I was recently told of a Christian from Xiamen who, born during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution , grew up on the small island of Gulangyu . When this individual started kindergarten in the mid-1970s, she was shocked to find that some of her new playmates did not know who God was and she was even more horrified to see that her classmates did not pray before their lunch. Prior to starting school, this youngster grew up in an environment with parents, relatives, and many neighbors who had been Christian for generations. Her early life experience was in a religious bubble floating amidst the stormy sea of Maoâs Cultural Revolution . When China first began to open to the outside world in the late 1970s, international observers were incredulous to find Christian individuals and communities that had survived the Communist repression of religion. The prevailing assumption was that the religion had been all but stamped out through the extreme policies of the first three decades of the Peopleâs Republic of China (PRC). But what this brief anecdote of the young Christian student tells us is the growth of Christianity in Reform-era China is not a completely new phenomenon, but is the continuation of a process with roots reaching to before the Communist era.
While the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented increase in scholarship on Chinese Christianity, a reflection of the changing attitudes towards a religion increasingly considered at home within the PRC , no longer a yangjiao or âforeign religionâ (Liu and White, forthcoming), few studies emphasize the continuity of the contemporary Chinese church with historical experiences in the late Qing dynasty or the Republic . Lian Xi âs (2010) compelling study of what he terms âpopular Christianityâ is an exception to such a propensity, showing how contemporary Protestant groups that have greatly increased their membership in recent years are actually a continuation of bodies started decades before. What Lianâs study and this present volume contend is that our understanding of Chinese Christianity today should incorporate how much of the past is still present.
The early years of the PRC and the religious restrictions of the Maoist era obviously influenced church structures and Protestant communities (Ying 2014), but the church was not eliminated during these years and the resurgence experienced in the Reform era is just that, a re-surging of growth and interest in the church. Scholarship on Christian experiences during the Maoist years, especially focusing on the Cultural Revolution , is just beginning to reflect how Protestant groups adjusted to measures by becoming more grassroots or by going underground. Chen-Yang Kao (2009) has argued that such tactics had the unintended consequences of generating greater space for female leadership and reliance on experiential religious practices. Joseph Lee (2017) has written on how the stories of persecuted Christians imprisoned during the 1960s and 1970s have been reproduced as martyr narratives that challenge, encourage, or otherwise influence contemporary Chinese Christian communities. These studies are approaching the challenging initial decades of the PRC with greater historical distance and objectivity and are revealing important linkages to today. Acknowledging an extension of pre-1949 Protestant activity in portrayals of contemporary Chinese Christianity calls for a reframing in which the dark ages of tight repression are presented as an historical comma, rather than a full stop. One benefit of stressing the interrelatedness of contemporary Protestantism in China and the historical experience of the pre-1949 church is that it allows us to view the difficulties of the Maoist era as an aberration. Such a paradigm need not ignore the real changes and challenges felt by the Chinese church in the years following 1949, nor does it need to assume that the trajectory of relaxing controls over governing the church will continue. The current atmosphere of Xi Jinpingâs leadership shows that a return to greater restrictions is very possible. But what this framing can do is accentuate the significant historical ties and currents reflected in Chinese Protestantism today.
This volume hopes to bridge the 1949 historical divide through the presentation of research on various aspects of Protestantism in Xiamen in the past and today. Research in Chinese studies in general has initiated a reassessment of the primacy of 1949 as a dividing line. Joseph Esherickâs (1995) revision of his own thinking on the topic and his review of scholarship at the end of the twentieth century on the Chinese revolution is an example of how analysis can breach the 1949 chasm. As he summarizes, we should recognize the ârevolutionâs importance, but not necessarily its centrality, in Chinaâs modern historyâ (1995: 46). Of course, it is not only scholars who have endorsed a hard break at 1949; the importance of this date is even more so a construct perpetuated within China, for this marks the beginning of âNew China.â Recent history is divided into two eras, jiefangqian and jiefanghou, before and after âliberation.â As Paul Cohen (2003: 33) has remarked, âThe notion of 1949 as a profound divide in historical time became an important component of Chinese consciousness and, as such, a very real factor in influencing Chinese thinking and behavior, with little or no concern evinced from the degree to which its content was mythic.â1
The temporal divide of either analyzing the history of Chinese Christianity or the contemporary Chinese church is not the only dichotomy this volume hopes to question. The chapters collected here critique many binary constructs found in research on Chinese Christianity, including: Chinese vs. Western , traditional vs. modern , Chinese vs. Christian, mission vs. indigenous , urban vs. rural , local vs. national (or transnational) , disenchanted vs. supernatural , conservative vs. liberal , and âThree Selfâ vs. house church . Each of the chapters presented in this collection problematize one or more of these categories, suggesting that in most cases, an either/or understanding fails to capture the complexities of Chinese Christianity, especially at the local level. This research reveals a localization of Christianity in Xiamen that transcends temporal, geographic, and conceptual boundaries.
David Woodbridgeâs study of the activities connected to the YMCA in Xiamen, for instance, exposes a dilemma in considering Western missionaries as a monolithic whole. As his chapter demonstrates, the British and American missionaries in Xiamen were drawn into the politicized atmosphere of a modernizing China and often were found on opposite sides of issues, some siding with the Chinese, to the chagrin of some of their fellow Westerners . In such scenarios, using categories such as mission and indigenous or Western and Chinese is problematic, for these conceptualizations often mask as much as they reveal. Research on Chinese Christianity in the twentieth century reflects how the academic pendulum has swung from a near universal focus on Western missionaries to analyzing Chinese Christians and the communities they formed (Standaert 2001; Mungello 2012). Woodbridgeâs chapter complicates this Western/Chinese divide and calls for an approach that incorporates mission and Chinese points of view without holding fast to these categories.
Similarly, my retelling of the Haicang voice in Chapter 5, an episode in which a supernatural sound perplexed a rural church for years in the 1920s, poses questions concerning how we delineate Chinese traditional beliefs from Christian phenomenon. This particular story additionally sheds light on the theological controversies found in Chinese churches in the Republican era . It reveals that both conservative and liberal theological currents may be simultaneously present in single church structures, both historically and today.
While each of the case studies found here questions established paradigms, the common thread weaving these chapters into a coherent volume is the narrow focus on Protestantism in Xiamen . A particular strength of these chapters is that they are an interdisciplinary collection from diverse authors, including American , Chinese, European, and Filipino scholars of anthropology, history, sociology, and theology . Limiting our analysis to the city of Xiamen allows us to challenge many of the conceptual divisions within Chinese Christianity in the same context.
Another distinction evident in these case studies is that all authors have spent considerable time in Xiamen studying Protestantism or interacting with Christians from the city. The seeds of this book were planted in 2014 when four of the contributors (Bram, David, Jifeng, and myself) were all involved in fieldwork on different aspects of Protestantism in the city, and many of these chapters reflect this, incorporating participant-observation and interviews. Gaining access to such sources is a universal challenge for researchers of Chinese Christianity. For scholars looking at the contemporary...