Analysis

This well-researched book records the lives and work of some of the early women missionaries in China. Valerie Griffiths traces the lives of several notable female missionaries, from the 1820s through the 1990s, who traveled to remote villages in the interior of China to reach out to women who had never been exposed to God’s message of love.

Wise Man from the East: Lit-sen Chang (Zhang Lisheng) contains translations of two shorter works by this once-influential but now largely forgotten theologian: Critique of Indigenous Theology and Critique of Humanism. Chang (1904-1996) was once an ardent believer in China’s “Three Teachings” – Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism. Converted to Christ at the age of fifty after a distinguished career in the academy and in the government, he re-examined his former convictions in the light of the Scriptures and then wrote extensively to show how the Bible offers what other religions could not.

This volume is a collective biography of forty seven Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950.

This work is a collection of essays by Western teachers who have taught English in China through EERC (Education Resources and Referrals – China). Their stories vary widely – from humorous recollections of how struggles with the language barrier result in pantomime and misunderstandings, to serious reflections on how Chinese traditions surrounding childbirth produce a mother who is distant from her own baby. Each story is rich with a lesson in Chinese culture and the personal transformation that life in this Eastern country has brought about in the author.

Contrary to repeated, and increasingly shrill, claims of widespread, systematic, and violent persecution of Christians in China today, almost all Chinese Christians meet together without harm. There are severe legal restrictions on religious activity, of course, though these are often not enforced.

The contents of this magisterial volume deserve careful reading by everyone interested in Chinese Christianity. We cannot understand the residual resistance to Christianity among educated Chinese without a knowledge of the material covered in this section on the late Qing scene.

This superb volume, edited and written by some of the world’s leading scholars, should be read carefully by every serious student of Christianity in China. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with late Qing China, Republican China, and the People’s Republic, Hongkong, Macao, Taiwan. This review will deal with Part One only.

This fine historical study traces the vicissitudes of a major Protestant church in Shanghai, from its beginnings in 1887 almost to the present, with a focus on its experiences during the first forty years of the communist era. Though ostensibly limited to a single congregation, the book ranges widely, and manages to place this one institution within the broader arena of Christianity in China in the past one hundred twenty years.