China: mission beyond the empire

The high confidence in the civilising and Christianising effects of proper commerce that missionaries generally shared with regard to Sub-Saharan Africa were not, in general, applied to China.

Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission (CIM) became one of the largest and most dynamic missionary societies of the high imperial era.

Like most Protestant missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century, mis­sionaries who joined the CIM were people who had more than likely received a powerful spiritual experience through one of the branches of the trans-Atlantic holiness revivalistic movements. Chief among these was the Keswick Convention that met annually in the Lake District in northern England.³⁴ The movement empowered hundreds of missionaries to span the globe, and Hudson Taylor considered the convention his missionary hunting grounds, estimating in the late 1880s that two-thirds of CIM missionaries were in China because of experiences at Keswick.³⁵ It was this potentially volatile mix of confident, young, educated and Keswick-animated missionaries sent out in an atmosphere of hardening racialist attitudes that resulted in the tragic humiliation of Bishop Crowther in Nigeria.

Of the hundreds of CIM missionaries sent in the late nineteenth century, none was more famous than the group known as the Cambridge Seven, whose popularity inspired the aforementioned Niger delegation.³⁶ This quintessential embodiment of late Victorian masculinity was drawn from the Dragoon Guards, Royal Artillery, Cambridge University boating clubs and the clubs of English test cricket.

The popularity of the Cambridge Seven, particularly within evangelical circles, repre­sents not only the infiltration of ‘muscular Christianity’ into the evangelical missionary movement, but also clearly illustrates broader demographic shifts within the composition of British missionaries. The combination of an elite education, evangelical Christianity and Victorian athletic ideals was meant to make men fit to perform their divine duty in the expansion of the kingdom of Christ.³⁹ Many of those appointed in the late nineteenth century (approximately one-fifth of new CMS recruits from 1880-1900) were, like the Cambridge Seven, men of means and education and were strengthened by revivalist- infused holiness spirituality, willing to vigorously dedicate themselves to the cause of the rapid expansion of the Christian gospel.⁴⁰ Missionary efforts in the late nineteenth century in general were infused with a confident, energetic and optimistic activism. Youthful, educated missionaries dispersed more widely than ever before, often spurred on by the notion of the ‘evangelization of the world in our generation’, as pithily captured by the Student Volunteer Movement on both sides of the Atlantic.⁴¹ The impact of these trends upon other missionary societies was dramatic. From roughly 1880 to 1900, the Church Missionary Society saw its number of missionaries quadruple from 250 to nearly 1,000, constituting half of the 2,000 missionaries the CMS sent out in the entire nineteenth cen­tury. Still, this was often a missionary investment beyond—not necessarily within—the formal boundaries of empire.

The late nineteenth century was not just a time of change for missionary societies. Chinese Christians had been at work alongside Western missionaries facilitating translations and itinerant journeys, and, in the process, were making Christianity their own. Among the CIM, the most important of these was a man known as Pastor Hsi, under whom some of the Cambridge Seven even agreed to work, to limited success.⁴² But even before the CIM began work in China, Christianity itself was being appropriated within Chinese social structures and worldviews. The Taiping were a unique and certainly the most violent of such appropriations. Hong Xiuquan received a dream that he later interpreted through Christian texts and tracts, ultimately believing that he was, in fact, the younger brother of Jesus. His society, known initially as the God Worshipping Society, gained massive traction among Hakka in southern China, going from a handful of followers in 1844 to perhaps as many as 50,000 by the end of that decade.⁴³ As Hong moved to create the heavenly kingdom in China, the God Worshippers set out destroying idols and slowly moved into an armed confrontation with the Qing state, resulting eventually in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. While Hong’s vision of a heavenly kingdom owed much to Bible translations, Christian literature and Christian concepts, his was a unique—and hardly what one could consider orthodox—response to the encounter with Western Christianity.⁴⁴

Despite missionaries’ optimistic hopes that their dispersed, itinerant efforts would be the quickest way to evangelise China’s millions, they were confronted with the reality that Chinese appropriated the Christian message on their own terms, reifying old village and familial conflicts.⁴⁵ This was due to the reality that the large majority of preaching and teaching was performed by Chinese pastors and evangelists whose remarkable efforts, in the case of the Hakka, likewise met with significant success in the late nineteenth century.

Keswick Christianity inspired many British missionaries with an uncompromising and energetic spirituality, motivating missionaries like the Cambridge Seven to devote themselves to a rugged life in rural western China. But even missionaries with ideals as strict as CIM missionaries met with unique appropriations by Chinese Christians. Even where they attempted to move beyond empire and Western influence, Christians became connected to Western protection, funding and literature through relationships with consuls and missionaries. Additionally, attempting to move beyond Western hegemony proved difficult for some of the members of the lauded Cambridge Seven, some of whom were caught in theological scandals, had trouble working with Pastor Hsi and challenged the CIM dress code. The frontier could quickly change even paragons of late Victorian Christian masculinity.