Missionaries and Chinese Nationalism: Devolution at a Southern Presbyterian Mission in Jiangsu

Missionaries and Chinese Nationalism: Devolution at a Southern Presbyterian Mission in Jiangsu by Lawrence D. Kessler Revolutionary nationalism in China in the 19205 challenged the Protestant missionary movement in fundamental ways. Most immediately and urgently, many missionaries were in personal danger from attacks on their lives and property. Once that danger had passed, there still remained questions about the proper role of Christianity and of foreign purveyors of that faith in the political, social and cultural reconstruction of the country. Could Christianity or any religion offer a panacea for China's problems? What was the relationship between Christianity and the imperialist political forces then threatening China? In building a Christian church in China, how prominent a role should foreign missionaries have? Who would control the burgeoning number of Christian institutions, such as churches, hospitals, and schools? Could Christianity, which professed to be a universal religion, find a national form? Not all of these issues can be treated in this paper.1 Here, I will focus on the response to the nationalist revolution of one American Protestant denomination, the Southern Presbyterian Church (PCUS: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.). More particularly, it will draw upon the experience of the PCUS mission station at Jiangyin in eastern Jiangsu province. Most studies of American missions in China have focused on northern denominations, with materials drawn from the files of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Southern Presbyterians have generally been neglected, but the denomination has rich archival resources, and there"are additional personal and institutional resources specific to the Jiangyin Station that afford a researcher a fairly comprehensive look into the life of that station and its involvement in the dramatic changes China was undergoing.2 SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIANS AT JIANGYIN The Jiangyin Station was one of fourteen maintained by the Southern Presbyterians in China. This denomination was one of the smallest American Protestant churches in size, but it assumed a leading role in foreign missions. In the early twentieth century, it ranked first on a per member basis in both the number of missionaries sent abroad and the amount of support for foreign missions.3 An inter-denominational agreement in 1907 assigned the Southern Presbyterians to China's eastern coastal province of Jiangsu. They divided their field into two sections, the North"Jiangsu Mission and the Mid-China Mission, separated by the Yangzi River. Jiangyin Station was under the jurisdiction of the latter. The walled city of Jiangyin, a county seat with a population in the 1920s of about fifty thousand, lay on the southern bank of the Y~ngzi about one hundred miles upstream from Shanghai. It was often called: the "mouth oidie Yangzi" because the great river narrowed down to about one mile at that point. Forts on hills north of the city had twelve-inch cannon trained on the !iver that could command traffic and protect the upper reaches of the 52 Yangzi from naval attack. Because of its strategic location, the city often found itself at the center of fighting between rival combatants in modern Chinese history. For example, as the Japanese advanced into China in the 19305, President Chiang Kai-shek personally inspected the fortifications and ordered them reinforced. After hostilities began in 1937, Chinese forces sank twenty-eight ships in the river just below Jiangyin in order to block the passage of Japanese warships coming up from Shanghai to threaten Nanjing.4 The Southern Presbyterians established the mission station at Jiangyin in 1895 at a time of increasing xenophobic reactions, fanned by decades of foreign invasion, to missionary work. Within a year, the two founderS"'of the station were driven out by an angry mob that accused them of mutilating a child's body for nefarious medical purposes.s The charges were later proven false, and the missionaries carrie back to lay the foundation of a successful enterprise that lasted until the communist government closed it down in 1951. The heyday of the Jiangyin Station, like other China missions, came in the early years of the Republic when newly emerging forces in the country looked to the West as a source of ideas and for a helping hand. Missionaries, as foreigners with privileges guaranteed by...