China's millions. The China Inland Mission and late Qing society, 1832-1905

China's millions is an outstanding work in the field of Chinese church history. It presents an insightful analysis of the growth of the China Inland Mission and its impact on modern China. As the world's largest Protestant missionary enterprise, the China Inland Mission sent 2,679 missionaries to the interior of China between 1854 and 1949. This study shows how its founder, Hudson Taylor, recruited these missionaries from Europe, North America and Australia, what kinds of Christian doctrines and practices the missionaries brought to China, how they interacted with Chinese converts and how much impact they had on the local society. By examining the expansion of the China Inland Mission into the interior of Shanxi province in northern China, this study discusses the transmission, reception and appropriation of Christianity in a cross-cultural setting. It provides valuable insights into the indigenisation of Protestant Christianity in rural China. The Shanxi story reveals that Christianity flourished on the peripheries of the Chinese empire where government control was limited and there was a long tradition of heterodoxy. Nineteenth-century Shanxi was wracked with opium addiction and suffused with social and economic discontents. This was a fertile ground for Christian conversion. Chinese converts came from diverse backgrounds and included scholars, opium smokers and ambitious village leaders. Their conversion experiences were similar to those manifested in other popular religious movements. They consciously incorporated the Christian ideas of sin and confession, soul and redemption into their everyday life. They successfully appropriated Buddhist, Taoist and other popular religious rituals and networks to create autonomous Christian communities that existed outside missionary control. This fascinating process of cross-cultural fertilisation can be seen in the story of Pastor Hsi who Christianised exorcism, faith-healing and dream visions. He also provided medical and social services by founding a huge opium refuge called the Middle Eden where he refined the missionary-supplied morphine as Chinese anti-opium pills and marketed it as 'Jesus opium'. He converted many opium smokers, trained them as evangelists and drug salesmen, and built an extensive network of opium refuges across the province. Evidently Christian conversion was an attractive strategy for personal and community empowerment. When Christianity became a popular religion in rural China, the Christian God publicly replaced the ancestor as the focus of worship and the church replaced the ancestral temple as a new institution at the grassroots level. Conversion, baptism and church affiliation were therefore essential duties for the faithful. Only by studying Christian integration into local society can the complexities of Christianity in China be appreciated. China's millions is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Sino-Western interactions.