History of Protestantism in China: The Indigenization of Christianity (review)

On August 22, 2000, a high-powered interreligious delegation representing Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, and Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity in China arrived in Los Angeles, California. Besides the leaders of China's five officially recognized religions, the entourage of fourteen people included scholars of religion, the national head and staff members of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, and members of China's own news media. The delegation was en route to New York to attend the Millennium World Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, convened at the United Nations. At their first meeting with American religious people and academics at the University of California, Bishop Fu Tieshan, a monsignor in the Catholic Church of China and head of the delegation, made the bold statement that "Christianity today is an integral part of Chinese culture."

How is this so? Has not China been ruled for more than half a century by a Communist regime that is avowedly atheist? And has not the government been antagonistic toward religion, if not its persecutor? This is what has consistently been reported by most of the Western media. However, other reports coming out of China, including accounts from American and other visitors to the People's Republic in the last two decades, tell us that the Communist struggle for a true Chinese identity and for independence from foreign domination (with its parallel religious activity) has succeeded in achieving autonomy for religious denominations in China, especially the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.

At the International Christianity and China Conference, with its theme, "Burdened Past, Hopeful Future," sponsored by the Ricci Institute and the Center for the Pacific Rim at the University of San Francisco on October 14-16, 1999, several Western scholars of China had already made the claim that Christianity today is very much a part of the cultural fabric of Chinese society, but not much was made of this important statement, perhaps because of its Western source.

Today, most informed people outside China are now aware of the apparent flourishing of religious activity in Marxist China. But the claim, after more than ., ... years since the arrival of the first Christians in China from the Church in the East (the Nestorians, in 635 C.E.), that Christianity has finally been successfully planted in China, a nation with a long and substantial history and a highly developed culture, is truly remarkable news, all the more startling because it is coming from China itself.

In History of Protestantism in China, Yamamoto Sumiko, a history professor at International Christian University in Japan, writes from an East Asian perspective that for her is of "more importance than the historical accounts of those foreign missionaries who first brought the religion to this region.". From the perspective of the receivers of the gospel message, the theme of her study is indigenization: "whether or not this imported system of religion is capable of putting down roots and growing on East Asian soil." As long as the churches established by the West in the countries of Asia were "politically, economically and also evangelically" dependent on the churches of the foreign missionaries, they would not be able to establish roots in Asian soil. On this point Yamamoto is emphatic. For her the prerequisite for the indigenization of an Asian church is for it to be "self-sustaining." Especially within the last two decades, the news that the Christian community in the People's Republic of China now has a profound new sense of its own hard-won selfhood and a feeling of pride at being truly a part of the Chinese people and the Chinese cultural milieu is being heard throughout the world.

Prior to the Communist movement in China, what were some of the historical antecedents to this newly acquired sense of selfhood and independence that finally came to fruition under the aegis of the People's Republic? To answer this question Yamamoto systematically collected her...