Salt and Light, Volume 1

Lives of Faith That Shaped Modern China

Hamrin, Bieler

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781621892915
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Salt and Light presents the life stories of outstanding Chinese Christians who, as early modernizers, promoted China's nation building and moral progress in the early twentieth century. Lively anecdotes and photographs highlight the strong character of ten pioneers in the modern professions of education, medicine, journalism, and diplomacy. These professionals were motivated by faith to introduce practical social reforms and build up China's civil society. They modeled and promoted virtues essential to social progress during the golden age of Chinese Protestantism. Their stories touch on themes important in today's global era: patterns of cooperation between foreign and Chinese partners, the contributions to China of Western-educated professionals, Christianity's role in furthering East-West understanding and exchanges, and the transnational nature of modern Chinese Christianity. The editors and authors articulate the importance of recovering China's Christian heritage as part of world Christianity.

Notes

Introduction

1. The half-joking phrase is attributed to Li Hongzhang as early as 1862 in Samuel C. Chu and Kwang-Ching Liu, eds., Li Hung-Chang and China’s Early Modernization (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1994), 11.

2. Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 14, 264, 268.

3. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, 266–68, 270.

4. For background, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Random House, 1955); and James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

5. Edwin Woodrull Tait, “The Cleansing Wave,” and William Kostlevy, “Saving Souls and Bodies,” Christian History and Biography 82 (Spring 2004): 22–25, 28–31.

6. Murray Rubenstein, The Origins of the Anglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807–1840 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996), 359.

7. Andrew Porter, “Introduction,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

8. Ryan Dunch, “Locating China in the World: Space and Time in Late Qing Protestant Missionary Texts” (paper, Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, Boston, March 22–25, 2007), 10. Dunch cites Alexander Williamson, in a preface to Jidu shilu [Life of Christ] in the 1880s, as an example of this: “Here we have true Evolution or rather Progression—which word I greatly prefer—and, I may add, in the Church of Christ alone have we aids adequate to the highest development of man, and provision made for the noblest forms of human society.”

9. Jessie Gregory Lutz, China and the Christian Colleges (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 5–6.

10. Kostlevy, “Saving Souls and Bodies,” 29.

11. The 1927 and 1931 conferences are discussed in Thomas H. Reilly, “Preaching the Social Gospel: Protestants and Economic Modernization in Republican China” (paper, “The Meeting of East and West: Celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Rev. Robert Morrison’s Arrival in China and the Fifth Conference on the Contemporary History of Christianity in China,” conference held at Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, April 26–27, 2007).

12. Jessie G. Lutz, “China and Protestantism: Historical Perspectives, 1807–1949,” in Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, eds., China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2001), 191.

13. Heidi A. Ross, “‘Cradle of Female Talent’: The McTyeire Home and School for Girls, 1892–1937,” in Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 211.

14. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, 255–62.

Chapter 1

Acknowledgment

Adapted from Stacey Bieler, “Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2004). Used by permission. Special thanks also to Edward Rhoads for alerting the author to the picture of Rong Hong and Joseph Twichell.

Notes

1. Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Holt, 1999), 37–38.

2. Edmund H. Worthy Jr., “Yung Wing in America,” Pacific Historical Review 34 (August 1965): 274.

3. Thomas E. LaFargue, China’s First Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States, 1872–1881 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1987), 40.

4. The three phrases are from W. C. ...

Table of contents

• Salt and Light
• List of Names
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• • Rong Hong
• • Tang Guo’an
• • Shi Meiyu
• • Fan Zimei
• • Ding Shujing
• • Mei Yiqi
• • Lin Qiaozhi
• • Wei Zhuomin
• • Wu Yifang
• • Yan Yangchu
• Time line
• Notes
• Contributors
• Sources of Illustrations