Protestant Publishing in Chinese at the Anglo-Chinese College, Malacca, 1818–1843

Established in Malacca in 1818 by Robert Morrison, the Anglo-Chinese College ( Yinghua shuyuan 英華書院) became an important centre for translation and publishing of Protestant books and tracts in Chinese in the formative decades before the Opium War (1839–42). The extant publications in Chinese from the Anglo-Chinese College in this period shed light on the process of experimentation followed by missionaries and their Chinese collaborators, about how to make books that would appeal to Chinese readers – a necessary prelude to making converts to Christianity. This article traces that process of experimentation through an examination of the publications in Chinese from the Anglo-Chinese College press over the twenty-five years of the College’s operation there, prior to its relocation to Hong Kong in 1843. After an overview of the publications, the article discusses the books as physical objects and then considers the content and language within them. These examples suggest common ground between Chinese and Protestant print cultures: both saw close connections between reading, education and virtue, and both employed selective appropriation of excerpts from longer canonical texts as a reading practice.1</jats:p

Protestants and the state in post-Mao China

In 1979, the Chinese Communist Party restored its policy of freedom of religion. The intention of this policy was to bring religious movements which had spread underground under the suppression of the Maoist era back under state control. This was to be accomplished through the "patriotic religious organizations," which would be coopted institution accepting party leadership over religion. In the case of Protestants, however, this policy did not succeed in accomplishing the state's objectives, as unsupervised Protestant activities and unwelcome attempts by foreign Protestant groups to play a role in the evangelization of China persisted over the decade. These and more general factors led to a growing desire on the part of the state to strengthen control over Protestant religious activities, but the state's efforts to strengthen control served to undermine the credibility of the TSPM/CCC with Protestant believers, contributing to the failure of the strategy of cooption to unite Protestants under a single institutional structure. At the same time, Protestant leaders were becoming increasingly frustrated with the state's intrusions into religious life, and were seeking to have a sphere of autonomy for the church recognized by the state. By 1990, Protestant leaders were pressing for the state to encode the separation of church and state in law, while the state was more anxious than ever in the post-Tiananmen domestic and international climate to tighten its control over the church, and over society in general.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofGraduat

Christianizing Confucian Didacticism: Protestant Publications for Women, 1832-1911

AbstractThe printed Protestant missionary engagement with Chinese views of the role and proper conduct of women in society was more complex and ambiguous than scholars have often assumed. Publications targeted at women readers occupied an important place among Protestant missionary periodicals, books, and other printed materials in Chinese during the late Qing. Most publications for women and girls were elementary doctrinal works, catechisms, and devotional texts designed to introduce early readers to Christian belief, and light reading (fictional tracts and biographies) for women's spiritual edification, but there were some more elaborate works as well. After an overview of mission publications for women, this article focuses on two complex texts, one a compendium of practical knowledge and moral guidance for the Chinese Protestant "new woman," Jiaxue jizhen (The Christian home in China) (1897; revised 1909), and the other, a Protestant reworking from 1902 of the Qing dynasty didactic compilation Nü sishu (Women's four books). Together, these two texts give us a more multifaceted picture of how missionaries engaged with Chinese society and the role of women therein. </jats:sec