Espousing Protestant Christian Citizenship

Abstract

This article seeks to outline struggles of self-understanding for Chinese Protestant Christians during the decades of great transition between the late Qing and the early Republic, and view how such understanding anticipated later nationalist discourses on state sovereignty. Using both existing scholarship on statism and Chinese Christianity, as well as primary texts from historical journals and Christian newspapers, the article argues for a consistent tension as many Chinese Christians strived to close the gap between their religious and political identities. In doing so, they ended up espousing and practicing a synthesis of piety, progress and patriotism which, though later subjected to state regulations, may have contributed to the statist claim over religion before the heightened political mobilization in the late 1920s.