Christianity in China

This volume contains a number of articles on modern Chinese History and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China.

Denis Janz argues that the encounter with Marxism has been the defining event for twentieth century Christianity. No other worldview shook Christianity more dramatically and no other movement had as profound an impact on so many. Now the Cold War is over and as we approach the end of the century we need, Janz says, to ask ourselves what happened. This book is the first unified and comprehensive attempt to analyze this historic meeting between these two antagonistic worlds of thought and action. The intellectual foundation of this antagonism is to be found in Karl Marx himself, and thus the book begins with an account of Marx's assault on Christianity. All the diverse philosophical and political manifestations of Marxism were ultimately rooted in Marx's thought, and supporters based their greater or lesser hostilities toward Christianity on their reading of his critique. Janz follows this with an overview of Christian responses to Marx, extending from the mid-19th century to the onset of the Cold War. He argues that within this time frame Christianity's negation of Marx was not absolute; the loud "no" to Marx bore with it an important, if muted, "yes." With this intellectual groundwork in place, Janz turns to an examination of the encounter as it unfolded in specific national contexts: the United States, the Soviet Union, Poland, Nicaragua, Cuba, China, and Albania. The experiences of these countries varied widely, from Poland where Christianity maintained its strongest independence, to Nicaragua where a Christian alliance with Marxism contributed to revolutionary change, to Albania where a Stalinist government attempted to abolish religion entirely. From this survey emerges the evidence that world Christianity has clearly internalized some of the prominent features of its antagonist, suggesting that the "Marxist project" is not as utterly defunct as many have assumed.

Becoming Chinese evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history, and that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness are to serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. The essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy.

Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. Becoming Chinese makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

This book discusses selected works on Chinese religion in the People's Republic of China (PRC) published since World War II. The work begins with brief overviews of religion in premodern and modern China, first by scholars in China, and then as understood by Western scholars. The bulk of the book consists of 1,005 annotated bibliographic entries--works by Chinese writers from the PRC and Western writers from East Asia, North America, and Europe. Though many entries deal with pre-1970 China, the emphasis is on the past two decades, which have been the most productive in the history of Western publications. The inclusion of some 200 entries for this time period by authors from China makes this an important work for students and scholars in contemporary Chinese religion.