Chapter 8 04. The history of missionaries reflected in the novel

John Hersey's The Calling was a groundbreaking book because it brought the personal experience of a missionary to the public.Because Hersey is well-informed, "The Call" has the flavor of a novel.There are hundreds of missionary memoirs, but few have the objectivity that only a missionary-born journalist can possess. "The Call" is an epitaph of what Protestant missionaries have done in China for 120 years.In the eyes of the American public, from 1830 to 1950, the church in China had been growing steadily. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, John R. Mott, who participated in the "Student Volunteer Movement", preached overseas and advocated "realizing the Christianization of the world in our generation". China is a special target.If we do not understand the atavism of Reaganian piety and Fulwellian missionaryism today, we cannot understand how we felt so badly about "losing China" in the 1950s and fighting to free Vietnam from communism in the 1960s. How rashly we have waged a "holy war" after being rescued from the hands of Christianity.

The United States seized the opportunity to Christianize China under a special circumstance.Americans initially crossed the sea to China only for trade and missionary purposes, and had no request for territorial expansion.In contrast, the British, French, Russians, Germans, and later the Japanese all aimed to invade and occupy Chinese territory.Only Americans with New World Democracy consider themselves anti-imperialist.This kind of self-recognition, which is easily understood by the Chinese, has become the foundation of the "special relationship" between China and the United States (if you know anything about today's China experts, you will find this trace in their blood).

Our privileged status due to our "extraterritoriality" has convinced us that the relationship between China and the United States is friendly.Extraterritoriality means that a foreign consul has jurisdiction in China over his own people.This is derived from the practice of the Chinese in the Middle Ages, who had a peculiar way of letting foreign chiefs control their inhabitants in China.For example, Chinese converts to Islam in Central Asia must abide by Islamic law. After the Western invasion of China in 1842, extraterritoriality was at the heart of unequal treaties.As was the habit of the old Chinese, the Anglo-Saxons invented extraterritoriality with great pride. After 1860, the British who ruled India and the Qing Dynasty, which conquered China, signed a treaty to divide China's sovereignty. These foreign rulers who conquered the people could understand each other.As a result, the missionaries were absorbed into the Chinese ruling class not because of mutual love but because of the policies of the Qing Dynasty. Disciples naturally regard them as destroyers of the old order.

In this context, changes in China's political life took place. In 1911, the Revolution of 1911 overthrew the rule of the Qing Dynasty; in 1949, Mao Zedong restored the central government.During this period, there was a 38-year power gap.During the decades of warlord strife, revolution and foreign invasion, foreigners had special opportunities to participate in Chinese life.This was the golden age of the Americans' semi-colonial policy in China.We don't have to feel guilty about implementing a semi-colonial policy. After all, California does not produce opium, unlike the British who traded it for tea and silk in China.

John Hersey's "The Call" describes the great influence of Americans on China from 1910 to 1950. The protagonist of "The Call" is David Todup, a 6.4-foot farm kid from New York State who is kind, tough, and energetic.During the 45 years he lived in China, he was engaged in missionary work.After comparing the failure of missionary work in the 19th century with the success of hospitals and schools, he rushed to China in time to attend the 1907 Missionary Centennial Conference (100 years ago in 1807, the British Robert Morrison was the first a Protestant to China).Two factions, radical and conservative, formed at the meeting. The old missionaries from the backcountry only believed in spreading holy teachings, while the young newcomers believed that China needed a beneficial social gospel.Todup belongs to the latter, he is the secretary of the YMCA.While in Tianjin, another YMCA secretary, Roscoe Hussey, provided him with room and board.We know from John Hussey's article in The New Yorker that he was the son of Roscoe Hussey. "The Call" describes the views of the modernists in the Christian Church who are most sensitive to the needs and temperament of the Chinese.

The various factions of Protestantism were unified and rarely fought. Although they were scattered in some parts of China, they united and maintained the spirit of reform, which was quite different from the Roman Catholic missionaries.Little did they know about the missionary history of the early Jesuits between the 16th and 18th centuries.The missionaries who in the 1890s sought to convert the upper class reformers in China felt they had a new strategy. Therefore, Todup organized scientific lectures rather ingeniously, in order to attract upper-class scholars and government officials. 300 years ago, the Jesuits in China began to use clocks, prisms, maps and other products of Western technology.David Todup talks specifically about gyrographs.He took out a soft chain, can it climb the ladder behind the stage?Can't you?His assistant fastened the chain to the wheel, and let it roll across the podium with the wheel, climbing up the ladder by inertia.Todup traveled around the United States, seeking financial sponsorship from businessmen, collecting equipment, and establishing a laboratory in Shanghai to produce the machinery and equipment needed to explain electricity, flying machines, and other scientific wonders.These lectures were so successful that he was able to travel with Jameson B. Todd (in place of the brilliant preacher John R. Mott) to attract audiences and spread scientific knowledge; Todd's lectures were even better. In China from 1910 to 1915, like the end of the Ming Dynasty, science had begun to spread, but Christianity was still knocking on the door.

In his later experience, Todup got acquainted with ordinary Chinese people. In the 20th century, American missionaries in China were more and more caught up in the social problems of a nation that was undergoing a profound transformation.From this point of view, missionary practice in the United States may win some Chinese converts, but for most Chinese, it misses the mark.Todup traveled to France with other YMCA secretaries, including some Chinese, and he helped some of the 780,000 Chinese laborers write letters home.This inspired the secretaries of the YMCA to start a literacy campaign and help develop mass sex education in China. In the 1920s, the leader of the YMCA, James Jean, also known as Jimmy Jean, entered the northern countryside of China, where he taught the people literacy, public health and agricultural science knowledge.In "The Call," Gene appeared as "Johnny Wu," whom Todup wanted to join, and Wu said foreigners were not welcome.

Hussey emphasized that the Japanese continued to occupy Shandong Province after the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, leading to the student anti-imperialist movement in the 1920s.Students have begun to focus on missionaries who represent cultural imperialism.At this time, the Chinese tried to replace the useful work of the missionaries with strong patriotism, because they came from a foreign land and wanted to maintain the status quo. "The Call" is an engaging read, thanks to David Todup.Todup worked diligently and wrote a news report or letter almost every day. When he was detained by the Japanese in 1943, he wrote a long reminiscence article "Search".Therefore, when Hussey narrates his comments, he can sometimes quote the article written by Todup at the time, and sometimes write his views on the matter 40 years later.This book gives a true account of the sights, sounds, smells, pleasures, and disasters of old China, features that have not yet been fully dispelled by modern civilization.David Todup is clearly the best writer to emerge from the missionary movement.

After reviewing 50 years of his life, he describes the reasons for initially engaging in conversion missionary work—individual need, collective fanaticism, missionary demagoguery, and self-fear.He also looks back on things from his upbringing.When he wanted to go to China as a missionary, he found that missionaries also have secular needs, so he wanted to get married before going.He had been depressed until he met Miss Emily Keene.They met at school for the first time, and then they came to each other, and finally decided to live together.In the eyes of his wife Emily, Todup is completely born for the cause.He was sent to China first, then she was, but they were married 18 months later.In family life, Todup kept in mind the missionary creed that family should be subordinate to career.One of his children died at the age of two while he was on a trip.

Of course, missionaries are very busy with their work, and they have to spend most of their lives with other missionaries, including Chinese Christians, living in hot and dirty Chinese cities and villages.Toddup likes to vacation in the secluded mountains of Lushan (a Chinese summer resort) on the lower Yangtze River or Beidaihe on the coast north of Tianjin.Here, they have no access to the lives of Chinese people.The spread of Hersey Christianity in China is not a history of exploitation, misunderstanding and hostility.Mission schools and publications offered new opportunities for the Chinese.The picture shows Mary Stone, who graduated from the University of Michigan, performing an operation in a missionary hospital in Zhenjiang.

It is clear that missionaries as a whole had their own culture and were careful to maintain it.In short, if habits and views become too Chinese, they lose their missionary spirit. Another phase of Tordup's missionary career began in the 1930s.According to the Home Office, he was merely a "humanitarian" and not really dedicated to God.As Emily said, "David had so much love for humanity".The government no longer helps him, but he has unofficial support to keep the job going.Soon, he had another chance. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria and began its invasion of northern China.The extraterritorial foreign missionaries did something to maintain the hospitals, schools, and other useful works they opened.They were not attacked by the Japanese until 1941.Caught between Chinese nationalism and Japanese aggression, the missionaries felt their time was clearly running out, but they continued to help China. After Tordup's solo village work, Hussey paints a lively and vivid picture of the tall American riding an Indian motorcycle, dusty, touring the village amidst the whine of motors.Under the invasion of the local warlords and the Japanese, those days were completely spent in famine and disease.The harsh realities make the spiritual cause irrelevant. In 1943, the Japanese finally detained Todep.Hussey told us he suffered from a breakdown in his faith.Emily has been sent home.Toddup was ill, unrewarded from his life's work, as if even God could not answer the human suffering he saw. The loss of this belief seems to teach us more about Hussey than about Tordup.This missionary work does not care about spiritual dedication, but pays more attention to practical help to the Chinese people.Hussey is not the type to bow to pressure and abandon beliefs, even if such beliefs were not the most important in his life in China.I believe that what John Hersey is describing here is his own Christian disillusionment, which he no doubt experienced in his own life.After all, Hussey wasn't a YMCA secretary himself, he was just the son of a YMCA secretary.He used the shattering of Todd's faith to symbolize that the activities of spreading Christianity, at least in China, have been thrown into the dustbin of history.All the work done by missionaries to social institutions and beneficial assistance to the oppressed Chinese people now seems to have had its glorious moment, but it is over. If John Hersey was making this point, he combined it with the American concern for the Chinese people.In American political life, attention to China is an eternal theme.Shortly after being repatriated by the Japanese, Todup returned to post-war China. At first he worked under the leadership of the United Nations Relief Administration. Later, he joined an industrial cooperative. In 1949, the communists organized and mobilized peasants to criticize him at the "struggle meeting". The next day, peasant friends still warmly greeted him on the street: he was deported from China as a representative of cultural imperialists , died shortly after returning to the United States at the age of 72. Hussey narrated many complicated people and events in modern Chinese history, which made him have no time to study the folklore about missions in China circulating in the United States.Apparently, it has not been studied by American historians either, who have studied the origins of Europeans across the Atlantic and turned west, from the mainland to the Pacific, but no one has attempted to connect ancient Chinese trade with the 1890s. In the 1890s, China seemed to be opening up new development zones. In fact, by 1899, the open door had been regarded as the American policy toward China. area of ​​work. Americans' views on China are very different from those of Russians. Few Russians' impressions of China began when Southern Russia was brutally concealed by the Mongol-occupied Golden Horde. In the 13th century, the Mongols swept China westward.The Russians moved east to find an ice-free port in the Pacific, a move with little missionary motive.The Russian Orthodox Church once established a Jizai Missionary Church in Beijing, but it only served the Russians, and spent most of its energy on sinology or alcoholism.Crossing the frigid Siberian steppes, the Russians were beaten hard by the mighty Qing Empire. In 1689, he was expelled from the Amur River in North Manchuria.Americans also experienced colonial expansion, which seems to have been limited to the conquest of Amerindian tribal chiefs like Siding, Barr, and Geronimo.These tribal chiefs really lacked the talents of their distant relative, the Chinese Emperor Kangxi, who defeated the Russians. Fortunately for us, the Russians never tried to save the souls of the Chinese until the Marxist-Leninist Third International came into being in the 1920s.Undoubtedly, when the Japanese invaded China, the Russians became a model for China to carry out a great revolution.We cannot fail to say that the neighboring Russians had a greater influence on China than the distant Americans.Today, when we think about superpower confrontation, we are reminded of the agony of the past: In the 1940s, the anti-Jesus Soviet communists stole the open China and killed the potential growth of Christianity from us. . In the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's modernization efforts sought our understanding and support, we should perhaps take a closer look at our unconscious motivations.Why was this not the case before? Todup was an all-powerful, omnipresent figure who did almost every job a missionary could do, except those jobs as reporter, communist, or foreign service officer (Joe McCarthy was in that profession) .However, his life takes him away from religion and into the real world.He intends to export technology to China and try to transplant human rights to China.As long as we can think in terms of the knowledge that The Calling provides, then this kind of action will definitely continue and make more sense. This review is of The Calling by John Hersey (New York, Knope Press, 1985), published in the New York Review of Books on May 30, 1985, under the title "Mission Impossible."