Christianity in China
THE article entitled ‘A Missionary Audit,’ appearing in the December 1927 issue of the Atlantic, contains much that is pertinent to the present position in China, but it also leaves unsaid a vast deal not generally known by the American and British public (who for the most part support these mission efforts) which is of paramount importance in considering the result which it is hoped will be attained by the sacrifices of those who provide the essential financial backing.
Of the one hundred and thirty separate organizations in China only some seventy are American, and of these seventy only three can be said with any justice to be of really great importance; nor can any of the Protestant efforts individually or collectively be considered as being in any way as effective or as great as the effort directed by the Catholic missions throughout the country that during the past centuries has been known as the Chinese Empire.
The Protestant effort in China is more talked of, more advertised, and, unfortunately, more nationalized than is the Catholic effort. The Protestant missions in this country, for reasons best known to themselves, seem to vie each with the other in introducing, together with the peculiar tenets of their one hundred and thirty different forms of Christianity, the different racial characteristics of their homelands, while the Catholics are now, as they ever have been, content to adapt Chinese cultural forms and customs to the service of that Church which since 1280 has been established in Mongolia and China, preaching and living the tenets of the Church in Rome.
The writer is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but he has lived in every one of the eighteen provinces of China, and during the past twenty-five years has been able to see the manner in which both Protestant and Catholic missions approach the object of their existence. He has been enabled, owing to his position in certain provinces, to ascertain the power and success with which both branches of the Church have organized their efforts, and to see, during this last burst of antiforeignism, the reaction as it affects both Churches and their personnel; and he has no hesitation in saying that the Catholic missions in China, which are in the main self-supporting and contributing, mean more to the country and its people than the whole effort of Protestant teachings, so that if the reorganization of the Protestant mission effort is necessary in the United States it would seem that such effort should not stay at the home-side rejuvenation and reorganization, but that the whole position, in the United States and England as well as in China, should be considered afresh in view of the experiences of the past century.
Granted that in power of concentrated effort, in its long historical connections with China and Mongolia, as well as in having a single driving power in Europe, the Catholic Church has many advantages, especially in regard to its long-unaltered policy of political noninterference, yet, if the scattered organisms that go to make up the Protestant missions in China could only be brought to see the advantages that would accrue to them if they would also observe those tenets of policy that have been the mainstay of the Catholics, these same Protestant missions, gifted as they are in many respects, could undoubtedly hope to be a very real assistance to the Chinese and indirectly a great power for furthering the peace and well-being of the East Asiatic mainland.
II
As the writer sees it, the whole aspect of the two Churches is different in every way and from every point of view. The Catholics man their missions with men who, when they leave their homelands, are as finely educated in the arts and crafts of their particular civilizations, as well as in the doctrines of their Church, as it is possible for the best schools of Europe and America to make them. They leave their homes so fired with the courage and conviction of their beliefs that they willingly renounce all thoughts of returning to their people or of ever seeing their countries again. In China they proceed to their stations after two or three years’ preliminary training in certain centres, and many of them never leave these upcountry stations. The writer has met many priests who for periods of thirty years and more have never left the province to which they were first allocated after their training period.
How does this compare with the Protestant procedure? Leaving aside such lights as Legge and Martin, Morrison and a very few others, the men sent out by the Protestant Church can make no pretense to the higher education even of their own countries, let alone advanced study in Asiatic history and culture. It is almost a byword among the educated Chinese — a synonym of being a Jack-of-all-trades — to be a Protestant missionary, and the lack of appreciation of Asiatic culture, historical associations, and customs does nothing to aid and much to hinder Christian effort in the country.
Then again the financial position and the social standing of the Catholics visà-vis the Protestant missions here do much to cause ridicule, misunderstanding, and general mental chaos among the people. The Catholics as a general rule never advertise their efforts, nor yet do they indulge their personnel in lavishly built quarters either as schools or living places, although their cathedrals and churches are among the finest buildings to be found in the land. Wherever the Catholics go, they start in a very small way, adapting Chinese buildings, using Chinese architects and forms, almost hiding their lights under a bushel, but working furiously and continuously none the less, getting in touch with the gentry and landholders, officials and merchants, making themselves acquainted in every way, not alone with the poor and homeless, the radicals and the outcasts, but also with every class and type of people within their districts, observing — at least in the outward form — all customary and cultural practices, and in all things upholding the status quo of the established régime, however difficult that may be in a country where rebellions and schisms are as rife as they are here. No historian will ever be able truthfully to say that any Catholic priest or father comforted or aided the Taipings or any other of the many sects of rebels that one time and another have swept over China, or that the Catholic Church gave its aid in any way whatsoever to any faction or party in the land; none may point the finger of scorn to this Church and hold it up in ridicule as having aided the radical or the Bolshevik.
But what can the Protestants say about the happenings in Korea in 1890, in Nanking in 1862-64, in Chihli and Shantung, as well as in other provinces, when this last antiforeign craze of 1926-28 swept across the land?
What excuse can the Protestant missions set forth to lay from off their shoulders the incubus of their teachings come home to roost during the wondrous career of that most noted and much belauded ‘Christian,’ Feng Yu-hsiang, to name but one of many heroes picked out by the Protestant missionaries during the past twentyfive or thirty years? What excuse can be brought forward to extenuate the mission boards in the United States and Great Britain for sending out to China gentlemen who misused their time and financial assistance by actively and painstakingly aiding and abetting the hot-headed young students of various mission-supported schools and colleges in their fight against what they conceived to be, in their foolish ignorance, the reactionaries of the North?
Besides being blessed with the comforts of pleasant homes and surrounded by every comfort known to the West, with hospitals for their use, schools for their children, vast pleasure towns such as Pei-Tai-Ho and other places owned in the main by missions or missionaries and operated by them for their own pleasure and comfort, these Protestant missionaries obtain home leave every seven or eight years, besides their annual summer leave of from six to twelve weeks, and live and carry on their work in palaces compared with what the great bulk of the Catholics have to be content with. No one who has seen that vast pile of palaces known as the Yu-An-Fu in Peking, or Yale-inChina in Changsha, or the Methodist Compound or the American Board Mission Compound in Peking, or the Haitien University to the west of the city, or others of the beautiful parklike surroundings in which the Protestant missions live among the squalor of Chinese cities, can wonder for one minute at the apathy the Chinese feel for the creed that these wondrous beings teach, who themselves are so well protected from all the common and everyday ills that afflict the unfortunate people.
When Père Robert, that great and powerful head of the Missions Étrangères, was in Hongkong controlling the great network of mission stations spread throughout Southern China, he was very content to live in a single room not twelve feet on a side, barefloored, with furniture of the scantiest, taking his meals with the other priests and lay brethren on a clothless table spread with the simplest of Chinese foods such as the common people live upon. And yet the Father at that time controlled millions of dollars’ worth of property, land in all the great provincial cities, fields by the hundred acres in a block scattered through the South; and always throughout his working life, with the other priests of his mission, he was up and at work long before 6 A.M. both summer and winter.
Who of the commercial community in China can take six weeks at the seaside in the summer at Pei-Tai-Ho to attend conventions? Who of the Chinese can understand a religion that preaches humility as one of its greatest tenets when this is preached by a body of people who themselves neither know nor practise it? Who among the common folk in China can own a house by the sea or on the hills so well favored in position as to let for six hundred taels for the season, as a hundred missionaries let their houses? Who ever heard in China of a priest indulging in rug making or silk embroidering or the sale of goats’ milk so that he might buy himself a house or a passage to a foreign land? Or who ever saw in any other country the ladies of a mission advertising in the daily press the days in the month on which they would be at home?
The Catholics own land, till and sow, reap and gather, and make wine, but they do these things for the missions and not for their individual comfort or aggrandizement. One can see their priests, regardless of the heat or the cold, of their position or their learning, ploughing the fields, tending the vineyards, the orchards, and the workshops, teaching the Chinese landowners and farmers how to get better crops, better yields, how to build better houses and obtain better animals from existing stocks, and generally trying, not to introduce strange, unknown, and unused sciences into the land, but to adapt Chinese methods and to graft on these methods such of other nations’ findings as may seem applicable under the necessities of the case. Never does one find the Catholics operating such conglomerates as the Young Men’s Christian Association or other quasi-political societies, nor do these priests ever condemn or ridicule Chinese family customs or laws or seek to give to their flock the idea or impression that because a thing or a thought is Chinese it must necessarily be wrong.
III
Another cardinal point of difference. The Catholics are not forever seeking to make of the farmer or his son a foreign-educated doctor, lawyer, or engineer. China is in essence an agricultural country, and with a population of between four and five hundred millions of people it always must be; hence if the missions can advance the knowledge of the people along agricultural lines they are more apt to do good than if they send raw and callow youths abroad to be whitewashed for five years with a slender coating of a form of knowledge that is not appreciated here and that cannot, at the present stage of China’s advancement, be of real use to the people generally. The conditions that obtain in France are not as they are in China, and certainly there are no points of similarity between Chinese conditions and those obtaining in either the United States or Great Britain; hence it is difficult to see how any Chinese could benefit from such foreign education. The past few years have shown how many of these deluded graduates of foreign universities have turned into the most frantic and verbose advocates of Bolshevist doctrines, owing undoubtedly to their having been soured in their efforts to put into practice in China the various doctrines and ideas they had picked up in foreign schools.
Even if we put aside the bewilderment that must beset the minds of the Chinese at having one hundred and thirty different forms of the same religion thrust at them by hundreds of more or less earnest and more or less mediocre teachers, few of whom are sufficiently educated in Oriental doctrines to enable them to approach the subject nearest their hearts by any avenue acceptable to the Oriental mind, the difference between the doctrine taught and that lived by the teachers must surely seem to the Chinese a species of that madness which most of them sincerely believe characterizes all things Western. But when one has seen aged men working for a generation or more at the same tasks the common people have to face, eating the same food, living in the same kind of houses, denying themselves everything that the mission might live and the service of the Lord might prosper, that the Church of God might be adorned by their sacrifices; when the people sec young and earnest men, well taught in their languages and customs, come to cast in their lot with them, to aid and help them in their farms and orchards, in their cottage industries, in their sicknesses and famines, to teach them how to improve their lot, not by radical changes, but by dint of long years of sustained efforts slowly made — then it is easy to understand why it is that the Protestants in China have made less than a million converts in more than a century and how it happens that today, when the great bulk of the Protestant missionaries have fled their posts, the Catholic priests still labor on without advertisement and without reward in the far-off interior stations, for these last are not strangers in the land, but Chinese of the Chinese, content to live and suffer for the cause.
The Protestants usually teach the Chinese in the mission schools their own languages, — the languages of their own home countries, — and many instances are known of Chinese who, thus educated, either have no knowledge at all of the Chinese language or else have had to acquire it during their early manhood. If it only stopped at this, however, there might be something to be said for the practice; but usually it goes further, and children are taught in the missions the manners and customs of the Western civilizations and then are turned loose upon the countryside to learn the bitterness of having all their treasured conceptions ridiculed and all their boasted learning contemptuously discarded by their associates.
The whole question seems to turn upon the divided control, or lack of control, exercised by the Protestant missions and the boards which, in turn, control these in America and Europe. It must be obvious to the least erudite that such a division of effort as now exists can have no pretense at all of any effective control in the field, and that only by the coöperation of all Protestant boards, both in America and in Europe, can this state of affairs be changed. Besides this difficulty, there is the question of individuality which will have to be faced, as the Catholics acknowledge only the one head and all their efforts are given, not toward their own personal aggrandizement or that of their particular creed, but to the missions. Strangely enough, an American priest within the Catholic Church seems to be as Catholic in his beliefs and doctrines as a priest of any other nationality, but the representative of a Protestant church will not manifest — or in practice, at least, does not manifest — anything like the same measure of self-abnegation.
IV
If the Protestant Church of America could heal the breaches within its own structure sufficiently to permit it, as one organization, to train and send out to China the very best type of highly educated and studious Americans, who would be willing to forget their nationality and upbringing enough to merge their lives with those of their chosen flock, and who would teach the Chinese to be decent citizens, to live as Chinese proud of their ancient civilizations and culture, and not to ape the language and manners of others, nor yet to cast ridicule upon the ancient house and family laws which have held together the Chinese fabric for countless generations — then indeed would the efforts of the American Christians not be vain; but so long as each of the multitudinous sects and divisions of the Church in America is free to send out all who profess the wish to come and partake of a free passage, comfortable living quarters, and opportunity to indulge in side lines as a means of making an easy livelihood, so long can no improvement be looked for in the present unfortunate state of affairs, which is the more to be regretted when the urgent needs of China and her people at this time are considered.
The Protestant Church spends many more millions a year in China in charitable works than does the Catholic, but it does so uneconomically; and, instead of adapting itself to the country, it seeks ever to introduce foreign methods, irrespective of their merits, into all its actions. In the case of the Peking Union Medical College this obsession is more noticeable than in most other directions, perhaps because this institution looms larger in the public eye than others, although the same idea in a lesser degree is apparent in nearly all the American charitable institutions throughout the land. If the flaunting of money and money’s worth is understood in the United States by the Christians, it is not so easily understood here by the Chinese, who are bewildered by the difference between the written creed taught them and the visible effects of that creed upon the people who act as their teachers and guides. The East, whatever the West may think to the contrary, is not as material-minded as the West. Moreover, the ceaseless flauntings of wealth, of vast buildings, of ease of living, of luxury, and the efforts made by the missionaries to get rich quick, in contradistinction to the creed of humility preached, offend many Chinese, for this inconsistency seems to imply that they have no reasoning intelligence.
This easy assumption of superiority on the part of the Protestants offends others resident in the country besides the Chinese, and raises up against the Protestants a body of opinion that challenges the missionaries’ right to speak for and on behalf of Christianity as a whole. To-day this very considerable body of public opinion, both Chinese and foreign, bitterly opposes any extension of the Protestant Church’s privileges in China.
A few instances of this lack of normality on the part of certain of the Protestant institutions might not be out of place here, as showing the kind of procedure which is so difficult for both Chinese and foreigners to understand. Such instances could be given in hundreds if any good end could be obtained by laboring the question.
Six American missionary bodies subscribe yearly to a fund to support a large Mission Language School in Peking, which up to 1920 fulfilled its purpose in a Chinese compound quite admirably and enabled many foreigners to become acquainted with the language at a very reasonable fee. But in 1926 this establishment moved into a vast block of modern buildings, having some one hundred steam-heated, electric-lit bedrooms, classrooms, recreation and public rooms, and branched out in competition with the ordinary, commercially operated hotels in the city, advertising in the daily press and offering rates that made it quite impossible for the ordinary hotels to compete with it. Later on this same establishment let part of its rooms as furnished and heated flats, again coming into competition with both foreign and Chinese commercial institutions and, by reason of its immunity as a charitable organization from the incidence of taxation and other charges, severely affecting the legitimate business enterprises of the community.
Another mission, operating under the name of ‘The Hall of Truth,’ fills the daily papers with advertisements of its dairy products, of its Christmas and New Year cards, and of other products which bring it into direct competition with ordinary commercial enterprises and create much ill feeling, not only against this particular institution, but against all Protestant missions generally in the minds of the unthinking.
Yet another American mission permits its compound to be used by members of the mission as a commercial workshop, making such items as table and house linens, embroidered goods, and similar articles which are sold at a profit by members of the mission and exported by them, thus again competing with ordinary unsubsidized enterprises — and so the tale could be prolonged indefinitely. The effect of all this upon the Chinese as well as the lay foreign mind can be very easily appreciated by the American business community, if not by the missionary community.
The Catholic institutions undoubtedly, directly as well as indirectly, through the operations of a well-known banking house, indulge in commercial enterprise in a variety of ways, but they do not advertise their efforts; they do not compete with legitimate business enterprise, but use the funds so amassed not individually but as a body, in order to make their mission effort self-supporting.
V
No ordinary commercial man in China can live in the style and comfort affected by the American Protestant missionaries; and this, in a country where the average Chinese family’s total earnings do not exceed five gold dollars per annum, does not make the Christian creed seem any the more easy for the Chinese mind to understand. When one of the most erudite Chinese and Mongol scholars now living, of any race, is content to live on his mission station outside the Great Wall, ninety miles from the nearest white man, surrounded by Mongols and the poorest of Chinese settlers, eating the common food of his flock, wearing the clothes used by them, performing his daily tasks in the church, in the dispensary, and in the villages for twelve and fifteen hours a day regardless of bandits, cold, heat, and discomforts innumerable, and when such a man has done this for twenty-eight years with no holidays or visits to his homeland, the Chinese, as well as the foreigners, begin to think that there must be some good in the creed he preaches and are content to call him ‘Father’ and to give him the reverence and attention which are his just due.
When, on the other hand, we are asked to give reverence to young ladies and gentlemen who contrive to live upon a much more comfortable plane than falls to the common lot, whose houses are far better built and more up to date than anything we can afford to occupy, whose working hours permit them much more leisure than any other foreigners obtain, whose seaside houses and gardens, hill cottages and grounds, are far finer than those that we can ever hope to own, and whose good works — if any — consist of teaching the lower classes to despise their own culture and civilization, we, no less than the ordinary Chinese people, are very apt to consider that the Protestant effort in China has deteriorated into a ‘business’ and that on the whole, however much the missionaries are to be envied, they are certainly not to be admired, let alone reverenced; nor are all of us convinced that a continuance of this procedure is to be desired.
There are, of course, many earnest workers among the Protestant missions, but unfortunately these are not by any means in the majority; and, while everyone resident in China outside the ranks of the missions deplores the need that seems to exist in the minds of the homeside controlling bodies to send young ladies into jeopardy of life and honor in interior stations, these good folk cannot be convinced of the futility of such a procedure, which has done much latterly to bring the Protestant effort into further contempt.
The position of women in Asia is not what it is in other continents, and the effect of the Nanking outrages will outlast many patient years of missionary efforts, be the ultimate political result of this unfortunate occurrence what it may. The presence of considerable numbers of women and often children in the Treaty Ports during last spring and summer after the Protestants had been called in by their consuls afforded Chinese radical writers much scope for malicious writings, augmented by the presence, in large numbers, of men workers who had no legitimate right to leave their bandit-ridden flocks, and probably would not have done so had they not been burdened with families and women.
The great majority of the Catholic priests, lay brethren, and nuns are still at their posts and have never left them; at a time when their flocks were being tortured, murdered, and raped, robbed and desolated, these noble souls worked as they never worked before, helping, interceding, nursing, and generally comforting their distressed congregations by every means within their power, offering their lives nobly upon the altar of their faith, while the Protestant missionaries marched with most undignified haste to the coast ports, many of them after the Nanking outrage leaving China for Japanese and other safe points of vantage regardless of the welfare of any but themselves.
If the American subscribers to Chinese missions cannot understand the small headway which attends their contributions and efforts in this field, then they have only to come out here to China, or to appoint a commission of lay minds unconnected with any mission body to come out, to examine the whole question, in order to see just why it is that residents in China, of whatever nationality, find it impossible to reconcile the creed that the Protestant missions preach with the manner in which the teachers as a majority live.
Let the Protestant Church of America do this, and much that is now in darkness will see the light, and China will be greatly benefited thereby.