Ying Refused Between Changes

The missionary movement in China in the nineteenth century assumed sweeping proportions and extend to wide areas not directly reached by other agents of the Western impact. The sources of anti-Christian feeling were many and complex. On the more intangible side, there was a general pique against the unwanted intrusion of the Western countries; there was an understandable tendency to seek an external scapegoat for internal disorders only tangentially attributable to the West and perhaps most important, there was a virile tradition of ethnocentricism, vented long before against Indian Buddhism, which since the seventeenth century, focused on Western Christianity. Accordingly, even before the missionary movement really got under way in the mid-nineteenth century, it was already at a disadvantage. After 1919, as missionary activity in the hinterland expanded, it quickly became apparent that in addition to the intangibles,numerous tangible grounds for Chinese reformation.