Steve Crowder's book on the Churches of Christ Mission to Canton

Passages like the Great Commission in Matthew and the Macedonian Call in Acts have long compelled members of the Churches of Christ to conduct missions. Taking the gospel to places where few if any have heard it always generates a series of victories and defeats, hardships and joys.

When historians capture these narratives, they bless the church. They present us with stories that not only inform and entertain, but also convict and inspire. That’s exactly what Stephen V. Crowder does in his new book, The Field is the World: A History of the Canton Mission (1929-1949) of the Churches of Christ.

Crowder tells the story of the Canton Mission as a series of four episodes. The 1920s was a time for dreaming and preparing. Two college students, George Benson and Lewis Oldham, learned that China, the most populous nation in the world, had no missionaries dedicated to “the restoration of New Testament Christianity.” They determined to change that. By the summer of 1925, George and Sallie Hockaday Benson, just weeks after their wedding, sailed for China. Oldham and his wife, the former Grace Narron, followed in 1927.

The years 1929 through 1937 marked a high point for the mission. The team decided to conduct their work in a major city, and settled on Canton (also called Guangzhou), in the south. Soon, newly-arrived missionaries and a few of the early converts joined the leadership. Together, they followed a strategy centered on Bible teaching, high-quality literature, and public evangelism--even street preaching.

Their work was never easy. The missionaries struggled to become fluent in Cantonese. Anti-missionary feelings sometimes came to the surface. In one village, a sermon was “drowned out by a noisy group of young people banging on pots and pans.” Still, by the mid-1930s, the Canton Bible School had a new two-story building, and the mission was conducting “a total of twelve evangelistic meetings each Sunday, with a combined attendance of around 450 people.” Beginning in 1937, the Japanese military occupation of China ended the momentum. Bombing raids forced nationals out of Canton and into villages. Reluctantly, the missionaries fled the city and eventually returned to the U.S.

The end of World War II signaled new opportunities. Lowell and Odessa Davis, who had served in Canton prior to war, returned to resume the work with a new emphasis on humanitarian aid. They discovered that the Chinese were more willing than before to accept the gospel. In December 1947, Lowell reported that 210 were baptized that year. But the Communist takeover of China in 1949 resulted in the deportation of missionaries and the sometimes-violent suppression of Christianity.

According to a recent estimate, China is now home to more than 60 million believers of Protestant persuasion. Observing that growth, George Benson in 1987 remarked, “What seemed for a long time to be years of wasted effort may prove yet to have been more productive than we ever imagined possible.”

The Field is the World chronicles the story of a handful of North American missionaries and their Chinese co-workers who proclaimed the message of salvation. The text, accompanied by dozens of illustrations, is a welcome addition to the missions historiography of the Churches of Christ.

Notes

The foregoing is a longer, unedited version of a brief review published in the May 2018 issue of The Christian Chronicle. The following are the publication facts for the book:

Stephen V. Crowder, The Field is the World: A History of the Canton Mission (1929-1949) of the Churches of Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018. 127 pages. $21.00.

The publisher's website for the book is as follows: https://wipfandstock.com/the-field-is-the-world.html

England and the Early U.S. in Asian Trade

Fichter, James R. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

This book is about Anglo-American capitalism in Asia. The story, says author James R. Ficther, illustrates "the deep links between the United States and the rest of the world from that country's inception (2-3).

For what it's worth, the part about "from that country's inception" is significant. The field of historical study that focuses on the U.S. and the rest of the world is growing rapidly. More to the point, it emphasizes not so much U.S. impact on the rest of the world, but rather the world's contributions and connections to U.S. history.

In this book, Fichter notes that American international traders did quite well for themselves in the years that immediately followed the American Revolution. Their economic success helped to pave the way for the tremendous growth that the U.S. experienced during the nineteenth century. But how did it happen? A careful historian, Fichter argues that there were a number of global factors at work in the rise and success of early-U.S. international trade. According to the author, some of these factors were as follows:

1. A strong American resistance to state-sponsored monopolies. The English East India Company was the only corporation that could legally import Asian goods, like tea, to Great Britain and her colonies. This, says Ficther, was at the root of the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. It wasn't merely that British subjects in America resented taxes on tea. It was that they also rejected the monopoly that locked American merchants out of the import business. From the beginning, the United States held onto the economic theory that insists that open and fair trade is a good thing for everyone.

2. The French Wars, which lasted from about 1793-1815, were an incredible distraction and impediment to European trade. European navies required ships for military purposes. Hostile countries interfered in each other's international trade. All along, the U.S. was basically neutral. So its trading vessels could safely sail under the American flag and do business with anyone.

3. Asian sellers wanted to be paid by Western buyers in silver. But there wasn't much of that in the early United States. American business leaders remedied that problem by selling shares in a given trading voyage to sometimes twenty or more individual investors. Most of these investors could never have owned a ship or financed a voyage. But they could still get in on the huge profits that came from international trade. In essence, by pooling their silver, Americans were not only able to make a lot of money, they were also able to quickly become major players in the game of Western trade with the East.

4. In spite of all its pomp and pride, the English East India Company, a state monopoly, was incredibly inefficient. Ironically, by attempting to retain its authority and unique legal status, it defeated itself.

5. British colonization in Asia created a whole set of problems associated with ruling a place so far from home. The United States didn't have those problems because it didn't have colonies in Asia.

By 1815, the English East India Company was kaput. Also by that time, enough American international traders had accumulated enough capital that they were able to help other industries in the U.S. to grow. In short, the British came to adopt a superior approach to Asian trade. While that was happening, the United States became a major player in Asian trade. The foregoing is nothing like a complete review of this book. But it does present some of the highlights.

Now, what was best about this book? I'm no expert on this topic, but I can tell you about what struck me. I think that the scope and depth of this book are impressive, to say the least. Ficther has spent a good bit of time in libraries and archives literally all over the world. Because of the extent of his painstaking research, he is able to tell a broad, complex story that takes into account a tremendous amount of wide-ranging information. This book represents quite an achievement, one that the reader will learn from and appreciate.

What wasn't so good about this book? While focusing on economics, Ficther tends to ignore the political dimension of his story. This shows up when one takes note of the featured actors. The author pays a lot of attention to people like American merchants, ship captains, and representatives of the East India Company. By contrast, we hear very little about significant politicians of the day. Perhaps the most glaring omission is Fichter's near silence about the labor of slaves in the Caribbean, an absolutely vital aspect of this episode in history. I am reluctant to fault a book along this line because it seems like faulting the author for not writing a different book. But I do think that more attention to the issues I have mentioned here would make this really fine book that much better.

Broken China: The Decline of an Empire

Huang, Ray. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

Non-fiction book lovers have gotten used to it: the odd-but-clever title designed to catch the attention of prospective buyers. In a world looking for something snappy, the title of a book is there to sell, not describe.

Thank goodness for the lowly subtitle. When you want to know what a book is actually about, the subtitle will tell you. And so it is that 1587, A Year of No Significance is really about The Ming Dynasty in Decline. More specifically, it focuses almost entirely on the era of Wan-li, who ruled from 1573 till 1620, and why his empire was in decline during those years.

The author, Ray Huang, was especially well-prepared to write this book. Born in Hunan Province, China in 1918, he served as an officer in the Chinese army from 1941 to 1950. Following his discharge, Huang moved to the United States where he studied at the University of Michigan, completing the doctorate there in 1964. From that time until his death in 2000, Huang built a fine academic career in which he taught, contributed chapters to the Cambridge History of China, and authored several books.

In 1587, Huang offers a series of compelling vignettes of major political, military and intellectual leaders of the period. His primary thesis is that, for all of their differences, each one was dealing with what was essentially the same intractable problem. At one point, Huang describes it as the "organizational inadequacy" (128) of the empire, a system in which "a literary bureaucracy" was managing "the affairs of the agrarian masses" (131). In another section, he speaks of "a sedentary empire" (186) with an army in which "the new elements had to slow down to keep pace with the old" (187).

The strength and the beauty of Huang's presentation is that his book resembles a carefully-researched film in which separate characters reveal a common world from the past. Thus we read about Wan-li, the boy who became emperor and who came of age only to discover that devotion to his public role made no apparent difference.

Next, Huang takes up the enigmatic Grand-Secretary Chang Chu-cheng, mentor and advisor to the young Wan-li. It was only after Cheng's death that Wan-li discovered the truth: when faced with the yin and the yang of "the professed moral tone of government" versus the "hidden desires and motivations of bureaucrats" (56), Cheng had become a hypocrite and a fraud.

Readers get some relief from the tragic as Huang delightfully tells the story of the special relationship Wan-li had with Lady Cheng, the emperor's favorite wife and the mother of his third son. Lady Cheng was refreshingly different from the hundreds of other women available to Wan-li. Instead of being awed by the presence of his majesty, she recognized his humanity and treated him more like a friend than a god. In this way she fulfilled many of his emotional needs, an unlikely gift for which he deeply appreciated and loved her.

Grand-Secretary Chang Chu-cheng was succeeded by the next character in the story, Shen Shih-hsing. Unfortunately, his completely different, subtle style was overshadowed by an early career in which Shen had worked under the then-notorious Chang. In this section, Huang makes clear that neither Chang's hard, top-down administration nor Shen's indirect approach could have ever made a long-term difference.

At this point, Huang takes up the story of the Ming emperor who chose to literally get away from it all, Wan-li's granduncle, Cheng-te. A playboy and a maverick, he avoided the Imperial City for months at a time, chasing women and fighting battles. But for all of the interesting tales he generated, Cheng-te's absence from duty only deepened and reinforced the crisis of the empire. The sick system he ignored only grew worse.

No one could have been more different from Cheng-te than Hai Jui, "the most impeccably moral and fearless civil servant of the empire" (141). As the author explains, though, even Hai's zealous campaign against the exploitation of the poor was destined to fail. In order to show why, Huang takes his reader back to the time of emperor Hung-wu and the early days of the Ming Dynasty. He describes how Hung-wu had established agrarian simplicity as the standard for the empire, ignoring the inevitability of commercial development. As a result, there were no established, regulated credit institutions. Without even a simple banking system, small struggling farmers had no one else to go to besides their neighbors who became their creditors. In those early years, a large share of imperial revenue came from those families who had succeeded at farming, lending, and acquisition. But over time, their wealth was transferred from the countryside to the Imperial City. By the late sixteenth century, not only had the imperial bureaucracy more than doubled in size, its 20,000 civil servants controlled a huge portion of the empire's economic power.

Huang's description of the imbalance and corruption of the empire provides the backdrop for his last two main characters. Ch'i Chi-kuang was one of the ablest generals in Chinese military history. Although he fought off the Japanese and Chinese pirates who were ravaging the east coast, Ch'i discovered that the contradictions and inconsistencies of his homeland were the toughest foes he would ever face. China's civilian leadership depended on the army for security. But they were also suspicious of strong military leaders. Consequently, in order to combat the enemies of the empire, Ch'i had to first develop and train an army that was always poorly supplied. Huang develops the story to show that, whether winning or losing battles, Ch'i was, from beginning to end, fighting a losing war.

Finally, the author turns to a very different sort of character, Li Chih. A proud and stubborn intellectual, he "appointed himself the group conscience of all the literati" (190). Huang portrays Li Chih as having been well-known and widely-read among his contemporaries. But not even a man with his clout and persuasion could succeed in a quest to "coordinate the personal needs and wants of a member of the scholar-gentry class with public morality" (198). The empire had long since become hopelessly conflicted. And so Huang concludes with his thesis: by the seemingly unremarkable year 1587,

the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached. It no longer mattered whether the ruler was conscientious or irresponsible, whether his chief counsellor was enterprising or conformist, whether the generals were resourceful or incompetent, whether the civil officials were honest or corrupt, or whether the leading thinkers were radical or conservative--in the end they all failed to reach fulfillment (221).

An interesting, if sad, story, what might it mean? Part of Huang's own answer may be revealed in an obvious quirk of the book: throughout, he punctuates his descriptions with phrases like "our history" and, especially, "our empire." Before getting used to it, the reader experiences the first few examples like a flash of lightning on an otherwise clear night. Of course, they remind the reader that although Huang had evidently become acclimated to the West by the time he wrote this book, he was first and finally Chinese. Beyond that, it may have been that Huang was using his story as a sort of political parable. He mentions how that those who lectured in the presence of the Wan-li emperor were expected to cite historical events as "a way of comparing past with present, and thus of reiterating the close relationship between ethics and public well-being" (44). Lessons from the past served as analogues to the contemporary scene. In this way, history was understood not only as background but also as prophecy. Did Huang intend for his own work, which was translated into Chinese, to serve in this way? I wonder.

Christianity in China

A massive wave of Christianity has been sweeping across China in recent years, and the Chinese ruling party, officially atheist, is now struggling to figure out how to control it.

So begins the introduction for a video produced by Frontline/World and The Chicago Tribune, Jesus in China: Is Christianity Transforming China?