Piety, patriotism, progress: Chinese Protestants in Fuzhou society and the making of a modern China, 1857-1927

While there are many studies of the role of Western Christian missions in Chinese history, the Chinese appropriation of Christianity has received little scholarly attention. This dissertation attempts to redress that gap through a study of Chinese Protestants in the Fuzhou (Foochow) area of southeast China, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1927. Drawing on previously unexamined Chinese-language sources and on mission archives and publications, this study shows that Chinese Protestants, while only a small percentage of the population, had become an influential and respected group within Fuzhou society by the early twentieth century.; The study first recounts the development of the Protestant churches in the Fuzhou area from the 1850s, highlighting the ways in which Protestants understood and expressed their religion in Chinese terms, and the social mobility of Chinese Protestants over the latter decades of the century. Secondly, the study documents the involvement of Chinese Protestants in the progressive movement for social and political change which developed in Fuzhou after 1900, and the prestige which Protestant institutions enjoyed during the first decade of the Republic. The middle chapters link this Protestant prestige to wider developments in Chinese society, including the formation of an urban professional class, the spread of nationalist rhetoric in China in the 1900s and 1910s and the importance of moral themes in that rhetoric, and the growing attention to the symbolic elements associated with modern nation-states, such as national flags, patriotic anthems, and public ceremonies, with which Protestants had long been familiar.; Enjoying unprecedented popularity after 1911, Fuzhou Protestants began to hope for the swift conversion of China to Christianity. However, as the concluding chapter shows, the emergence in the 1920s of a new nationalism which defined Chinese Protestants as agents of Western imperialism ended Protestant hopes for remaking China through political activism, and paved the way for the renewed emphasis on personal piety which appeared among Chinese Protestants after that time.