Ch 1: Introduction: Imaginaries and Modernities
In this chapter we contextualize the West China mission field within the general history of West China in the late 19th and early 20th century, and within the evolution of Protestant missionary efforts, with particular attention to the tensions between evangelism and the pursuit of the social gospel in the Anglophone world. We introduce the concept of the theopolitical imaginary, with emphasis on social gospel theology and the cult of adventure. We will also explain how and why the concepts of microculture and transnationalism animate our work.
We reflect on how our positionality as gendered members of the descent community and as humanist social scientists impacts and informs our work. The introduction will also explain our approaches to temporal and spatial aspects of the work, including the organization around phases in a lifespan, as well as the transliteration of place names from Chinese to various systems of English orthography. Specific research questions we address in the book are:
1. Who were the West China missionaries as a cohort within their nations of origin and a transnational community within their mission fields?
2. What theopolitical imaginaries motivated the West China missionaries to take up their “calling” and to continue their missionary work through thick and thin?
3. What institutional structures supported and perpetuated the foreign missionary movement through two world wars, world famines, and economic depressions in the Western world?
4. How did the West China missionaries live out their diverse experiences of missionary vocations?
5. In what ways were the West China missionaries’ lives transnational (e.g. family life, church networks, international ecclesiastic organizations and conferences, tourism travel, influences of reading, etc.)
6. How did diverse emerging modernities (both in China and in the missionaries' sending communities) intersect, interact, and conflict in the missionaries' work?
7. In what ways and to what extent do the accounts of West China missionaries complicate the historiographies of 20th century southern and eastern China, China’s relationship with the West, and of global Protestant evangelism?
8. What insight does this analysis shed on the enduring impacts of the West China mission on descendant communities, home nations and China itself?