A hard field, from Jingjiao to the later bans

Christian mission in China, the notes write, began in a very hard setting, and from the first met political, social, and cultural difficulty. Nestorian missionaries in the Tang brought the faith as Jingjiao. It once flourished, they say, but depended on the court, compromised with other religions, and was cut off from its mother church, so it was not naturalised; in a large persecution in the time of the emperor Wuzong it declined. The memory of persecution, they add, later made Chinese society slower to receive a foreign religion.

Roman Catholic work, they write, began in the thirteenth century. John of Montecorvino — the notes write the name in that form — founded a first Catholic church in Beijing and baptised thousands; with his death the work receded. Jesuit missionaries later tried to enter from Macao, and men such as Matteo Ricci sought to preach by understanding and accepting Chinese culture and custom, but met lasting resistance in a clash with Confucianism. Bans on the teaching under the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors, they write, made Christian activity inside China virtually impossible.

Counts before the Opium War, and a rising hostility

In the early nineteenth century, they write, foreigners’ residence and activity were limited, and missionaries had to remain in restricted places such as Macao and Guangdong. Protestant missionaries put their strength into indirect work such as Bible translation and publishing, and among Chinese communities outside the mainland — Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta — which, they note, was not mission on the Chinese mainland itself, and so had a limit. Bans and persecution in this period, they say, greatly reduced the size of the Christian community in China: believers once reached 300,000, and just before the Opium War had fallen to fewer than 100,000. Those figures are left in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total.

When foreign missionaries obtained mission rights through force and unequal treaties, they write, the image of Christianity as a religion in league with imperialism grew stronger among Chinese people. From the mid-nineteenth century, mission was closely tied to imperial plunder, and anti-Christian feeling hardened. Missionaries, they say, often used extraterritorial standing to occupy land, to step into legal disputes, and to press Western culture. The scholar-gentry, holding a sense of a Chinese centre, saw Christianity as a symbol of foreign invasion; conflict deepened when missionaries criticised such customs as patriarchy, foot-binding, and ancestor rites, and the gentry moved to defend Chinese culture and Confucian values. Cultural clashes, they write, led to anti-Christian incidents at the end of the nineteenth century, including the Tianjin missionary case and the Boxer movement, which the notes date from 1899 to 1901 in North China, movements that identified Christianity with Western imperialism.

Prayer, inland work, and Chinese dress

In the midst of that, they write, Hudson Taylor took up the challenge of mission. His principle was to trust God completely, and to believe that what was needed would be provided through prayer rather than through material solicitation. He did not, they say, make a direct financial demand in any situation, and relied only on God’s supply. One anecdote they record is that, when an employer did not pay his wages, he did not press, but only prayed, and the next day a gold coin arrived by post. From this he established for missionaries as well a principle of “faith mission”: not to go into debt, and to entrust needed funds to God alone. He also put the preaching of the gospel — the person of Jesus Christ and the message of salvation — at the centre, and sought to show it in the practice of a life, not only in a sermon.

In 1865, they write, he founded the China Inland Mission, an interdenominational body aimed at sending workers beyond the coastal cities into the interior; the notes say this body continues today as OMF International. He crossed to China in 1853, and worked in places such as Shanghai and Ningbo. After the Opium War, unequal treaties widened the range of Western activity, and mission expanded with it, but the sense that mission had come in with imperial power enlarged the resistance of local gentry and common people. In missiology, they add, the process of learning the local language, culture, and way of life in order to speak a message from inside it is called cultural adaptation, or indigenisation; Taylor’s choice of Chinese dress and the queue is often cited as a leading case. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Hudson Taylor: inland mission, faith mission, and Chinese dress, with older counts of believers left in their window.

Last updated: 15 November 2026