Abstract
Negotiating the Christian Past in China originates from a doctoral thesis that Jifeng Liu successfully defended at Leiden University in 2017. This work adds a valuable contribution to the latest ethnographic research on the preservation and circulation of church memories among Protestants in today’s Xiamen, Fujian Province. Liu asks the question of how urban Protestants, popular history enthusiasts, and heritage tourism experts appropriated the legacy of missionary activity in the former international settlement of Gulangyu Island to project a cosmopolitan image of Xiamen.
The book comprises five chapters enveloped within an introduction and a conclusion. The introductory account surveys the efforts by local church leaders, popular writers, and municipal officials to highlight the centrality of Christianity in Xiamen’s cultural sphere.
Chapter 1 builds on the studies of Christianity in Fujian Province by Ryan Dunch, David Cheung, and Chris White to show the re-emergence of old mission churches as new heritage sites. The next two chapters reclaim the alternative voices of local churches long submerged under the Chinese Marxist historiography. Chapter 2 documents the changing interpretations of the role of medical missionary John A. Otte, from being an agent of foreign imperialism in the 1950s to a celebrated Christian humanitarian since 2000. Chapter 3 tells the story of Pastor Wen, who endured numerous political campaigns in the 1950s–60s and was reinstalled as a local Three-Self patriotic church leader. In chapter 4, Liu shifts the attention to the frequent flow of religious knowledge, personnel, and resources between local and overseas Chinese Christians since the Reform era. Chapter 5 reveals the global-local religious linkages that have arisen from the Xiamen International Christian Fellowship. In closing, Liu advocates the “Xiamen model” of Christianity in which the need to indigenize the ecclesiastic governance complements the desire to fellowship with global churches.
There are three major takeaways from this study. The first lesson concerns the challenge to generalize the diverse patterns of church-state relations in contemporary China. The picture that emerges from Liu’s samples is one of variation, ranging from highly conflictual to remarkably cooperative. Since the 1980s, the Xiamen Christians have benefited from a liberalizing social and economic environment. With the support of sympathetic officials and popular writers, they completed several church restoration projects to assert themselves in the public sphere. This thematic focus on the making and circulation of church memory throws light on the evolving patterns of contradiction and complicity in China’s church-state encounters.
The second lesson is the exploration of multiple sources. Liu consults a variety of primary materials such as foreign missionary archives, local church documents deposited in the Chinese municipal archives, oral history, and ethnographic data about the material culture of Christianity in specific settings. Combining fieldwork with archival research allows for pursuing a longitudinal study of the Chinese Christian landscape in any locality. In particular, field research facilitates many intimate encounters between Liu and his informants in Bible study sessions, church worship, and home visitations. This approach enables scholars to problematize biases displayed in government documents and church records, and to synthesize the information from the perspectives of faith practitioners.
Equally important is the interplay between the global and local Christian forces in coastal China. Liu’s account resonates with Nanlai Cao’s research on Wenzhou “boss Christians” and their international outreach to Europe, and with my work on Wenzhou Seventh-day Adventists who are eager to embed global religious inputs into local ecclesial and theological practices.
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.
As we appreciate Negotiating the Christian Past in China for advancing our understanding of how faith and memory are co-dependent with each other, an alertness of the uncertain prospects for carrying out similar field research on Christianity in post-COVID China must be in order.