Concubinage And Obstacles, The Confucian Scholar Who Converted To Christianity In The Late Ming And Early Qing

After Jesuit missionaries entered China and had the preliminary contact with Chinese people, each side left the other party the inevitable and complicated impression of"stranger". It is interesting to note that the original impressions as a result of their preconceptions of the other party did not necessarily all diminish or disappear as time went on. On the contrary, some of the potential differences and conflicts would emerge and intensify in the course of their dialogues. Concubinage System is such a case: it did not reach a basic consensus through dialogue, but rather caused increasingly fierce disputes between the two parties.The main purpose of Missionaries coming to China is to disseminate the gospel of Jesus Christ in China. As Christianity is a "foreign religion" in the hearts of the Chinese people, it is inevitable to experience challenges from Chinese local culture which is regard as the core of Confucian culture. Western missionaries also realized that the importance of the traditional Chinese ideology, Chinese culture and Confucian ethics among the Chinese and thus adopted compatible missionary strategy. As a result, they made some concessions to the Confucian ethics. However, in the course of their work with the Christian missionary in China, the missionaries encountered many difficulties on the issue of Concubinage System. Monogamy System which is from the "Bible" traditional Christian formed a sharp contradiction with Concubinage System which is from the culture of Confucian filial piety. In the West it appears to be a"moral issue"while to the Confucian Chinese it is a complicated issue of filial piety. Therefore this barrier manifests the conflict of marital ethics value in Chinese and the Western culture.That the Chinese and Western perspectives are entirely different on the issue of Concubinage, suggests some fundamental disagreement between Chinese and Western cultures. Due to the nature of this issue, then it can not be an ignored factor which decided the fate of early Jesuits in China. This paper related theories on this issue and analyses some typical cases to explore the causes underneath the Concubinage System, it would help us to further strengthen the awareness of the cultural conflict between China and West during Ming and Qing Dynasties, to understand the nature of cross-cultural, the rule of communication and to understand the difficulty of the early missionaries coming in China. Such a study is of great value for today's cross-cultural dialogue and communication.