China

Review: Jingjiao

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Cover image of "Jingjiao" by Glen L. Thompson

Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China, Glen L. Thompson (foreword by Samuel N. C. Lieu). Wm. B., Eerdmans (ISBN: 9780802883520), 2024.

Summary: The earliest Christian Church in China came via the Silk Road in the seventh century, substantiated by the Chang’an stele and other documents.

Most renderings of the history of Christianity in China place its arrival in the nineteenth century, a product of Western missions. This lays it open to criticism as a Western imperialist effort, part of the effort to colonize China. Glen L. Thompson, in this book, summarizes the research, rooted in primary documentation, showing this is not so. Rather. he shows that the earliest Christian Church in China came via the Silk Road in the seventh century AD. Furthermore, its origins were not in the European West but the Syriac East.

In fact, Christians, gradually moving east along the Silk Road established churches along that route culminating with churches in northwest China, established by a Syriac priest, Alopen. Christianity was known as “Jingjiao” or the Luminous Teaching. It received official approval in the tang Dynasty, along with other religions. It survived, with some setbacks into the ninth century, and resurfaced briefly in the twelfth century.

This book traces the evidence that has been uncovered for Jingjiao. Most notable is the Chang’an stele, attributed to a monk, Jingjing in the da Qin Monastery. The stele first summarizes the teaching of Jingjiao, which looks very much like orthodox Christianity of a Syriac origin. Then it details the edicts of Taizong and subsequent emperors, granting permission to propagate this Luminous Teaching and traces the rise and fall of Jingjiao through the reigns of subsequent emperors. A second part celebrates the true Lord and the Tang emperors. At the bottom are details of the composition of the stele and the church hierarchy, comprising both Syriac and indigenous personnel. Thompson also discusses additional pillars and scrolls that round out the teaching summarized on the Chang’an stele. He includes appendices showing much of this material, and a line by line translation of the Chang’an stele.

Thompson explores how the material shows the challenges and efforts to contextualize the faith while remaining orthodox. Moreover, the overall consistency of this material of eastern origin with later western teaching lays the groundwork for an apologetic for the faith. It is early on the scene, Gradually, the Syriac elements give way to more indigenous elements. The contemporary Chinese church has gone further in this way. But the story of these early Christians, enjoying the approval of emperors offers great encouragement.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: A Force So Swift

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A Force so Swift

A Force So Swift, Kevin Peraino. New York: Crown, 2017.

Summary: A study of how the Truman adminstration, under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, framed America’s response to the rise of Mao as the Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek fell to Communist forces in 1949.

The role of the People’s Republic of China as a world power is an accepted reality in today’s global landscape. Threats to Taiwan, seizure of coastal islands, influence throughout east and southeast Asia, and economic growth and trading relationships with the U.S. regularly are subjects of the evening news. What is often less understood are the events nearly 70 years ago that helped shape current realities.

In 1949 the world was recovering from war. China invaded by Japan in World War II, nominally was under control of a Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek. Beginning in the spring of 1949, Communist forces under Mao Zedong rapidly conquered Nationalist controlled territories, leading to a situation where the fate of Chiang’s government, which had enjoyed American support, was increasingly in doubt.

Kevin Peraino, using recently declassified information as well as Russian and Chinese sources, studies the U.S. response to what many viewed as a cataclysmic event. China under Chiang had been an object of American mission efforts as well as trade and a wartime alliance, all of which was in jeopardy. For that reason, the Truman administration faced significant factions who pressed for continued efforts to prop up the failing regime, led by one-time Truman ally, Warren Judd. These efforts were also fostered by Madame Chiang, who took up residence in the U.S., probably the most effective ambassador Chiang could have employed.

Louis Johnson, Truman’s Secretary of Defense favored efforts to support Chiang while Dean Acheson, as Secretary of State was much more doubtful of Chiang’s ability to survive, even on Taiwan. Acheson also recognized that China and Russia may not have had as much in common as was projected. There were even reasons to support rather than resist this new government. In the end, it wasn’t to be, even though there was good reason for the suspicions that the relationship between Russia and Communist China was an uneasy alliance at best. Instead, the U.S. extended its policy of containment, withholding recognition to the People’s Republic of China until the late 1970’s, and becoming involved in conflicts first in Korea and then in Indochina, leading to our Vietnam ordeal.

Peraino’s book explores how foreign policy is often constrained by the politically possible at home as well as by other global actors. Fears of Communism, of atomic war, and the concern not to be the administration that “lost” China placed great pressures on the Truman administration, which resulted in a compromise between acceptance of the new reality and the effort to project a strong response shaping events for at least a generation, and perhaps down to the present day. One wonders what might have happened if early American recognition and support of Mao had been possible. Would China have gone through the ordeals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Would we have been embroiled in Korea and Vietnam? At the same time, would the vibrant, indigenous Chinese Christian movement have arisen, now estimated to number more than 100 million adherents?

It is not given to us to know “what if.” But Peraino helps us understand what happened and what resulted and how that has shaped the international landscape down to our own day. We see both the necessity of intelligent foreign policy in the careers of people like Acheson and George Kennen, and the limits even very bright people face. We see both the pressures and the folly involved in backing failing governments. And we see how Truman’s ideals of achieving the “federation of the world” of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” come smack up against the realities of the Cold War, one that really hasn’t ended to this very day.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Review: China Wakes: The Struggle For The Soul Of A Rising Power

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China Wakes: The Struggle For The Soul Of A Rising Power
China Wakes: The Struggle For The Soul Of A Rising Power by Nicholas D. Kristof
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always enjoyed the writing of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Their work as a married couple writing for The New York Times as well as their individual publications, including Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky have challenged many of us to think more deeply about human rights, and especially, injustices toward women.

These same sensitivities are evident in this twenty year old work chronicling their years as correspondents for The New York Times in China. The book chronicles their time (1988-1993) during the democracy uprisings that led to Tiananmen Square and the beginnings of the economic boom that has worked a radical transformation upon the most populous nation on earth.

It is a chronicle of the tensions such a transforming nation faces. We see through the eyes of dissidents as well as party members the corrupt and repressive face of Maoist and post-Maoist communism. We see the pervasive importance of quangxi, a form of social (and at times, financial) capital, in making one’s way and getting ahead. Kristof (the authors alternate chapters) gives us an up close and personal account of the tragedy of Tiananmen, and with it an example of the courage journalists show in “getting the story”. As well, we get an account of how the authors walked the fine line between the restrictions placed upon them as foreign journalists, and their efforts to circumvent those restrictions, including travel as tourists to see the realities of peasant villages–not the show villages the government would parade them through.

Perhaps most insightful is their description of the transition from a totalitarian to an authoritarian rule that has occurred concurrent with China’s economic boom. Another is their recognition of the high savings rate of the Chinese people that has provided the capital that has fueled that boom. And already in the early ’90s, they describe the growing problems with air and water pollution that imperil the nation’s health, the global climate, and is becoming in this day an increasing urgent reality that challenges the unfettered growth of the economy.

The book made me curious to learn more about what the last twenty years have been like. It hasn’t witnessed the crumbling of the Communist party or authoritarian rule. It has witnessed huge economic growth and growing international power and influence. It seems that many of the questions about China’s future being asked in the book are still relevant–and unanswered.

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