Editorial for Special Issue “Expressions of Chinese Christianity in Texts and Contexts: In Memory of Our Mentor, Professor R. G. Tiedemann (1941–2019)”

1. Introduction

Chinese Christianity, or Sinophone Christianity, has gained increasing attention in recent decades as both a socio-cultural phenomenon and a subject of inquiry. The resilience of Catholic and Protestant churches in China and the diaspora, marked by diverse expressions of faith and practice, has drawn interest from scholars.1 At the same time, there is significant debate about the historiography of Chinese Christianity as a distinct field within the history of modern China.

This debate has been profoundly shaped by Professor Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann (1941–2019), also known as R. G. or Gary Tiedemann (狄德滿), a pioneer in presenting a “grassroots view” of the Christian missionary expansion into China. His scholarship shifted the focus from the traditional narrative of Western missionaries to the reception of Christianity within local Chinese communities. This approach is still relatively new in the field, spanning less than a single academic generation. Predictably, early analyses of Chinese Christianity centered on the most educated segments of Chinese society and the highly trained missionaries who interacted with them—especially Jesuits and Sinologically inclined Protestants like Robert Morrison and James Legge. Tiedemann’s research was groundbreaking in its focus on a neglected stratum of the Chinese “mission field”: the ordinary, often less educated population. Rejecting the conventional portrayal of Boxer rebels as demonic purveyors of martyrdom, Tiedemann reinterpreted them as “fighters for righteousness and harmony”, situating their uprising within a broader tradition of popular religious movements. Rather than dwelling on their alternative identification as social revolutionaries, he placed the Boxers within the late-nineteenth-century landscape of competing millenarian aspirations—peasant uprisings that opposed the Qing state. In the case of the Boxers, however, their aspirations were channeled into organized collective violence against the Western powers that had come to shape China’s development (Bickers and Tiedemann 2007).

What sparked Tiedemann’s fascination with both Christian missionaries and their Chinese audience? The answer lies in his upbringing (M. Tiedemann 2019). The parallels between the humble origins of many Western missionaries—Catholic mendicant orders and Protestant preachers from working-class backgrounds—and the rural Chinese communities they sought to reach, often described as “bare sticks” (guanggun 光棍) in contemporary missionary correspondence, resonated with Tiedemann on a personal level. Born into a poor farming household in wartime Germany, he instinctively grasped the deep connections between rural endurance and insurrection, popular religion, and Christian missions. This Special Issue discusses themes related to Tiedemann’s rural origins and the enduring appeal of Christianity in modern China. Above all, it highlights the historical actors who mattered most to him—the ordinary people—while showcasing cutting-edge historical and social–scientific research on the transformations within Chinese Christian movements. Major analytical contours in this field include the following:

• Examining the spatial and temporal diversities of the Christian missionary presence and Chinese church movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
• Investigating the transnational connectivity of Chinese Christian communities and their evangelistic agents, including individuals, organizations, linguistic contributors, artistic expressions, and multipolar networks;
• Mapping the interconnectivity of Christian faith experiences in China and the rest of the world via the exchange of religious prints, songs, and modern knowledge;
• Reflecting on the scholarly access to new and old archival sources, the re-conceptualization of Christian terminologies, doctrinal interpretations, lived religious experiences, and reassessments of key historical moments.

Contributors challenge the longstanding state-centered paradigm that defines Chinese mission institutions and indigenous churches against Euro-American Christianity. Instead, they investigate intra- and inter-church exchanges across Sino-Western linguistic, socio-cultural, and political boundaries, highlighting the trans-local church networks. They argue that Chinese Christian expressions evolved in resistance to Western missionary efforts and in response to decades of socio-political upheaval that profoundly influenced Chinese churches and believers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analytical category of “Chinese Christianity” reflects shifting interpretations and methodologies in studying its diverse landscape over time and space. All twelve articles explore the reciprocal nature of Chinese–Christian encounters and can be divided into the following themes: linguistic innovations in knowledge exchange, Chinese Christians’ engagement with nationalism, and the consolidation of Cantonese and Wenzhou Protestant identities.

2. Theme 1: Linguistic Innovations in Knowledge Exchange

The first three articles address the importance of translation in religious and scientific knowledge exchange. Influenced by the revivalist movement in Europe and North America, Protestant missionaries believed they were God’s “chosen and elect” people tasked with Christianizing the Orient. They believed in the importance of the Bible, personal conversion experiences, and evangelism. Upon arriving in southern China, they faced linguistic barriers, including differences between the different dialects of Guangdong Province and the Mandarin spoken in northern China. Missionaries overcame this challenge by transmitting Christianity in vernacular expressions. Following Buddhist translators’ footsteps over a millennium ago, missionaries used transliteration to introduce “proper names from the Bible and Western history and philosophy, untranslatable terms from the sciences and the humanities” to Chinese (Wright 1959). Shin Kataoka and Yin Ping Lee examine the first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison’s pioneering translation work, including the first Chinese Bible (1823) and the three-volume Cantonese learning aid, A Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect (1828). Their findings reveal missionaries’ linguistic contributions to the diachronic study of the Cantonese language.

Another problem facing missionaries was the low literacy rate among the local population, necessitating the design of a new curriculum for children. Missionaries viewed literacy as essential for conversion and encouraged first-generation converts to send their children to Christian schools. The mission schools provided an immersive Christian environment, shielding students from hostile neighbors and fostering a Christian worldview. Sixing Chen investigates Protestant missionaries’ vernacular education efforts since the late nineteenth century, arguing that their church school textbooks bridged linguistic divides and encouraged the development of dialect-based elementary education across the Pearl River Delta. Similarly, Man Kong Wong revisits the medical career of Benjamin Hobson, an active medical missionary in Guangzhou (Canton) from the late 1830s to the 1850s. In addition to demonstrating new medical and surgical skills, Hobson translated several Western medical texts into Chinese. His ministry of healing and enlightening represented what R. G. Tiedemann called “a concerted effort by the West to transform Chinese society” (R. G. Tiedemann 2010).

3. Theme 2: Chinese Christians’ Engagement with Nationalism

When Chinese nationalism gained momentum in the early twentieth century, the localization of Christianity became a contentious issue. Five articles in this issue reflect on the reactions of missionaries and church leaders toward nationalism. Zhu Haiyan and Xiao Lin draw on declassified Soviet and Chinese documents to revisit the Anti-Christian Movement in mid-1920s Shanghai and Beijing, shedding light on the Communists’ weaponization of patriotic sentiments against mission institutions. However, the local picture of mission–state and church–state conflicts is far more complex than has been acknowledged in the secondary literature. Silje Dragsund Aase consults the Norwegian missionary sources on the Lutheran Middle School in Hunan Province, where Chinese Lutheran teachers and students negotiated conflicting claims on church membership and national citizenship in the 1920s. Unlike the organizers of the Anti-Christian Movement in Shanghai and Beijing, local Lutherans were keen to speak of Hunanese identity.

In this climate of heightened nationalist agitation, some prominent Catholic and Protestant figures moved beyond the ideological divide to advance the spread of Christianity in modern China. Zhiyuan Pan looks at Fr. Vincent Lebbe’s early twentieth-century Belgian Catholic project for Chinese students, which aimed to foster intercultural understanding and integrate the students into the Belgian Catholic milieu. Junhui Qin draws attention to Chinese theologian and biblical commentator Jia Yuming’s role in advancing spiritual independence in churches. While navigating nationalism and theological dialog, Jia sought to reconcile Chinese Christian identity with global churches. If we bring in the centralizing state, the Chinese church’s challenge was more complicated during the regime transition, as exemplified by Peter Kwok-Fai Law’s study of Chao Tzu-chen in the post-1949 era. Focusing on Chinese higher education in the 1950s, Law uses the story of Chao to show how the socialist state’s remolding of Christian universities and schools ended the emerging, yet fragmentary, sphere of civil society. A cosmopolitan Christian thinker like Chao Tzu-chen was obviously marginalized in a state-controlled theological institution and struggled to serve God and the state simultaneously.

4. Theme 3: Consolidation of Cantonese and Wenzhou Protestant Identities

As the twentieth century progressed to the twenty-first century, we saw the proliferation of multiple expressions of Christian faith and practice in Chinese local and diasporic settings. The last four articles examine Cantonese churches in Hong Kong and Wenzhou diasporic congregations in Europe. Christina Wai-Yin Wong documents the hidden history of Cantonese Christian literature, such as religious pamphlets, prayer books, and dictionaries. The proliferation of these works marks the beginning of the standardization of written Cantonese and the formation of a Cantonese Christian identity. By contextualizing Hong Kong’s hymnological development at the intersection of music and identity, Shin Fung Hung argues convincingly that with the decline of the old Chinese Protestant centers of Shanghai and Guangzhou, the growth of Cantonese popular culture and Hongkonger identity fostered the rise of Cantonese worship songs at the end of British colonialism. Yi Yang revisits the literary works of Xu Dishan and Chen Zanyi from Cold War Hong Kong, illustrating how Christian thoughts merged with local traditions. Nanlai Cao and Lijun Li use ethnographic data to explain that social networks and religious motivation have driven the transmission of Chinese Christianity among the Wenzhou migrants in today’s Europe. The diverse patterns of cross-fertilization have embedded Christianity into the fabric of the Hong Kong and Wenzhou identities.

Together, these articles seek to move beyond nationalistic or state-centered narratives of Christianity, illustrating the diverse experiences of Chinese Catholics and Protestants. By studying the intersections of religion and literacy, faith and politics, and personal agency and institutional structures, this Special Issue invites future researchers to engage with new source materials and examine the dynamics of Chinese Christianity within changing historical, socio-cultural, and transnational contexts.