This volume brings together twenty articles selected and translated from issues of the Chinese journal Zongjiao yu lishi [Religion and History] published between 2013 and 2018 with an introduction by the editor, outlining recent Chinese scholarship on the history of Christianity in China. The journal is an important one, publishing serious scholarship with high research standards in what is currently a very sensitive field in China. The title expresses the book's overall argument, which is that just to talk of indigenisation and whether or not it happened is too simple an approach and we need to talk about that process in far greater depth. This point, which is a valuable one, is elaborated in the introduction. After this the volume is divided into four sections, on philosophy, conflicts, relations with other religions and missionary involvement in non-religious spheres. Essays cover a wide range of topics and periods from the chronology of eighth-century Nestorian Chinese writings to attitudes of Western missionaries to Communism in the 1930s. Thus, what follows is necessarily selective: I have chosen what I myself found interesting and was able to assess, but it may well be that other pieces are also of significant value.
The first section on philosophy is the largest and will probably be the most interesting to readers, since Chinese scholars’ deep and broad knowledge of Confucian philosophy is something that is extraordinarily difficult for Western scholars of Christianity to achieve, and their conclusions about the impact of Christian thought in China go well beyond arguments in the English-language literature. In particular, several chapters look at the relationship between missionary writings and Confucian philosophy in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (sixteenth to eighteenth century). Similar points were made in the early twentieth century by the great historians Chen Yuan and Fang Hao but have since been largely forgotten. Ji Jianxun takes some of the Chinese language writings of Matteo Ricci on the translation of terms for God (the famous shangdi vs zhu debate) and analyses them seriously as Chinese philosophy, coming to the striking conclusion that Ricci's process of translation and thus necessarily integration within Chinese philosophy is generating a new theology. He then suggests that this influenced non-Christian late Ming ideas of tian (heaven), which the early Catholic missionaries also used for God. (This term was only later replaced by tianzhu, or Lord of Heaven, which is in use by Catholics today.) In a fascinating piece, Liu Yunhua examines how the Christian idea of jing tian (revering heaven) contributed to the changes in the nature of Confucianism in the seventeenth century which are usually associated with the influence of Buddhist thought. This was a time when Chinese society generally became interested in ideas of sin and good deeds, which were even balanced in published points systems. Liu argues that these ideas and conceptions of heaven as a transcendental Other which Confucians should contemplate and revere, and for whom they should conduct rituals and personal examinations of virtue, were influenced by Christian thought. These arguments go beyond specific cases of Confucian scholars who converted to Christianity or had extensive discussions with missionaries, claiming instead that Christian ideas entered the broad field of Confucian thinking in this period and changed the thinking of major Confucian philosophers.
Other interesting pieces include a piece on seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic poetry in honour of the Virgin Mary which includes the full texts and translations of quite a few of these poems, which will be fascinating for many readers and is also likely to be useful to students and teachers. There is also a nicely researched piece by Yang Xiongwei on the press coverage of the famous dispute in Nanchang in 1906 which led to the death of Jean Marie Lacruche cm after he was accused of the murder of the county magistrate, Jiang Zhaotang. Yang examines the contemporary news reporting in both Chinese and English with a focus on the sources the newspapers were using and their motivations, which he concludes were more concerned with the sales that could be provoked by stirring up nationalism than by accuracy. I was particularly interested to see his claim that the Chinese newspapers were getting information not from the Chinese provincial government, as one might imagine, but from Protestant missionaries. This article is characteristic of those in this section which tend to be geared to undermining simplistic takes on the causes of conflict between Christians and the rest of society. Tao Feiya's article on a missionary attempt to petition the emperor directly in 1895 contains some interesting sources on how the senior official Weng Tonghe, a famous diarist, reacted to Timothy Richard and other missionaries. I was less convinced by the articles on relations between Christianity and other religions. It is interesting to know that the Norwegian Karl Ludwig Reichfelt ran a Christian Centre that had close relations with the great Buddhist reformer Taixu, and that the Quaker Isaac Mason undertook a huge amount of writing and translation to create conciliatory texts that would bring Chinese Muslims to Christianity. The trouble with these articles, which like most in this book are highly appreciative of Christianity, is that the missionaries involved would appear to be extreme outliers but are presented as the trend in Christianity.
The volume as a whole provides a useful introduction to the Chinese language field. A number of the authors are major scholars who have also published significant monographs, Since the selection comes from a single journal there are also important figures who are not included and there is no coverage of the historical scholarship, much of it excellent, produced in Taiwan. However, many of the articles begin with helpful literature reviews to the other Chinese-language literature, which makes this a useful volume for scholars with some, but not enough, Chinese to make their way into the Chinese-language literature. There is also the issue that because of the process of editing, translation and publication the field has moved on since these pieces were written. This volume should be seen as an introduction to an important section of the Chinese-language scholarship as it was in 2018, rather than a representative sample of Chinese scholarship on this subject. However, the quality of the translation is excellent and addresses the issue that there is a significant amount of interest in Christianity in China among English-speakers who do not read Chinese, and likewise there is significant writing on the subject by Chinese scholars who do not read European languages other than English, which has tended to create two largely separate literatures in this field. While the ideal would clearly be more study of languages by both communities and more effort by Western scholars of China to keep up to date with the Chinese language secondary literature, in practice this volume has a potential to make a real contribution in introducing recent debates in the Chinese language scholarship to English readers.
