Examining the stories of diverse Christians in Shanghai, this book uses the city as a model to highlight how a minority religion in a city has interacted with other religions as well as social, cultural, political, and economic changes. Susangeline Y. Patrick illustrates how the history of Shanghai Christians sheds light on why and how Christians have accommodated social and political changes, and gives valuable insights into multiculturalism, globalization, sinicization, and ecclesiology. The interreligious dialogues between Shanghai Christians and other traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Islam, and Judaism throughout history provide worthy reflections on the roles of Christians in a multi-religious space.
Within the next decade, China could be home to more Christians than any country in the world. Through the 150-year saga of a single family, this book vividly dramatizes the remarkable religious evolution of the world’s most populous nation. Shanghai Faithful is both a touching family memoir and a chronicle of the astonishing spread of Christianity in China. Five generations of the Lin family—buffeted by history’s crosscurrents and personal strife—bring to life an epoch that is still unfolding. A compelling cast—a poor fisherman, a doctor who treated opium addicts, an Ivy League–educated priest, and the charismatic preacher Watchman Nee—sets the bookin motion. Veteran journalist Jennifer Lin takes readers from remote nineteenth-century mission outposts to the thriving house churches and cathedrals of today’s China. The Lin family—and the book’s central figure, the Reverend Lin Pu-chi—offer witness to China’s tumultuous past, up to and beyond the betrayals and madness of the Cultural Revolution, when the family’s resolute faith led to years of suffering. Forgiveness and redemption bring the story full circle. With its sweep of history and the intimacy of long-hidden family stories, Shanghai Faithful offers a fresh look at Christianity in China—past, present, and future.
Overseas Chinese Christians in Contemporary China explores how diasporic Chinese understandings of what it means to be Chinese are changing in post-1978 China. Ethnographically, it focuses on overseas Chinese Christian business people residing in Shanghai. Hyper-mobile, well-educated, and financially secure, these elites adopt a long-term view of their time in the country. This study examines how these elites put Christianity to work, mediating their hopes, fears, and obligations, in order to illuminate the ways in which this overseas Chinese experience departs from existing academic models of diasporic Chinese as either bridge-builders or pragmatic capitalists. By focusing on religion, this study offers novel insights into how overseas Chinese are making a place for themselves in a globalising China.
Freedom of religious belief is guaranteed under the constitution of the People’s Republic of China, but the degree to which this freedom is able to be exercised remains a highly controversial issue. Much scholarly attention has been given to persecuted underground groups such as Falungong, but one area that remains largely unexplored is the relationship between officially registered churches and the communist government. This study investigates the history of one such official church, Moore Memorial Church in Shanghai. This church was founded by American Methodist missionaries. By the time of the 1949 revolution, it was the largest Protestant church in East Asia, running seven day a week programs. As a case study of one individual church, operating from an historical (rather than theological) perspective, this study examines the experience of people at this church against the backdrop of the turbulent politics of the Mao and Deng eras. It asks and seeks to answer questions such as: were the people at the church pleased to see the foreign missionaries leave? Were people forced to sign the so-called “Christian manifesto”"? Once the church doors were closed in 1966, did worshippers go underground? Why was this particular church especially chosen to be the first re-opened in Shanghai in 1979? What explanations are there for its phenomenal growth since then? A considerable proportion of the data for this study is drawn from Chinese language sources, including interviews, personal correspondence, statistics, internal church documents and archives, many of which have never previously been published or accessed by foreign researchers. The main focus of this study is on the period from 1949 to 1989, a period in which the church experienced many ups and downs, restrictions and limitations. The Mao era, in particular, remains one of the least understood and seldom written about periods in the history of Christianity in China. This study therefore makes a significant contribution to our evolving understanding of the delicate balancing act between compromise, co-operation and compliance that categorises church-state relations in modern China.
This book offers a sociological analysis as well as a theological discussion of China’s internal migration since the marketization reform in 1978. It documents the social and political processes that encompass the experiences of internal migrants from the countryside to the city during China’s integration into the global economy. Informed by sociological analysis and narratives of the urban poor, this volume reconstructs the political, economic, social and spiritual dimensions of this urban underclass in China who made up the economic backbone of the Asian superpower.
Literary Representations of Christianity in Late Qing and Republican China contributes to the “literary turn” in the study of Chinese Christianity by foregrounding the importance of literary texts, including the major genres of Chinese Christian literature (novels, drama and poetry) of the late Qing and Republican periods. These multifarious types of texts demonstrated the multiple representations and dynamic scenes of Christianity, where Christian imageries and symbolism were transformed by linguistic manipulation into new contextualized forms which nurtured distinctive new fruits of literature and modernized the literary landscape of Chinese literature. The study of the composition and poetics of Chinese Christian literary works helps us rediscover the concerns, priorities, textual strategies of the Christian writers, the cross-cultural challenges involved, and the reception of the Bible.
Although Christianity has been a minority religion in Chinese societies, Christians have been powerful catalysts of social activism in seeking to establish democracy and rule of law in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diasporic communities. The chapters gathered in this collection reveal the vital influence of Christian individuals and groups on social, political, and legal activism in Chinese societies. Written from a range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the chapters develop a coherent narrative of Christian activism that illuminates its specific historical, theological, and cultural contexts. Analyzing campaigns for human rights, universal suffrage, and other political reforms, this volume uncovers the complex dynamics of Christian activism, highlighting its significant contributions to the democratization of Greater China.
China's Urban Christians: A Light That Cannot Be Hidden looks at how massive urbanization is redrawing not only the geographic and social landscape of China, but in the process is transforming China's growing church as well. The purpose of this book is to explore how Christians in China perceive the challenges posed by their new urban context and to examine their proposed means of responding to these challenges. Although not primarily political in nature, these challenges nonetheless illustrate the complex interplay between China's Christian community and the Chinese party-state as it comes to terms with the continued growth and increasing prominence of Christianity in modern China.
