Protestant missions in China 1807–1953
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
China and the West were virtually unaware of each other’s civilizations until the nineteenth century. In Europe, knowledge of China and its ruling (Manchu) Qing Dynasty was restricted to a small circle of experts familiar with the writings of earlier visitors, such as the Jesuit court missionaries. The same limitations applied to China’s officials who, however educated they may have been, possessed very little insight into European civilization, including Christianity.
During the last half of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth century little was done among Protestant Christians to take the message of the Christian Gospel to China. Eventually, however, the release of national dynamism brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the spiritual renewal that began among the churches by the evangelical awakening throughout the English-speaking world coincided with an era of Western colonial expansion and what has been called “The Great Century” of modern missions.
The few Roman Catholic missionaries operating in China before the 1800s were generally isolated and bound by an ever more tightly woven net of anti-missionary legislation. A new generation of missionaries, fired by an evangelical revival in Protestant Europe, beginning with Robert Morrison, spearheaded a renewed encounter between China and Western culture.
Contents |
[edit] Missionary activity, 1807-1839
In 1807, Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society reached Canton via America despite the opposition of the British East India Company[1] and the ship captain's famous challenge: “And so, Mr. Morrison, you really expect to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire?.” Morrison's reply was: “No, sir, I expect God will.”
After twenty-five years of intense work he translated the whole Bible and baptized ten Chinese. The first was Tsae A-Ko, the first known Chinese Protestant Christian. Protestant missionaries like Morrison pioneered the translation of the Bible into Chinese and distributed the Scriptures as broadly as possible, unlike the previous Roman Catholic translation work that had never been published.[2] Morrison worked with such contemporary missionaries as Walter Henry Medhurst and William Milne (missionary) (the printers), Samuel Dyer (Hudson Taylor's father-in-law), Gutzlaff (the Prussian linguist), and Peter Parker (China's first medical missionary). For years their only efforts in China were restricted to Guangzhou (Canton) and Macau. They concentrated on literature distribution among members of the merchant class, gained a few converts, and laid the foundations for more educational and medical work.
[edit] The two Opium Wars, 1839-1860
Then came the Opium Wars. The British East India Company was determined to force China to trade with the West, both legitimately and otherwise. At an early date opium grown in British India began to prove a most profitable export commodity. Although opium was known in China, the emperor had wisely and officially forbidden its importation. Some Chinese traders, however, circumvented the law and prospered. In 1839 the Chinese court ordered confiscation of all opium in Chinese warehouses and on British ships in Canton: they burned twenty thousand cases of opium. British merchants protested at this interference with their “legitimate” trade. The First Opium War broke out in 1841, when the British fleet assaulted Canton and demanded reparations (plus Hong Kong). In 1842 the fleet attacked Nanjing (Nanking) and the Chinese were defeated by the British.
By the Treaty of Nanking (1842) the Chinese were forced to grant Western nations five ports for residence and trade plus several other concessions, including Hong Kong to British rule, indemnity for opium destroyed, and British monitoring of tariff rates. The following year (1843) the British infringed further on Chinese sovereignty and forced the emperor to grant extraterritoriality to all British citizens. This meant that Chinese officials were not permitted to have jurisdiction over them. By extraterritoriality, foreigners, “when they were defendants in any criminal action against Chinese, were to be tried under their own laws and by their own authority; in civil cases with Chinese they might invoke the aid of their consuls; and in controversies among themselves they were not to be subject either to Chinese laws or courts”.[1] Travel inland was not permitted; missionary activity was confined to Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.
Due to the breakdown of these terms, however, the Second Opium War broke out in 1856. The French joined the British and made the conflict more unequal than before. When peace was declared in 1860, the Chinese were forced to increase their concessions. What was particularly galling to them was the “most favoured nation” clause, under which the Chinese had to grant the same privileges to all foreign nations alike. This was to prevent any one nation from gaining an upper hand in securing concessions to China. From henceforth China would be at the mercy of every nation from the predatory West. Along with extraterritorial status she was forced to enlarge the freedom of missionaries to proclaim their faith. They could now travel inland. Furthermore, the Chinese themselves were guaranteed the right to become Christians.
At this time France publicly championed the Catholic missions. Capitalizing on the treaty, she forced China to restore all church properties that had been appropriated by the Chinese during the repression of Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “regardless of how many Chinese owners had altered or used them for other purposes during the intervening years”.[2] In contrast, the more subtle British declined any particular sponsorship of Protestants, although it was assumed by many that her direct aid would be available to them should any emergency arise. The era of “missionary gunboat policy” had begun. Of course, this was carefully explained in “spiritual” terms to the churches in Britain:
While it is not right to do evil that good may come, still God often brings good out of evil, as the following will clearly prove....War may compel strong foreign governments to open the door and to give freedom and security to the missionary and his converts....Hear the words of Bishop Moule: It is probable that in consequence of the exclusive policy of China and her intolerable arrogance nothing but a series of humiliating defeats, such as she experienced in 1841-42 and 1856-1860, could have opened her brazen gates and have brought to the more amenable and friendly common people the blessings of honesty and Christian truth.[3]
China was deeply humiliated at the hands of the British. Within a period of nearly thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century she was also internally torn by at least six major rebellions, the average duration of which was nearly fourteen years. These were widely scattered, erupting in all parts of China except in the northeast. The Taiping Rebellion (1848-1865) is estimated to have taken at least twenty million lives. This widespread unrest was due to the mounting pressure of population growth coupled with the inability of the government to provide adequate livelihood for all. China had yet to go through an industrial revolution comparable to the West.
[edit] The Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion began in the mind and heart of Hong Xiuquan, an unsuccessful candidate for the civil service examinations, who somehow obtained and read a lengthy Christian treatise (compiled by one Lung-Fan, a Malaccan convert of Milne, Morrison's colleague). According to Hong Xiuquan, in a vision he later felt called of God to cleanse the country of idolatry and corruption. His goal was to establish a heavenly kingdom known as the Tài Píng (Great Peace).
Was this a Christian movement? In recent years the Taiping Rebellion has come under renewed scrutiny by scholars. They underscore the religious context from which it sprang: the decay of the organized religions (Buddhism and Taoism) and the hated foreign Manchu dynasty's dominance of the official Confucian cult. The time was ripe for the emergence of a new religious movement which would replace the older faiths and pave the way for a political renaissance that would be Chinese through and through. The weight of current scholarship is on the side of those who contend that this movement was primarily a religious revival and only secondarily a revolt against the Manchus.
It was the most formidable rebellion to confront the Manchu dynasty, “a product of China's new contact with European civilization and the most positive consequence of Christian missionary enterprise, [yet it was] ignored by the missionaries themselves and was finally destroyed by the armed intervention of the Christian powers.” Earlier European histories of China deride the religious dimensions of the rebellion, yet according to the Taiping leaders their faith mattered more than victory over the Manchus.
Admittedy, Hong Xiuquan did not have a traditional view of the Gospel, although he possessed a complete Bible. Following his conversion he served for some years as a missionary among his own clan. His converts were taught to oppose all existing religions, and particularly Buddhism because it was considered idolatrous. This aroused official hostility, and Hung was charged with promoting civil disorder. This led to armed conflict.
During the early years of the Taiping Movement, not a few prominent missionaries, such as William C. Burns and William Alexander Parsons Martin, were favourable to its efforts to bring about religious and social reform. How could it have been otherwise? The Taipings forbade foot-binding and opium, elevated the position of women, lowered taxation, and made those who earned more pay more. They were more friendly to the foreigners than the Manchus, for they wanted China opened to Western trade and travel. Moreover, they were pro-missionary. Even the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong “frequently asserted his conviction that the Taiping movement was a Christian crusade, if perhaps unorthodox and ill-instructed in certain doctrines”.[4] However, when the British and French authorities in 1860 exacted their highly favourable concessions from the Manchus, the missionary community was easily persuaded to represent the Taiping creed as gross superstition, replete with blasphemous distortions of Christian truth.
What did the Taipings actually believe? They began as a sect: “The worshippers of God”. Their “Trimetrical Classic” was writing the Bible into three-character sentences for catechetical use.
By 1852 the Taipings began moving down the Yangtze Valley. A year later they made Nanking their capital and proclaimed a new Taiping Dynasty. When they threatened Shanghai in 1860, a foreign force was hastily organized to oppose them. By now missionaries almost totally sided with the decadent Manchu court. It was ironic indeed that a brand of spontaneous Chinese Christianity was defeated with the help of the nominally “Christian” Western powers (1864). The object of foreign intervention was to preserve the corrupt and defenceless Manchus, because a Taiping victory would have made China strong and independent. Although corruption and violence invaded and defiled the Taipings during their closing years, the “glimmer of Chinese idealism” remained in the movement to the very end. (Admittedly, many conservative mission historians seriously doubted that the Taipings were doctrinally orthodox from the outset).
[edit] Missionary activity, 1860-1900
In 1860 Protestant missions were confined to five coastal cities. By the end of the century, however, the picture had vastly changed. Scores of new societies had been organized, and several thousand missionaries were working in all parts of China. This amazing transformation can be largely traced to the excitement caused by the 1859 Awakening in Britain and the example of J. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905). By 1865 when the China Inland Mission began, there were already thirty different Protestant groups at work in China[3], however the diversity of denominations represented did not equate to more missionaries on the field. In the seven provinces in which Protestant missionaries had already been working, there were an estimated 204 million people with only 91 workers, while there were eleven other provinces in inland China with a population estimated at 197 million, for whom absolutely nothing had been attempted[4]. Besides the London Missionary Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, there were missionaries affiliated with Baptists, Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, American Reformed Mission, Methodists, Episcopalians[disambiguation needed], and Wesleyans. Most missionaries came from England, the United States, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, or Holland[3].
In addition to the publication and distribution of Christian literature and Bibles, the Protestant Christian missionary movement in China furthered the dispersion of knowledge with other printed works of history and science. As the missionaries went to work among the Chinese, they established and developed schools and introduced the latest techniques in medicine[3]. The mission schools were viewed with some suspicion by the traditional Chinese teachers, but they differed from the norm by offering a basic education to poor Chinese, both boys and girls, who had no hope of learning at a school before the days of the Chinese Republic [5].
Hudson Taylor had arrived in China in 1854 at the age of twenty-one under the auspices of the Chinese Evangelization Society. His work was largely in Shanghai and Ningbo at first. By 1860 he was back in England, broken in health and with little prospect of ever returning. His society had already nearly disintegrated through poor management. Taylor's future looked dark, but he was “challenged by the open Bible and the ever-accusing map”.[5]
Things began to happen, however, when Taylor was asked to write a series of articles on the needs of the "Ningpo Mission", to be published in a Baptist magazine. He agreed, for he was eager to promote this work and hoped his articles might stimulate prayer and recruit workers for the small clinic he had established there.
The editor, William Garrett Lewis, liked the articles and asked for more. He told Taylor: “Add to them....Let them cover the whole field...as an appeal for inland China.” Taylor agreed. When he tackled this assignment, however, a crisis was provoked in his mind and heart. His biographer gave the details:
Compiling facts as to the size and population of every province in China, and making diagrams to show their neglected condition, stirred him to a desperate sense of the sin and shame of allowing such a state of things to continue. Yet what was to be done? The number of Protestant missionaries, as he had discovered, was diminishing rather than increasing. Despite the fact that half the heathen population of the world was to be found in China, the missionaries engaged in its evangelization had actually been reduced, during the previous winter, from one hundred and fifteen to only ninety-one. This had come to light through his study of the latest statistics and, naturally, added fuel to the fire that was consuming him.[6]
In time these articles were published in a book entitled China's Spiritual Need and Claims. Overnight it became a bestseller among the evangelicals of Victorian England. Taylor began by affirming the biblical teachings that all men are lost without Christ, that the Gospel is for all, and that the Great Commission specifies that the church is to “make disciples” of all peoples. He then identified those in China who had yet to hear the Gospel and believe in Jesus Christ. Indeed, Taylor's research uncovered
...the startling fact that even in the seven provinces in which such work had begun there were still a hundred and eighty-five millions utterly and hopelessly beyond the reach of the gospel....And beyond these again lay the eleven inland provinces - two hundred millions more without a single witness for Christ.[7]
Taylor emphasized this “by comparisons and diagrams.” These statistics were profoundly real to him: “A million a month in China are dying without God, and we who have received in trust the Word of Life — we are responsible”.[8] This young man was now determined to confront the churches of the West with all of these terrible implications. Very soon, churches on both sides of the Atlantic were awakened. Many new societies were formed and hundreds of workers were recruited, largely from the thousands of university students influenced by the ministry of D. L. Moody.
In 1865 Taylor founded the China Inland Mission to implement his vision of bringing all China to Christ through the rapid and widespread preaching of the Gospel. By 1895 this society counted 641 missionaries, 462 Chinese helpers, 260 stations and outstations, and 5,211 communicants.[9] “In no other land was there ever a single society which planned so comprehensively to cover the whole and came so near to fulfilling its dream”.[10] Non-denominational, evangelical and international, this society became the model for the worldwide “faith mission” movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taylor has been called one of the significant figures in Chinese history in the 1800s
| “ | Hudson Taylor was, ...one of the greatest missionaries of all time, and ... one of the four or five most influential foreigners who came to China in the nineteenth century for any purpose... | ” |
[edit] The Boxer crisis of 1900
Attacks took place across China in connection with the Boxer Rebellion, more properly called "Boxer Uprising," which targeted Christians and foreigners. 182 Protestant missionaries and 500 Chinese Protestants were known to have been killed, but the numbers of natives involved may have been higher. The China Inland Mission lost more members than any other agency: 58 adults and 21 children were killed. However, in 1901, when the allied nations were demanding compensation from the Chinese government, Hudson Taylor refused to accept payment for loss of property or life in order to demonstrate the meekness of Christ to the Chinese. [6] Other missionaries, such as William Ament, led a campaign, supported by American army troops, to confiscate goods and property from Boxers and alleged Boxers in order to compensate Christian families. Their actions were criticized by Mark Twain, who referred to the "reverend bandits of the American Board."[7]
- Veteran missionary Griffith John noted afterward:
| “ | It is the height of folly to look at the present movement as anti-missionary. It is anti-missionary as it is anti-everything that is foreign. ..The movement is at first and last an anti-foreign movement, and has for its aim the casting out of every foreigner and all his belongings.[8] | ” |
[edit] Opium trade abolished
Scientific evidence of the pernicious nature of opium use was largely undocumented in the 1890s when Protestant missionaries in China decided to strengthen their opposition to the trade by compiling data which would demonstrate the harm the drug did. These missionaries were generally outraged over the British government’s Royal Commission on Opium visiting India but not China. Accordingly, the missionaries first organized the Anti-Opium League in China among their colleagues in every mission station in China. American missionary Hampden Coit DuBose served as the first president. This organization which had elected national officers and held an annual national meeting, was instrumental in gathering data from every Western-trained medical doctor in China which was then published as William Hector Park, compiled Opinions of Over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium in China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1899). The vast majority of these medical doctors were missionaries, the survey also included doctors who were in private practices, particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese who had been trained in medical schools in Western countries. In England, the home director of the China Inland Mission, Benjamin Broomhall was an active opponent of the Opium trade, writing two books to promote the banning of opium smoking: “Truth about Opium Smoking” and “The Chinese Opium Smoker”. In 1888 Broomhall formed and became secretary of the Christian Union for the Severance of the British Empire with the Opium Traffic and editor of its periodical, "National Righteousness". He lobbied the British Parliament to stop the opium trade. He and James Laidlaw Maxwell appealed to the London Missionary Conference of 1888 and the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 to condemn the continuation of the trade. When Broomhall was dying, his son Marshall read to him from The Times the welcome news that an agreement had been signed ensuring the end of the opium trade within two years.
[edit] Expansion and war 1912-1945
The early 1900s saw great expansion of missionary activity in China following the Boxer Rebellion and during the Revolution of 1912 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic. William Whiting Borden, wealthy heir of the Borden, Inc. family, who graduated from Yale in 1909, left behind a comfortable life in America to respond to the call for workers with the Muslims of northwest China. He died in Egypt while still in training.
A musician and an engineer named James O. Fraser was the first to bring the Gospel message to the Lisu tribes of Yunnan in southwest China. This resulted in phenomenal church growth among the various tribes in the area that endured to the 21st century.
The Warlord period brought widespread lawlessness to China and missionary work was often dangerous or deadly. John and Betty Stam were a young couple who were murdered in 1934 by Communist soldiers. Their biography "The Triumph of John and Betty Stam" inspired a generation of missionaries to follow in the same steps of service despite the trials of war and persecution that raged in China in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
The Japanese invasion further complicated efforts as the Japanese distrusted anyone with British or American Nationalities. When the Japanese invaded China in World War II, the China Inland Mission moved its headquarters up the Yangzi River to Chongqing. Many missionaries were put into concentration camps until the end of the war. One such camp was at Weifang. The entire Chefoo School run by the mission at Yantai was imprisoned at a concentration camp.
[edit] Final Exodus 1945-1953
Phyllis Thompson wrote that between 1949 and 1952, after the victory of the Chinese Communist armies, there was a “reluctant exodus” of all of the members of the China Inland Mission, the last Protestant missionary society to leave China.
In 1900 there were an estimated 100,000 Christians in China. It multiplied to seven times that number by 1950 (700,000). The Chinese church began to be an indigenous movement helped by strong leaders such as John Sung, Wang Ming-Dao, and Andrew Gih.
[edit] See also
- Matteo Ricci
- 19th Century Protestant Missions in China
- History of the Jews in China
- List of Protestant missionaries in China
- List of Roman Catholic missionaries in China
- Christianity in China
- Jesuit China missions
- Religion in China
[edit] References
- Broomhall, Marshall. Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission with a record of the Perils and Sufferings of Some Who Escaped. London: Morgan and Scott. http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01471430&id=yVtXfdulqUMC&pg=PR3&dq=broomhall+martyred. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
- Spence, Jonathan D. (1991). The Search for modern China. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393307808.
- Taylor, James Hudson (1868). China's Spiritual Need and Claims (Third Edition). London: James Nisbet.
- Townsend, William (1890). Robert Morrison: the pioneer of Chinese missions. London: S.W. Partridge.
- Wylie, Alexander (1867). Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Latourette, A History of the expansion of Christianity, p.363
- ^ Outerbridge, p.111
- ^ Laycock in Missionaries, Chinese and Diplomats by Paul A. Varg, p.35
- ^ Ibid, p.577
- ^ Dr. and Mrs Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor and The China Inland Mission: The Growth of a Work of God, p.24
- ^ Ibid, p.30
- ^ Ibid, p.39
- ^ Ibid
- ^ China's Millions, p.124
- ^ Latourette, A History of the expansion of Christianity, volume 6, p.326
[edit] External links
- Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity
- OMF International (formerly China Inland Mission and Overseas Missionary Fellowship)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
