bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1989), pp. 36–38
The Golden Hope by Peter Stursberg.
Toronto: The United Church Publishing
House, 1987, 275 pp. $12.95
Peter Sturberg, noted World War II CBC correspondent and eminent practitioner of oral history, has taped interviews with three score Canadian missionaries and their children, Sinologists and Chinese to try to record and evaluate the aims and achievements of 60 years of Canadian missionary endeavour in China. By quoting the recollections and opinions of survivors of the China missionary experience, he succeeds in bringing to life the hopes, the disappointments and the longterm accomplishments of four Canadian Protestant missions as microcosms of the larger Western Christian movement in China.
In the Fall 1987 issue of bout de papier, I reviewed Alvyn Austin’s Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom 1888-1959, which I described as a good popular history of Canadian missionary activities set against the evolution of China’s troubled history. Austin’s book covers both BOOKS IN REVIEW/CRITIQUES DE LIVRES
Protestant and Roman Catholic missions in a balanced and inclusive historian’s treatment. Stursberg has brought his account alive by focusing on a score of key missionaries whose experiences he helps us to share through deftly sketching the background and then quoting the source or someone qualified to comment.
Canadian Protestant missionaries who went to China in the early 1890’s were inspired by the vision of converting the heathen to Christianity. They believed in the superiority of Western culture and technology. It was Dr. Virgil Hart, who opened the Methodist mission in Sichuan Province in 1891, who coined the phrase: “If we give our best, the ’Yellow Peril’ will become the world’s ’Golden Hope’”. In North Henan, Dr. Jonathon Goforth launched the Presbyterian mission with a Messianic belief in the power of preaching the Gospel. The Canadian Anglican mission was established by Bishop William C. White in 1910 at Kaifeng, south of the Yellow River in Henan. Stursberg, himself, was born in Kaifeng, the son of the Postal Commissioner of the province.
Stursberg recounts frightening experiences of Canadians being evacuated from interior mission stations in 1895, during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and during Chiang Kaishek’s Northern March of 1927. He points to the hope that Goforth placed in the Christian warlord Feng Yuxiang, who baptized his troops with a fire hose. He describes the missionary schools where children were educated without social contact with Chinese children. He suggests that poor ability to speak Chinese and isolation in compounds of big Western houses separated the missionaries from the Chinese they wished to convert. Stursberg asserts that the phasing out of colonial privileges after the unification of China by the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1927 marked a turning point. I think that the following decade of KMT rule before the Japanese invasion of North China was the most productive period for Christian missions in China because of the educational foundations that were laid and because the Chinese churches were unified and increasingly self-reliant.
In the 1920’s and early 1930’s, the emphasis of the Canadian missions shifted from a priority on preaching the Gospel, to the Social Gospel with increasing emphasis on education and modern medicine. Strusberg describes the growth of the West China Union University with its faculties of medicine and dentistry. He also mentions Cheeloo University in Jinan, Shandong to which the North Henan mission contributed staff and to which it sent the graduates of its mission high schools.
Sixty years of missionary endeavour threw up many personalities who Stursberg describes sympathetically. In addition to the pioneers, Hart and Goforth, he tells of Bishop White’s increasing interest in Chinese culture. After meeting C.T. Curelly of the Royal Ontario Museum in 1924, White threw himself into collecting antiques for the museum. After retiring from China, he served from 1934-48 as Keeper of the Chinese Collection at the ROM and compiled books on Chinese art.
Stursberg interviewed me for four hours and from this records the discovery in 1914 by my father, Dr. James M. Menzies, of the site near Anyang, Henan of the last capital of the Shang Dynasty, 1311-1039 B.C. Father emphasized the need for missionaries to understand Chinese culture. He pointed out that the ancient Chinese, whose written legacy is on incised oracle bones and bronze ritual vessels, believed in a Supreme Being, Shang Ti, the same term used by Protestants for God
Sturberg tells of the contacts between Dr. Robert McClure of the United Church North Henan mission and Dr. Richard Brown of the Anglican Mission with Dr. Norman Bethune who arrived in China in February 1938 to work with the Communist Eighth Route Army fighting the Japanese on the Shansi-Henan border. Brown described Bethune as “very rude and arrogant, very impatient…. In spite of all his defects, he had this burning desire to help the underdog.”
The conquest of China by the Communist armies in 1948-49 and the entry of Chinese ’volunteers’ into the Korean Conflict in December 1950 brought an end to Canadian missionary activity in China. Two of the last Canadian missionaries to leave West China, Earl Willmott and Bill Small (elder brother of John Small, Ambassador to China 1972-76) endeavoured to explain to Canadians that “Chinese Christians now believe that the missionaries brought to China an adulterated Christianity — a Christianity connected with the ideas and interests of imperialism. This explanation was not well received in the United Church in Canada.
In a final chapter, Stursberg evaluates the present role of the Christian Church in China. Numbers of adherents have actually increased to over six million from four million in 1948. After the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the Chinese Government began to return church property to the Chinese churches “as part of its movement toward greater religious freedom.” He says that “it could finally be said that the People’s Republic had finally realized that religion — which in China’s case really meant Christianity — was no longer a threat to Marxism, and could even be of assistance.”
I take a broader view. I think that the Communist Party of China no longer feels threatened in its control of the country by religions which do not have strong foreign links. Chinese are not religious by nature.
Today less than ten percent have any religious interest. But the Communists are still concerned about Tibetan Lamaism’s loyalty to the Dalai Lama in exile in India because Tibetan nationalism has a strong theocratic element. They are also concerned about Roman Catholicism because the Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan and the Pope claims the right to appoint bishops. But the ’criticize Confucius’ campaign of the Cultural Revolution has been stopped and the monuments in the ancestral cemetery in Chufu, Shandong have been repaired. Repression of Islam has ceased because it was counterproductive to criticize the Russians for crushing Moslems in Afghanistan while doing the same thing to the Moslem Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Sinjiang.
– Tolerance of Buddhism permits stronger I cultural links with Japan and with overseas Chinese. Relaxed attitudes toward Protestantism and Catholicism, without acknowledging Papal control, are expected to improve relations with Westerners and potential overseas e Chinese investors and lessen the apprehensions of Christians in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The former Chinese Communist characterization of Christian missionaries as “running dogs of the Imperialist” has been dropped in recent years and replaced by a grudging recognition that Christian missionaries, whatever their faults, also served as important conduits of modernization in an era of great social change.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1989), pp. 36–38. Read the rest of this issue →
