Free Restless Empire by Odd Westad

free will, but because their families or clans decided that they had to, others were drawn to the cities by the freedom from family control that they offered. As in other countries at the dawn of industrialization, factory life in China was hard and hazardous, but the foreignness of the cities broke the monotony of farming and held out the hope of rich rewards to those who most eagerly broke the set moral guidelines of the past.
    M ANY C HINESE FIRST ENCOUNTERED foreigners as missionaries. As the empire was forced to open its doors in the mid-1800s, Christian missions sprung up in the treaty ports and itinerant missionaries began traveling to most parts of the country. In spite of both official and popular Chinese resentment, much cultural and educational interaction took place through Christian missions. Education and science, not religion, became the most significant fields of missionary enterprise. Still, the Christian faith came to have a deep impact on some parts of Chinese society, as did the many religious amalgams and cultural translations that came out of these contacts.
    While the social and economic dislocation in China in the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for the entry of a new transcendental faith, the association of Christianity with foreign aggression diminished the effectiveness of the missionaries’ message. Although many were impressed with the personal courage and sacrifice shown by foreign and Chinese Christians, many more were disgusted with the demands foreign governments made to pave the way for Christian proselytizing. When France declared itself a protector of all Catholic missionaries in China, or when the British or Germans exacted revenge for attacks against Christians, much of the goodwill on which Christianity could expand was destroyed. The sense that Christians were one of many Western groups out to smash the existing order in China also damaged their cause. In village after village, disputes, often violent, broke out when Christians refused to contribute to popular festivals or the upkeep of the village temple. In some areas reports of churches being vandalized were followed by news of temples or sacred images being destroyed. The attitude of Confucian officialdom toward Christians remained profoundly negative. A Christian man brought before a Shanxi magistrate after a brawl over the man’s refusal to help pay for the annual Chinese opera performance was asked which country he was from. When he answered that he was a man of the Qing, the magistrate exploded:
    If you are a person of the Qing dynasty then why are you following the foreign devils and their seditious religion? You didn’t pay your opera money when requested by the village and you were beaten. But how can you dare to bring a suit? You certainly ought to pay the opera subscription. If you don’t you won’t be allowed to live in the land of the Qing. You will have to leave for a foreign country. 5
    Two constituencies among which Christian missionaries made some early inroads—as would the Communists later—were women and ethnic minorities. Even though their position could be strong in some regions and clans, especially in the south, women were the largestoppressed group in nineteenth-century China. They lacked the rights of men and were under the command of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and even sons. For some of the most exploited women, Christianity, with its emphasis on choice and personal salvation, proved a way out, but often at the cost of breaking with their families or even their community. Some ethnic minorities, such as the Miao people in southern China or the Taiwan aboriginals, also had relatively high numbers of converts. After the end of the Taiping movement, groups among the Hakka joined with local missions—such as the Swiss-German Basel Mission—in order to defend against revenge from non-Hakka neighbors. The Deng clan—from among whom one of the key leaders of Communist China, Deng