Chinese Views of Western Missionaries

Anti-Christian Tracts
Anti-Christian tracts frequently accused foreign missionaries of using human body parts to make medical or magical substances. Pictures, published in central China in 1891, depict Catholics gouging out the eyes of Chinese Christians and extracting fetuses from pregnant Chinese women.

Wong Kit-taik

From Eugene Stock, The Story of the Fuh-kien Mission of the Church Missionary Society (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday and Church Missionary House, 1877) p. 49-53.

Wong Kiu-taik ("Seeker of Virtue") was one of the Methodists' earliest recruits in Fuzhou, converting to Christianity despite the violent opposition of his family. He was baptized in 1857 and then worked for three or four years as a Methodist evangelist.

Wong resigned when the Methodists insisted that he translate the Christian concept of "God" into Chinese using a term that he found objectionable. He then joined the British Church Missionary Society where he was ultimately ordained a clergyman in 1868.

"Jesus Opium"
China had historically allowed foreigners to conduct trade only at the southern city of Canton. In the mid-19th century, Western frustrations over these restrictions came to a head over the issue of opium, which European and American merchants were actively-and illegally-importing into China.

After Chinese officials in Canton confiscated and destroyed 20,000 chests of pounds of British opium, Great Britain sent warships to demand reparations. The British victory in the "Opium War" triggered Western imperialist expansion in China. Dozens of Chinese cities were ultimately opened to European and American traders, diplomats, and missionaries, who enjoyed immunity from Chinese law. By the end of the century, the Euro-American powers were vying to acquire territorial concessions and leaseholds in China.

Western missionaries harshly condemned the continuing trade in opium and lamented the fact that many Chinese associated the spread of Christianity with the drug. This perception was reinforced by the unfortunate fact that many early missionaries relied on opium boats for transport into China's interior, where they also lodged in the homes of Western opium merchants and banked at opium trading firms.

The Taiping Rebellion
In an effort to convert Chinese elites, missionaries distributed religious tracts at the examination halls where Chinese scholars competed for a place in the civil service. None could have predicted that the Christian message of salvation would eventually become the guiding ideology of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864).

Led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, the Taiping rebels sought to overturn the imperial dynasty and establish a Christian kingdom on earth. Hong and his 100,000 followers rampaged through five provinces and 600 cities and occupied the ancient capital of Nanjing for 11 years before government forces finally subdued them. 

The Boxer Uprising
By the end of the 19th century, the inability of the Chinese government to halt foreign expansion in China led to a growing sense of crisis. This anti-foreign uprising of 1899-1901 brought together a diverse group of religious and martial arts societies, united by their resentment over growing Western encroachment in North China. Particularly galling were the German missionaries in Shandong Province who used their extraterritorial privileges to aid Chinese converts in civil and criminal disputes.

With the backing of the Empress Dowager and her conservative courtiers, the "Boxers United in Righteousness" besieged the foreign diplomatic quarter in Beijing throughout the summer of 1900. After a joint foreign expeditionary force finally quelled the uprising, the Chinese government was compelled to pay a huge indemnity and foreign powers received the right to station troops in the imperial capital.

Chinese Elite Culture
Christian tenets posed a direct threat to Chinese elite culture. Missionaries classified many Chinese customs as idolatrous, and forbade their converts from practicing any of the Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian rituals that for centuries had been an integral part of family, community, and government life in China.

Particularly problematic was the Christian ban on "ancestor worship," religious rituals directed at the spirits of deceased family members. It was only after nine years of arduous effort that the Methodists baptized their first convert in Fuzhou.

Unidentified missionary in Fuzhou, ca. 1870 (Stock, 79)

The Missionary Impact
The missionaries' impact in China extended far beyond the relatively small number of converts they were able to make. They provided an important vehicle for introducing European and American science to China, establishing schools and hospitals, and translating Western works into Chinese.

Their indirect impact was perhaps even more significant: as the most visible manifestation of Western imperialism in China, Christian missionaries (along with their Chinese converts) served as the foil for emerging Chinese nationalism beginning in the late 19th century.