Editor’s note: Last month, in CP’s new monthly podcast, we looked at the state of Christianity in China today. In our second monthly podcast, we examined the history of Christianity in China. When and how did Christianity come to China? What happened when this foreign religion came into this large civilization? How does that history impact China — and Chinese Christians — today?
Here’s a short excerpt from that conversation. In this part of the conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, we looked at Christianity in China from around 1900 to 1950. Please check us out and follow on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts.
China’s Boxer Rebellion
Ryan: One of the biggest sufferings and trials for Christian missionaries at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century was the Boxer Rebellion. The gentry class in China resented and hated Christians, especially foreign missionaries. That resentment toward eventually grew into a local movement that turned violent.
The Boxers were a group of people who practiced martial arts, therefore named Boxers. They ended up wanting to destroy some of the churches and temples, and then went around killing missionaries and some local Christians. Eventually, that erupted into a wider rebellion, known as the Boxer Rebellion, in northern China. This started about 1899, and grew throughout the region until it expanded to the capital. The Boxers targeted Western missionaries, Western establishments, and also local Chinese Christians. About 204 missionaries were killed, and about 32,000 Chinese believers.
Western powers asked the Qing court to suppress the rebellion. But the Dowager Empress saw this as an opportunity to get rid of the Westerners, so the court inflamed the rebellion to do more. The rebellion spread across northern China, and a lot of missionaries were killed. Eventually, some of the missionaries, soldiers, and diplomats came under siege in the foreign legation quarter in Beijing. There was a period of several months where a bunch of foreigners, missionaries, and some local Chinese believers were under siege there.
Then eight nations, including the British, French, Germans, and Americans, formed an alliance together to invade Beijing and northern China to bread that siege. That became known as the Eight-Nation Alliance, and it was successful. They crushed the Chinese army and occupied Beijing for many months, but they also looted many palaces, and even burned one of the biggest ones. The Eight-Nation Alliance freed the missionaries, diplomats, and Westerners under siege, but it also capped off a whole century of humiliation in China. Today, the Eight-Nation Alliance is still referred to as the biggest national shame in Chinese history, because that showed how weak the Chinese government and military were.
The Boxer Rebellion got a lot of attention because of how much it affected the Western missionaries. But through it all, God used the suppression of the rebellion. Now that the Westerners occupied China, they opened up China even more to carve it out for colonization – but that also allowed more missionaries and other Westerners to move in.
Christianity and Colonization
Beth: So, colonization and missions are marching arm in arm. It’s very interesting and sobering to think about, because the Lord used it for good – but there’s also a lot of pain and hurt that still has echoes down into today.
After the Boxer Rebellion was defeated, China opened up, and more new missionaries started arriving in China. Something interesting happened around this time. In the West, at the time in the church, there was a big split between more liberal Christianity and more fundamentalist, conservative Christianity. The missionaries of the 1800s were definitely spiritual descendants of the Puritans: they were very focused on Christ, crucified, and sharing him with the people of China. After the rebellion, a lot of those older missionaries who had lived in China for decades were martyred or ended up leaving the country.
As the new generation of missionaries came in, most of the new missionaries ended up not being directly involved in evangelism and church planting. Instead, a lot of them focused on how faith influences society. They did things like build hospitals, schools, and other social institutions. Mercy ministry had always been a part of missionary work in China. There were great needs, and life was very, very hard for the common people. The missionaries had always come bringing medical care and education – especially for girls – and meeting the needs of the people. But as these newer missionaries came in, a change started to happen.
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Pastor Wang Yi has a series on this. He says there was a switch between the missionaries of the 1800s, who were focused on “China for Christ,” to newer missionaries, who had an attitude of “Christ for China.” The newer missionaries looked at missionary work as mostly about helping people, not about preaching Christ crucified. Some of them also came in with political goals and ideology. They didn’t just focus on teaching people about Jesus, but on helping to build what they believed would be a better, free, democratic, independent country, not just the gospel. So, this split between the more liberal and more conservative missionaries ended up filtering down into the church.
About one-third of Chinese Christians at the time were killed in the Boxer Rebellion. And this wasn’t just any third! The people who were targeted were the Chinese leaders of the church. The Boxers would kill a pastor before they’d kill a regular churchgoer. So, for a while, the Chinese church didn’t have strong leadership. That had to be raised up again. And as this new generation of Chinese Christian leaders was rising, it would come to mirror the liberal-conservative split in the church.
Eventually, these theological differences laid the groundwork for the split between the house churches and the government churches. This split would be overseen by the Communist Party, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Ryan moved from Guangzhou, China, to Ohio at the age of 12. He is the pastor for neighborhood ministries at New City Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and also serves as the translation manager for China Partnership. E.F. Gregory is a mom of three. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley on the border of East Los Angeles, where her husband pastors a small PCA church.
Pray for Chinese Christians to know that Christ does not belong to Westerners — or to any one place. Christ is God of all the earth, including China.
