Negotiating the Christian Past in China

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Xiamen’s pursuit of World Heritage Site designation from UNESCO stimulated considerable interest in the city’s Christian past. History enthusiasts, both Christian and non-Christian, devoted themselves to reinterpreting the legacy of missionaries and challenged official narratives of Christianity’s troubled associations with Western imperialism. In this book, Jifeng Liu documents the tension that has inevitably emerged between the established official history and these popular efforts.

This volume elucidates the ways in which Christianity has become an integral part of Xiamen, a Chinese city profoundly influenced by Western missionaries. Drawing on extensive interviews, locally produced histories, and observations of historical celebrations, Liu provides an intimate portrait of the people who navigate ideological issues to reconstruct a Christian past, reproduce religious histories, and redefine local power structures in the shadow of the state. Liu makes a compelling argument that a Christian past is being constructed that combines official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory, a realm of dynamic negotiation that is neither dominated by the authoritarian state nor characterized by popular resistance. In this way, Negotiating the Christian Past in China illustrates the complexities of memory and missions in shaping the city’s cultural landscape, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations.

This groundbreaking study assumes a perspective of globalization and localization, in both the past and the present, to better understand Chinese Christianity in a local, national, and global context. It will be welcomed by scholars of religious studies and world Christianity, and by those interested in the church-state relationship in China.

“This is a wonderful new resource for all scholars of Chinese religion and historians of China more generally. It is a beautiful example of how contemporary ethnographic work combined with historical archival research can produce some of the most pertinent and insightful portraits of state– society relations and their co-production of memory, history and identity.”—Gerda Wielander, China Quarterly

“This book is not only a catalyst for the development of empirical Christian studies in China but also contributes to deepening the exploration of the field of Christian history and cultural memory studies.”—Wei Xiong, Religious Studies Review

“At a time when the Chinese state is restricting access to the official archives and to fieldwork among local Christian communities, and when the public security officials suspect any Three-Self patriotic church leaders who travel to the West as infiltrators, Liu’s ethnography represents the latest, and hopefully not the last, scholarly endeavor to raise awareness about Chinese Christian experiences.”—Christie Chui-Shan Chow, International Bulletin of Mission Research

“The book aspires to illustrate ‘the complexities of memory and missions in shaping the city’s cultural landscape, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations.’ That project might seem ambiguous and difficult to demonstrate, but Jifeng Liu has successfully employed a creative approach.”—Richard Cook, Journal of Church and State

“This book is a significant contribution to the growing literature on Chinese Christianities and provides an illustrative model for how to ethnographically study the social life of religious history.”—Xiaobo Yuan, Review of Religion and Chinese Society

“Negotiating the Christian Past in China coalesces granular, deeply researched ethnographic data into a fresh and expansive take on the unique patterns of Church-state engagement and the relationship between social memory and faith identity. This story is local and global, particular and general. For anyone who has not yet visited, or cannot travel to, Xiamen, especially Gulangyu Island, this book is the next best thing.”—Joseph T. H. Lee, Pace University

“Drawing on firsthand interviews, locally produced Chinese-language histories, and observation of historical celebrations, Negotiating the Christian Past in China offers a new understanding of China’s Christian past. In particular, Liu shows how this past is constructed by combining both official frameworks and unofficial nostalgias and experiences into a social memory that is actively produced without being dominated by state repression or characterized as grassroots resistance. This book takes readers as never before inside the lived world of Xiamen’s Christian present. It does so by exploring how protagonists construct its past in negotiations with other societal actors in the shadow of the state.”—Carsten Vala, author of The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China

Jifeng Liu is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Xiamen University, China.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Note on Romanization, Names, and Monetary Unites

List of Abbreviations

List of Characters

Introduction

Chapter 1. Xiamen History, Society, and Christianity

Chapter 2. Discursive Reversals on Western Missionaries

Chapter 3. The Passing of Glory

Chapter 4. Writing and Contesting Christian History

Chapter 5. Global Missions Meet Local Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

History

           History of Religion

Religious Studies & Religion

           History of Religion

           Sociology of Religion

Sociology

           Sociology of Religion