Christianity flourishes in areas facing profound dislocations amidst regime change and warfare. This book explains the appeal of Christianity in the Chaozhou-Shantou (Chaoshan) region during a time of transition, from a stage of disintegration in the late imperial era into the cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial area it is today. The authors argue that Christianity played multiple roles in Chaoshan, facilitating mutual accommodations and adaptations among foreign missionaries and native converts. The trajectory of Christianization should be understood as a process of civilizational change that inspired individuals and communities to construct a sacred order capable of empowerment in times of chaos and confusion.

A biography of an important but little-known American scientist that evokes the issues of religious and secular beliefs and the evolution of Chinese scientific and educational institutions during the early 1900s.

How did the Chinese in the 19th century deal with the enormous influx of Western science? What were the patterns behind this watershed in Chinese intellectual history? This work deals with those responsible for the translation of science, the major issues they were confronted with, and their struggles; the Chinese translators’ views of its overpowering influence on, and interaction with their own great tradition, those of the missionary-translators who used natural theology to propagate the Gospel, and those of John Fryer, a ‘secular missionary’, who founded the Shanghai Polytechnic and edited the Chinese Scientific Magazine. With due attention for the techniques of translation, the formation of new terms, the mechanisms behind the ‘struggle for survival’ between the, in this case, chemical terms, all amply illustrated at the hand of original texts. The final chapter charts the intellectual influence of Western science, the role of the scientific metaphor in political discourse, and the translation of science from a collection of mere ‘techniques’ to a source of political inspiration.

China's Christian Colleges explores the cross-cultural dynamics that existed on the campuses of the Protestant Christian colleges in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on two-way cultural influences rather than on missionary efforts or Christianization, these campuses, most of which were American-supported and had a distinctly American flavor, were laboratories or incubators of mutual cultural interaction that has been very rare in modern Chinese history. In this Sino-foreign cultural territory, the collaborative educational endeavor between Westerners and Chinese created a highly unusual degree of cultural hybridity in some Americans and Chinese. The thirteen essays of the book provide concrete examples of why even today, more than a half-century after the colleges were taken over by the state, long-lasting cultural results of life in the colleges remain.