Book Review

Asia

Ryan Dunch's work challenges the traditional views of the roles of Christian converts and their reception by non-Christians in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese society. Rather than seeing them as peripheral and largely ignored, if not scorned, this study places them near the center of political and social life in the treaty port of Fuzhou, where the local community was open to their participation. There the mission work of three bodies—Methodists, the American Board, and the China Inland Mission—as well as the Young Men's Christian Assoction (YMCA) produced converts who were, according to Dunch, motivated by a Protestant model of "moralistic nation-building." He sees the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period of flourishing voluntary associations and local projects, as one where "the birth and articulation of a vision of a Chinese modernity" grew "organically from local civil society" (p. 198). The possibility of further development of this civil society was nipped in the bud by the Nationalist Revolution in the 1920s.

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Dunch's focus on Chinese Christian converts rather than on missionaries makes his book unique in this field where major studies on the role of Christianity have looked primarily at the roles and initiatives of missionaries. He elucidates the conversion process by showing that converts accepted their new Christian beliefs in part at least because they could be fitted together with Chinese traditional religious and ethical "sensibilities." While, early on, supernatural beliefs and images were most important, in the twentieth century the Western origin of Christianity made themes like science and progress paramount in potential converts' choice to become Christians.

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