BOOK REVIEWS

Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Wu Xiaoxin eds., China and Christianity, Burdened Past, Hopeful Future

Study of the interaction between China and Christianity is a burgeoning field which, to judge from the number of publications, is in no danger of declining. Such a field in fact covers fairly distinct areas: the socio-cultural impact of Christian preaching and the joint contribution of Western sciences, from 1583 (when Ruggieri and Ricci arrived in China) up to the persecutions which took place in the reign of the Emperors Yongzheng and Qianlong; reactions to the reintroduction of Christianity, under very different conditions, from the unequal Treaties until recently; the intellectual syntheses produced by the clash between Christian thinking and Chinese culture, underpaid by the recurring question of whether they might in principle be incompatible; examination of the artistic, architectural and scientific syntheses produced by this interaction; more anthropological studies of the life of Chinese Christian communities, and of the social creativity they have displayed, from the first missions up to the present. A more restricted but interesting field comprises the encounters at the time of the Tang and Yuan dynasties.

The book edited by Stephen Halley and Dioxin Wu is the result of a conference organised in 1999 in memory of Father Edward J. Malatesta, S.J., (an eminent participant in the renewed dialogue between Chinese intellectuals and Christian thinking in the contemporary period), whose untimely death occurred in 1998. The aura of Father Malatesta accounts to a considerable extent for the number and quality of the contributors to this volume which, however, suffers somewhat from the profusion of contributions and areas covered. The book has the advantages of its shortcomings and vice versa. It constitutes an excellent introduction to the present state of studies on China and Christianity, while running the risk of oscillating between contributions which either are too highly specialised or too general. It covers more or less all of the fields mentioned above, but balance within the fields is not always maintained, and given such a wide range, the parts which are not covered appear all the more clearly. Overall, though, the wealth of contributions makes it the most useful of reference books.

Among the twenty contributions brought together, those by John Witek, Erik Zürker, Paul Rule, Nicolas Standaert and Li Tianyang can be read as a body. John Witek's historical overview centres felicitously on the tension introduced by the presentation of Christianity as a “universal” teaching that nevertheless well and truly originates in the West. This tension between the Universal and the Particular still remains real today, and its consequences vary, depending on the period and the protagonists. The early Jesuits were often to be inclined to seek to prove the universality of the teachings they brought, by the excellence of the fruit they had supposedly borne in their countries of origin. Here we witness the gradual emergence of an imaginary Europe, imbued with wisdom, virtue, and prosperity, with peace and political stability, a fiction recounted in the nostalgic tones peculiar to the Laozi: Europe resembled more or less the Taoist dream of a time when matters were so well arranged that the population did not even know the name of its overlord… The article by Eric Zurker, which details the formation of this “European fiction” in the writings of the Jesuits and of the early converts, is a choice document. The universality of Christian teaching was also inferred from the universal character of the sciences and techniques which the Jesuits brought with them. In this respect, the underlying question remains pertinent : the language of scientific and calculating rationality, which is the foundation of modern technology, has indeed become universal, and the problem of the relation between the universality of this language and its Greek Christian roots (perhaps more Greek than Christian?) remains relevant to any “philosophy of history”—even if, in our day, our philosophies of history most often remain prudently inchoate.

Another way of resolving the question of the relation between universality and particularity was to be the denial of any universal character in Christian teaching. This was to be the position of the anti-Christian writings which made their appearance with the well-known treaty Shengchao poxie ji (Against Heterodoxy) in 1639, writings which were taken up, analysed, and one might say, relayed by Jacques Gernet in China and Christianity((1). Paul Rule takes up the same writings, as well as those of the Christian converts, more prudently than Jacques Gernet, whom he takes to task for his cultural relativism and his polarisation in the conceptual debates at the expense of a contextual analysis of the writings he is commenting upon((2). What we see in fact, was not, he says, the struggle between two incompatible cosmologies. As in other cultural contexts, it was the doctrine of the Incarnation (rather than that of a Personal God, or of Creationism) that made scandal. Moreover, the intellectual compost of the end of the Ming dynasty was much more malleable and varied than Jacques Gernet gives us to understand. Lastly, the process of conversion was never purely intellectual. Rather, the synthesis arrived at by converts was also of an emotional and instinctive nature, which allowed them a pragmatic resolution of contradictions perceived as insoluble by outside observers.

Nicolas Standaert analyses the tension between universalism and particularism using a model of cultural transmission and interaction. He especially criticises any essentialist approach to the contact between cultures (in this case between China and Christianity), focussing on the process of “texturing”, by which dogmas and innovations are adopted and reinterpreted. If one sees the invention of a “Chinese Christianity” as resembling the making of a piece of cloth by the interweaving of strands, he says, a whole series of differentiated interactions will be observed. One existing strand, that of concubinage, was arbitrarily withdrawn, while another, monogamy, was reinforced; the Confucian strand was also strengthened, while the Taoist and Buddhist strands were rejected. Selections were made, such as the acceptance by some Chinese Christians of Christian moral teachings, but not of the eschatological beliefs. Some innovations played the same functional role as certain strands they replaced: fasting and devout societies replaced the corresponding Buddhist practices. Certain strands were given new colours, such as the Christianisation of funeral rites, and so on… Nicolas Standaert also stresses the power of initiative, too frequently underestimated by historians, of the converts themselves, who were the first in China to take an interest in Western military technique, and who directed the missionaries towards the translation of mathematical treatises rather than a full translation of the Bible.

Li Tianyang's article may be read as an illustration of Nicolas Standaert's. Taking up the idea expressed in 1920 by Liang Qichao, he sees a “Chinese Renaissance” in the period between Wanli era of the Ming and the Jiajing era of the Qing. This Renaissance was virtually a direct result of the introduction of “Western sciences” into China by the Jesuits, an introduction which functioned similarly to the rediscovery of Antiquity which was the prelude to the European Renaissance. Li Tianyang, in common with other researchers of his generation, calls here for a renewed paradigm of Chinese intellectual history, more open to the role played by interactions with the outside world.

The rest of the volume, on the modern and contemporary period, contains no articles comparable to those we have just analysed. Most of the contributions are monographs, and add little to the previous work of their authors. We should, however, mention Richerd Madsen's article, which, pursuing the analysis begun in China's Catholics((3), describes contemporary Chinese Catholicism as a “heterodox religion”, the word xie (heterodoxy) traditionally harking back in China to those teachings and practices which differed from the “Way of the Wise”. The character of a “popular religion” taken on by Catholicism in the Chinese countryside allows it to put down cultural and social roots, while at the same time threatening to alienate it from Catholic “orthodoxy”, in the ecclesiastical meaning of the word. For my part, while agreeing with large areas of Richard Madsen's analysis, I wonder if he does not underestimate the power of training and of “orthodoxification” (if I may venture such a neologism) inherent in the structure of the Catholic Church, a structure which has been well preserved in China. He also possibly underestimates the high level of education of many Chinese Catholics. In fact, however, the variations in style observed between one Catholic community and another, according to the social context, are likely to increase.

Mention should also be made of the article by Zhuo Xinping, Director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' influential Institute of World Religions. He offers an analysis, which is both highly interesting and somewhat disappointing, of the phenomenon of the “cultural Christians”, those intellectuals who, in towards the mid-1980s began to show an interest and an attention to contemporary Christian culture, and especially to the theological resources it offered for thinking through some of China's problems and traumas at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Zhuo Xinping has little difficulty in “deconstructing” the expression, showing that it applies to disparate groups and individuals, and little difficulty either in showing that the importance of the phenomenon was doubtless exaggerated by Western Christians, eager to see a blossoming of a Chinese Christian intellectual movement worthy of that name. However, Zhu Xinping does not really engage with the problematics which were, and remain, those of the individuals brought together under that name: the way in which they made it possible to deal in a different way, in a Chinese context, with the questions of suffering and of radical evil, for example. His analysis of the enterprise of the most influential promoter of the expression, Liu Xiaofeng, remains sketchy. On the other hand, Zhuo Xinping is right to point out that Liu Xiaofeng, a native of Sichuan and for a time professor in Shenzhen, now lives in Hong Kong, even though his links with the mainland, including those with the Institute directed by Zhuo, remain constant. But this fact in itself deserves elucidation.

The general conclusion, by the Protestant theologian Philip Wickeri, sums up the whole question very well. The dialogue between China and Christianity remains largely of the order of the interaction between two different cultural entities, with problems of transmission and of incomprehension sometimes similar to those during the Ming-Qing period. The acculturation of Christianity within the Chinese mould is manifestly unfinished. And, I would add, the influence of Chinese thought on Christian theology remains extremely modest. At the same time, present research stresses the creativity of the Chinese Christian communities themselves—more than it was done in the past. It also shows that reflection on the successes and failures of the last four centuries can feed the development of an acculturated Chinese theology. The future face of Chinese Christianity still remains sketchy. But the features it will take on are appearing now with more vigour and creativity than one could have imagined twenty years ago.

Translated from the French original by Michael Black