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Tension Within the Church: British Missionaries in Wuhan, 1913–28

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 1999

Ning J. Chang
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Abstract

The foreign missionary was always a prominent source of Sino-foreign friction. The appearance of Protestant missionaries in China's interior, and their intrusion into Chinese society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, caused strong resistance from the Chinese and many outbreaks of xenophobia. After the Boxer Uprising of 1900, however, this resistance and these outbreaks greatly declined. And the foreign missionary in the second and third decades of the twentieth century had to face new problems: namely, tension between the foreign and Chinese members within the church. In the late 1910s the missionaries found that their well-educated Chinese colleagues demanded equal treatment. Between 1925 and 1928 the missionaries and their Chinese members were involved in a severe conflict between ‘foreign’ Christianity and ‘Chinese’ nationalism, and this created even greater tension. How the missionaries responded to these problems, and how they influenced Christianity in China, deserve further analysis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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