Jesus Rising in the East: The Extraordinary Story of the Church in Modern China (Christianity Today Essentials) by Kim-Kwong Chan & Tony Lambert & Ryan Dunch & Daniel H. Bays & Kevin D. Miller & Ruth A. Tucker & Mark Galli & Roger Steer & Alvyn Austin

Author:Kim-Kwong Chan & Tony Lambert & Ryan Dunch & Daniel H. Bays & Kevin D. Miller & Ruth A. Tucker & Mark Galli & Roger Steer & Alvyn Austin [Chan, Kim-Kwong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Christianity Today
Published: 2012-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Tainted by association

There was almost certainly no conscious conspiracy among foreign missionaries to deprive Chinese leaders of the means of emerging and flourishing. There was often respect, genuine friendship, and collegial cooperation between missionaries and Chinese priests and pastors. But in the new political atmosphere that was brewing after 1920 in China, such ties were fatally compromising to the Chinese involved.

In the 1920s, popular resentment against foreigners’ legal privileges in China, which dated back to treaties signed by the Manchu government in the mid-1800s, boiled over. This popular nationalism fueled the rapid rise of two major political parties that have dominated Chinese politics from the 1920s to the present: the Kuomintang (the Nationalists) and the Communists, which became bitter rivals and then mortal enemies. The leader of the Nationalists was Chiang Kai-shek, himself a Christian convert and married to Soong Mei-ling, the daughter of one of China’s most prominent Christian families. Under Chiang, there were several other Christians in government positions and polite, even cordial relations with the foreign mission establishment. But even Chiang agreed that foreign privileges should be eliminated as soon as possible, especially immunity from Chinese laws.

Missionaries were among those who enjoyed these privileges. There had been the occasional missionary prophet (for example, Frank Rawlinson, editor of the Shanghai missionary journal The Chinese Recorder) who warned that the seeds of the “treaty system,” as it was called, might bring a harvest of wrath someday. That day arrived in the mid 1920s, and the most radical elements of Chinese opinion considered missionaries, and for that matter Chinese Christians as well, lackeys of foreign governments and of “world capitalist exploitation.”

These attitudes, which pervaded the Communist Party, continued strong until the last foreign missionaries were expelled from China in 1951–52 by the new government. The missionary community, and the mission project as a whole, paid a high price for its failure to distance itself from at least some aspects of Western political, military, and economic power in China.

This portrayal of the missionary record may seem unfair to some. Missions had brought many blessings to China. Chinese Christian schools had been the first places where Chinese could receive a modern education, and the first to permit enrollment of girls and to employ women teachers. Missionary hospitals and clinics had saved tens of thousands of lives, and missionary-coordinated famine relief saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Missionaries had been leaders in the movements to abolish the opium trade and to end the custom of binding and crippling the feet of young girls as a means of increasing their desirability for marriage.

All in all, the missionaries’ contribution to the making of modern China was considerable. Though they were reviled and demonized by the new regime after 1949, they are quietly given credit for their accomplishments and warmly welcomed back to visit China today.