Christian Mission and the Internationalization of China, 1830–1950

Abstract

The debate over whether external or domestic factors should be given priority in narrating China’s modern history has fueled an enormous amount of Western scholarship on China in the twentieth century (cf. Cohen 1984). As this century drew to a close and a new one began, scholars began to realize that distinctions between the two were in fact rather blurred. Of the various theoretical and methodological innovations, the concept of internationalization as developed by William Kirby (1997) has gained much practical relevance as a rather pragmatic attempt to look at the modern history of China from a fresh perspective. Kirby starts from the simple empirical observation that foreign relations became “all penetrating, all prevailing … ultimately forcing their way into every part of Chinese society” (Kirby 1997: 433). While accepting Western influence as a matter of fact, he nevertheless acknowledges the active role of the Chinese in what he calls “the self-conscious attempt to overhaul Chinese culture, particularly political culture, according to international categories” (Kirby 1997: 434). More recently, Kirby has confirmed this reading in stating that “the lines between things international, or global, or external, on the one hand, and things ‘Chinese’, on the other hand, are in many realms nearly impossible to draw” (Kirby 2006:4).