Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate by Ernest P. Young (review)

Ecclesiastical Colony is a long-awaited book that reinterprets the history of Catholicism in modern China through a critical study of the French Religious Protectorate, a secular institution implemented by France to monopolize Catholic missionary affairs under the mid-nineteenth-century unequal treaties. By historicizing the religious protectorate in different temporal and spatial settings, Ernest P. Young elucidates how France used this diplomatic mechanism to reshape the Chinese Catholic landscape, how this top-down approach affected the local Catholic communities, and how rival European diplomats and missionaries devised innovative strategies to expand or constrain the French influence.

This book makes significant contributions to our understanding of Chinese Catholicism. First, Young has consulted an impressive range of new evidence from Chinese and European archives to illustrate the operation of the French Religious Protectorate. He builds on the latest studies of Catholic movements by Anthony E. Clark, Henrietta Harrison, and Eugenio Menegon to address the diplomatic context of the Catholic missionary expansion into China. The religious protectorate was, in fact, more central to the advancement of France's colonial ambitions than to the evangelistic concerns of Catholic missions. But elevating the protectorate over individual missionaries and non-French Catholic enterprises was fraught with contradictions. Under the Third Republic (1870–1940), Léon Gambetta (1838–1882) notoriously announced that anticlericalism was not an article for export. While the French government marginalized the Catholic Church at home, it protected missionaries abroad in order to put the Church in service of its imperialistic ambitions.

Nevertheless, the religious protectorate weakened due to rivalries with other foreign nations. This external factor not only influenced France's monopoly on Catholic affairs in China, but also enabled Chinese officials and Catholic believers to pit one foreign power against another. In 1885, hostilities between France and the Vatican prompted the Holy See to deliver a papal message to the Chinese emperor, and the occasion inspired Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) to pursue direct diplomatic links with the Vatican, with a view toward undermining the religious protectorate (pp. 56-59). By the early twentieth century, the foundation of this imperialistic system was shaken by the broken alliance between France and the Vatican in late 1904 (p. 89). The French consulates in China worried so much about the erosion of the religious protectorate that they employed coercive and co-optative measures to pressure the European Catholic missionaries to defend their imperialistic interests.

In addition, the conflicts involving the French Catholic missions had a strong property dimension even though the ostensible reasons given were different. The indemnities following the Boxer Uprising (1900–1901) transformed the Catholic Church into a powerful economic institution. But well-endowed Catholic churches turned out to be a double-edged sword. One example was the extensive network of the Jesuit institutions in Shanghai. The more prestigious educational, medical, and welfare programs the French Jesuits offered, the more appealing Catholicism was to the Chinese. This huge mission empire prompted the Jesuits to rely on dubious revenues for support, including rental incomes collected from a Chinese-run brothel on Jesuit premises (p. 90).

Equally important were the diverse Chinese responses towards the religious protectorate, ranging from suspicion and indifference to hostility and confrontation. Most of the late imperial district and sub-district officials bitterly opposed French intervention into local resource disputes involving Catholic missionaries and Chinese converts, but some ambitious community leaders joined the Church to employ French diplomatic influence against their opponents in rural politics. Young draws a complicated picture of the local management of Catholic affairs. European missionaries often lost control of their flocks and were dragged into endless intra-/inter-community conflicts. At least in Jiangxi, Sichuan, and Guangdong provinces, the projection of French power through its religious protectorate was neither a complete nor a unidirectional process. Native Catholic agents occasionally appropriated this mechanism for their own empowerment and survival.

Methodologically, two interpretative frameworks have dominated the historiography of Catholicism in China...