." He ended up as editor of die ecumenically supported Chinese Recorder, the scholarly journal ofmissionaries who cooperated with Chinese to explore the truth, which is "true in China as elsewhere." Rawlinson was also aided by his second wife, Florence Lang, a YWCA missionary who, according to Lian, "helped transform his religion into human terms and into thisworldly ideals." Well known for...