19th Century Protestant Missions in China
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During the last half of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth century little was done among Protestant Christians to advance the cause of the Gospel in China. Eventually, however, the release of national dynamism brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the spiritual renewal that came to the churches by the evangelical awakening throughout the English-speaking world combined to usher in the era of Western colonial expansion and “The Great Century” of modern missions.
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[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 and the ship's captain (or owner) with his famous quote: “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. He worked with such contemporary missionaries as William Henry Medhurst and Milne (the printers), Samuel Dyer (Hudson Taylor's father-in-law), Gutzlaff (the Prussian linguist), and Parker (China's first medical missionary). For years their only beachheads into China were Canton and Macao. They concentrated on literature distribution among members of the merchant class, gained a few converts, and laid the foundations for educational and medical work.
[edit] The Two Opium Wars, 1839-1860
- Main article: Opium Wars
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 Nanking and the Chinese were at the mercy of the British.
By the Treaty of Nanking (1842) they 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”. Travel inland was not permitted; missionary activity was confined to Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ning-po, 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 priviledges 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”. In contrast, the more subtle British declined any particular sponsorship of Protestants, although everyone knew 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:
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- “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 freedomand 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" ”.
We can appreciate the depth of China's humiliation at the hands of the British if we keep in mind that 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 through the inadequacy of its social ideology to provide adequate livelihood for all. China had yet to go through a technological revolution comparable to the West.
[edit] The Taiping Rebellion
- Main article: Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion began in the mind and heart of Hung Hsiu Ch’uan, 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). 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 to the Taiping leaders their faith matered more than victory over the Manchus. The object of foreign intervention was to preserve the corrupt and defenceless Manchus, because a Taiping victory would have made China strong and independent.
Admittedy, Hung 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 W. A. P. 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”. 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 “Christian” Western powers (1864). 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 dynamism released by the 1859 Awakening in Britain and the genius of J. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905).
Hudson Taylor went to China in 1853 at the age of twenty-one under the auspices of the Chinese Evangelization Society. His work was largely in Ning-po. By 1860 he was back in England, broken in health and with little prospect of ever returning. His society had already disintegrated through poor management. Taylor's future looked dark, had he not been “challenged by the open Bible and the ever-accusing map”.
Things began to happen, however, when Taylor was asked to write a series of articles on the needs of Ning-po, 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 liked the articles and, like most editors, 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 gives the details:
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- “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”.
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 truths that all men are lost, 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
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- “...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”.
Taylor emphasized this “by comparisons and diagrams.” These statistics were profoundly and unuterrably 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”. This young man was now determined to confront the churches of the West with all these terrible realities. In no time at all 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 . “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”. Non-denominational, evangelical and international, this society became the model for the worldwide “faith mission” movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[edit] See also
- List of China Inland Mission missionaries in China
- List of Protestant missionaries in China
- Christianity in China
- Religion in China
- Nestorianism in China
- Medieval Roman Catholic Missions in China
- Jesuit China missions
[edit] Notes and Further Reading
- ↑ 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
