Negotiating the Christian Past in China: Memory and Missions in Contemporary Xiamen

Xiamens pursuit of World Heritage Site designation from UNESCO sparked interest in its Christian past, leading to tensions between official narratives and popular efforts to reconstruct it. Jifeng Liu's book explores how Christianity has become integral to Xiamen, combining official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory. It demonstrates the complexities of memory, missions, and church-state dynamics in shaping the city's cultural landscape and global aspirations.

Format: Hardback
Length: 252 pages
Publication date: 16 August 2022
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Xiamen's quest for UNESCO World Heritage Site designation sparked widespread fascination with the city's Christian heritage. Historians, both Christian and non-Christian, dedicated themselves to reexamining the legacy of missionaries and challenging official narratives of Christianity's fraught relationships with Western imperialism. In this captivating book, Jifeng Liu delves into the inevitable tension that has arisen between the established official history and these popular endeavors. This volume sheds light on how Christianity has seamlessly integrated itself into the fabric of Xiamen, a Chinese city profoundly shaped by Western missionaries. Through extensive interviews, locally produced histories, and keen observations of historical celebrations, Liu offers an intimate portrayal of the individuals who navigate ideological complexities to reconstruct a Christian past, reproduce religious narratives, and redefine local power structures in the shadow of the state. Liu makes a compelling case that a Christian past is being constructed that blends official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory, a realm of dynamic negotiation that resists both authoritarian control and popular resistance. In this way, Negotiating the Christian Past in China vividly illustrates the intricate interplay of memory, missions, and cultural landscapes, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations.

This groundbreaking study adopts a perspective of globalization and localization, both in the past and present, to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese Christianity within a local, national, and global context. It will appeal to scholars of religious studies and world Christianity, as well as those interested in the church-state relationship.

Weight: 520g
Dimension: 159 x 235 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780271092874