What does it mean to be a Chinese Christian? This question has been central to academic discussions about the history of East and West since the time of Matteo Ricci, and as the religion continues its recent surge in China it is only becoming more relevant. To answer this question, scholars traditionally define both what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Christian and then find some blended middle ground (an approach based on acculturation theory). In The Missionary’s Curse, Henrietta Harrison boldly and directly challenges this approach by focusing on the history of Cave Gully, a Catholic village in Shanxi, over a three-hundred-year span. She starts with Cave Gully’s Catholic tales about its own past and then investigates the origins and meanings of those stories. The result is an engaging and revolutionary reinterpretation of what it has meant over the centuries to be a Chinese Christian.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each addressing a distinct era in Chinese Catholic history. Harrison begins by repudiating the most basic tenet of acculturation theory: that there is some inherent division between Catholic and Chinese culture. She shows that, at its origins, Catholicism in China was already very Chinese. Cave Gully’s early converts, having little direct contact with missionaries, practiced and spread their new religion according to local spiritual norms. Chinese ideals of filial piety, proper conduct, and humble devotion to sacred images were not against the new religion; and prayerful communal chanting, fasting, processions, confessions, etc., were similarly in no way foreign to early converts. They therefore easily embraced a Catholicism that resonated with their local popular culture. Christianity, in other words, did not become a local religion over time as two distinct cultures blended into one. It was local the moment that local people began to practice it.
Cave Gully’s stories, furthermore, show that European missionaries often exercised very little control over the village church, especially when they were opposed by the Chinese state. The Qing dynasty’s ban on Catholicism, for example, coincided with a renewed attempt by Franciscan priests to end “ancestor worship”. Shanxi believers supported neither policy and in the end they successfully resisted both. The Qing ban made European missionaries dependent on Shanxi Catholics to keep them out of the public eye, while lax Qing enforcement allowed their local Christian practices to continue. If a missionary got overly insistent about stopping filial rituals, Shanxi Catholics could easily turn him in to local authorities. The Qing may have identified Catholicism as a foreign import, but foreigners were clearly not the ones controlling its practices “on the ground”. Indeed, Qing officials and foreign missionaries may have both seen inherent contradictions between Catholicism and Chinese culture, but that was not true of Shanxi’s believers.
Missionary power, however, took a dramatic turn after the first Opium war, when Qing concessions allowed foreign missionaries to preach openly in China. European missionaries no longer depended on local Catholics to keep them away from government officials, and Qing concessions also prompted a new wave of foreign investments in missions. Empowered by these new developments, foreign missionaries built churches, orphanages, and convents in the region, making Catholicism more visible, which increased local tensions. Chinese Catholics and non-Catholics alike began to resent the new order of things. Many Shanxi Catholics “actively resisted the growth of missionary power” (7) and tried to keep their church in Chinese hands. Meanwhile, the Church’s growing visibility, attached as it was to the rise of European imperialism, inspired widespread nationalist animosity against Christianity, which eventually erupted into the violence of the Boxer rebellion. Despite their attempts to keep their church in Chinese hands, Shanxi Catholics were lumped in with the foreign missionaries as targets of the persecution.
After detailing these events, Harrison masterfully explains the shortcomings of traditional acculturation approaches. Nationalist and Catholic historians alike have blamed the Boxer violence on the supposed inherent incompatibility of Chinese and Catholic culture, claiming that the rebellion was due to Christianity’s growth in the region. But Cave Gully, Harrison emphasizes, was Christian long before the Boxer movement, and it did not experience great growth in numbers with the arrival of more missionaries. The violence, in fact, had nothing to do with Shanxi’s Catholic culture. It was really about tensions that descended on the village from two increasingly powerful outside forces: global Catholicism and Chinese nationalism. Cave Gully Catholics were caught between the two as they resisted missionary control over their local church while also continuing to embrace their faith, even unto martyrdom.
Moving into the twentieth century, Cave Gully’s stories again shift with changes in political power. The most dramatic of these shifts happened around the Cultural Revolution. Shortly after the rise of the Chinese Communist Party to power, foreign missionaries were expelled from China and Catholicism was reorganized into a state Church that no longer answered to the Vatican. Unlike the previous Qing ban, under Mao foreign missionaries were unable to remain in China. But the old imperialist baggage remained attached to local Shanxi Catholics, ultimately leading to an attempted purge during the 1960s-70s Cultural Revolution. As with the Boxer rebellion, Cave Gully Catholics experienced the Cultural Revolution as a time of severe persecution, and Harrison uses this persecution to explain Christianity’s recent growth in China. The state cracked down on Catholic leadership, she explains, and lay Catholics in turn took power unto themselves through personal manifestations of the divine. When the state church was reinstated, after 13 years of suppression, this lay underground Catholic movement maintained a rift between itself and the official state-sanctioned Church, a rift that continues into the present.
“Both Chinese culture and global Christianity are diverse and constantly changing” (207), Harrison concludes, and this, of course, is nothing new to anyone familiar with cultural studies. But building a clear methodology around this insight is easier said than done, and that is where Harrison makes her biggest contribution. She debunks outdated cultural theories by historicizing them. Acculturation theory identifies Catholic culture as “foreign” and China’s developing national culture as “local”, and this inevitably produces the conclusion that Catholicism could only succeed in China insofar as it was gradually adapted to China’s “local” (or from this perspective “national”) culture. But Cave Gully was Catholic before it was nationalized, and its history is therefore not one of gradually adapting a foreign religion to local Chinese life. That happened rather quickly in the eighteenth century. It is, instead, the history of a Chinese Catholic village caught up in the ongoing struggle between a globalizing church and a nationalizing state. What does it mean to be a Chinese Christian? Harrison’s masterful work shows us that the best way to answer this question is not to begin by reducing “Chinese” and “Christian” to structural abstractions. It is rather to ask the Chinese Christians themselves, and then to listen.
