T

ang Guo’an was a remarkable man, a Christian involved in business, diplomacy and education in the early 1900s. Yet there is no full biographical record of his many contributions to China’s early modernization. During his lifetime, he was overshadowed by his cousin Tang Shaoyi, who became the first premier of the Republic of China. And in the field of China studies, there has been general neglect of moderate reformers of the late Qing period. Meanwhile, mission and church historians focus on the pioneer missionaries, and secondarily on Chinese pastors and evangelists, rarely on lay Christians in other professions.

Contributions

In 1909, Tang was involved in two major undertakings as an official of the Qing Ministry of Foreign Affairs, coordinating with the US Government as co-sponsor of both. In February, the first International Opium Commission met for three weeks in Shanghai drafting resolutions and committing to actions that led to a second conference at The Hague in 1913. The result was the world’s first formal international drug-control Convention, ending the opium trade to China and elsewhere.

Tang’s 1909 report and closing speech on behalf of China cited the Golden Rule in exhorting foreigners to change their ways, and also praised Hudson Taylor, Benjamin Broomhall and other missionaries who lobbied the British Parliament on the issue. His talks were printed and circulated widely in the China treaty ports and in the U.K. and Europe, spurring faster changes in policy.

Later that year, in November 1909, Tang traveled by steamer to San Francisco to take the first group of Chinese students to study in the U.S. under official sponsorship since 1881 (when he himself was at Yale as part of the first Chinese Educational Mission). Tang had helped negotiate the use of excess Boxer indemnity funds held by the U.S. to pay for this revival of the US-China official student exchange program after 30 years’ lapse. Before his death in 1913, he set up Tsinghua College (today one of the top universities in Beijing) and became its first president.

Faith Commitment

Those who know today about Tang’s accomplishments back then rarely learn of his strong personal Christian faith. He revealed his generally high regard for missionaries and his shared commitment to their cause in a series of articles published from August - December 1905. The Missionary Review of the World had requested his frank critique of the mission enterprise (see part I. in Pathways May-June). He used the articles to loyally defend the interests of Chinese church leaders. Many were close friends and some, such as the Rev. Y.K. Yen, were personal models and mentors. Rev. Yen, founder of St. John’s University in Shanghai, had toured the U.K. in the 1890s speaking against the opium trade, and perhaps inspired Tang’s own later activism on this issue. Tang attributed nearly all the progress in mission work in “the midst of the most difficult and discouraging circumstances” to “the fruitful labors of native pastors and evangelical workers of every class” on whom “the ultimate evangelization and regeneration of China must depend.”

In these articles, Tang chastised the mission community for the continuing discouragement and bitterness among Chinese Christians, due to mistreatment by missionaries. How did they expect to attract high-quality Chinese workers who would be respected by the educated classes, he asked his readers, given the paltry and unequal salaries they offered? Quoting a missionary who admitted that “five hundred native evangelists would be a far greater power than five thousand foreigners,” Tang boldly challenged the Church either to use foreign funds for the employment of capable men for the evangelization of the Chinese, or keep those funds for the employment of foreign missionaries only, and “let the Chinese take their chances in getting into heaven.”

In a separate article published in 1905 in another missionary journal, The Chinese Recorder, Tang Guo’an spelled out in greater detail the challenges facing Chinese Christian leaders. These included difficulties in

• social and political relations: A pastor “could never have the confidence of the officials or a voice in the communal government of his village or clan… As a pastor in the church, his Chinese civil rights are denied him, and he is accorded the treatment of a political outcast.”
• relations with his native colleagues: “Mutual feelings of jealousy” lead native clergy to disparage and undermine each other.
• relations with foreign colleagues: “Assuming the role of masters and employers,” foreigners “treat their assistants more like servants and inferiors than co-workers,” often with a “spirit of racial pride” or an “imperial spirit, impatient of opposition and delay.” They disparage rather than respect their Chinese colleagues, “forgetting that the Chinese have never had the intellectual and moral advantages which are the birthright of the foreigner.” Native workers, with meager salaries and delayed promotions, constantly have a “life and death struggle in efforts to maintain a family.”

In such circumstances, it was no surprise to Tang that many Chinese Christian workers suffered “the most poignant regrets” that they ever entered the ministry. Unless things changed, “the church will be filled with men of only common talents and meager attainments, who do not command the respect of the educated classes and are wholly unable to cope with them.” Tang urged a major new effort by the missions to train and support young Chinese Christian leaders, pastors, teachers and writers to overcome all these grave difficulties. Such a strategic effort, he noted, would require the expansion of Christian schools for women as well as men, and the wider circulation of high-class Christian literature.

Comment

One wonders today what the missionary readers of his articles in 1905 might have done differently if they had even a tiny glimpse of the historic task facing their young Chinese colleagues -- helping the church survive the next 50-60 years of anti-Christian movements, war and revolution. Would they have taken Tang’s plea and their duties more seriously?

What does this suggest about the urgency of leadership training today, when China clearly is in the midst of another era of historic change? More importantly, what is the kind and quality of education and training available today to Chinese Christians, whether clergy or lay leaders? As the social and economic elites expand and grow in influence in China, will Chinese Christians be respected for their knowledge and abilities as well as their character?

Tang Guo’an’s critique of the mission and church situation in 1905 foreshadowed much stronger criticism by 1925. During those two decades, Christian schools and social service agencies like the YMCA held great attraction for Chinese young people, but the churches often were viewed as backward and isolated, irrelevant to the rapidly changing society. A survey by the YMCA in 1921 revealed that only 3% of YMCA members were also church members; students and faculty at Christian schools rebelled successfully against compulsory chapel attendance. Some of this difference in popularity reflected the much greater proportion of native leadership and financial independence of the YMCA, compared with the church dependence on the missions. Part of the problem stemmed from the attraction of liberal theology within the elite. Today, there seems to be a similar hesitation or antipathy, only partly related to politics, toward baptism and church involvement among the growing numbers of well-educated Christian believers in China and overseas today. Why is that? What changes would remedy this, in your opinion? Please share your thoughts!

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