Until well into the twentieth century few Americans living beyond the western and northeastern United States ever met or interacted in person with Chinese immigrants. One reason was there were few Chinese in part due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the entry of Chinese laborers, a group that had been previously welcomed by capitalists as a large supply of cheap labor. Moreover, the majority of Chinese immigrants did not speak English well, if at all.
Despite Americans lacking much direct contact with the Chinese people, they nonetheless held strong impressions, often incorrect or demeaning about these “Celestials” as they were often called in the 19th century, that they formed from accounts of explorers, merchants, and missionaries. Another popular epithet, heathen, focused on the uncivilized aspects of Chinese, worship of idols, and their uncleanliness.
The earliest views of Chinese held in the West, which was generally
( Empress of China. (see Lee, Before Chinatown)
Later in the mid-19th century, China was in turmoil and disarray after being defeated and humiliated in two costly Opium Wars with Great Britain who had introduced opium from India to China to pay for its own 'addiction' to China's tea that caused a trade imbalance of silver payments.
This uncertain situation provided a golden opportunity in China for Christian missionaries to engage in medical as well as evangelical missions.
Many missionaries regarded Britain’s victories in the Opium Wars as a sign that God was readying China for the arrival of the Word. “ Roberts added, “ we are willing to see anything which has a tendency to accomplish these desirable ends”— the opening of China to Christ.
. (See Minden)
Chinese Anti-missionary Sentiment due to the Harm of Opium
Much of the Chinese opposition to Christian missionaries arose from the fact that opium was a harmful and illegal commodity, and that despite their vigorous advocacy of the rule of law, Westerners were the chief importers of the drug. Indeed, the connection drawn in the minds of many Chinese between the missionaries and the illegal activities of their countrymen was discrediting all missionary claims of benevolent intent and undermining their assertion that Christianity represented a superior foundation for moral behavior. Many missionaries began to hold the view that the opium trade, or rather the stigma of lawlessness that was associated with it, was becoming a major obstacle to the spread of the gospel in China.
By the mid-1850s, the attitudes of American missionaries toward the opium question had undergone a fundamental transformation. Humanitarian concern for the impact of opium on the health and welfare of the Chinese people was supplanted by a greater concern over the impact of its illegality on the reputation of Westerners in general, and thus on the winning of greater numbers of converts to Christianity. There was no greater proof of this change than the influential contribution made by American missionaries to the agreements associated with the Treaty of Tianjin negotiated in 1858. 70
Thus, for the sake of easing their own consciences, and , perhaps, to more effectively spread the Gospel in China, missionaries helped to open the country more widely to the importation of opium. After the signing of the Treaties of Tianjin, the importation of the drug increased dramatically and opium addiction became one of the most devastating scourges ever to afflict the Chinese people.
To save the heathen Chinese, it was first necessary to demonize them.
see john pomfret
The first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, arrived in 1807, but during the first twenty-seven years in China, Protestant missionaries claimed only ten converts.
In 1830, E. C. Bridgman arrived in Canton with the evangelical zeal of the Second Great Awakening. He was one of the first Americans to acquire a mastery of the Chinese language, earning wide recognition as the foremost American expert on Chinese society and politics.3
From May 1836 to April 1837, Bridgman and Williams? printed seventeen articles on the history and present state of the opium trade in China, most of which illustrated the various ways that the drug was exerting an evil influence on the moral, commercial, and political life of the nation.
p 44
Peter Parker, the fourth American Protestant preacher in China, arrived in Guangzhou in 1834. A graduate of both Yale’s medical college and its divinity school, he was the first medical missionary in China. Parker and the other early Protestants shared some similarities with the Catholic Jesuits who had been coming to China since the sixteenth century. Through good works, they sought to convince the Chinese of the superiority of their faith. In his application to the American Board, Parker described dual goals: disseminating “the blessings of science and Christianity all over the globe.”
Issachar Roberts arrived in China in 1837 after mortgaging his Mississippi farm and preaching in Macao. While the first group of Western missionaries studied Chinese and hobnobbed with the upper classes, Roberts was drawn to the masses. Roberts moved to Hong Kong and then in May 1844 to Guangzhou
Peter Parker and Issachar Roberts disagreed about how to change China. Parker and others sent out by the American Board believed that long years of study, an additional specialization, and a healthy respect for the culture were the keys to China’s kingdom. They were scholars, not bomb-throwers. They wanted, in Parker’s words, to “heal” China, to help it become stronger.
James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) was a British Protestant Christian missionary who spent 51 years in China and founded the China Inland Mission (CIM, now OMF International) which was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to China who established 125 schools and directly resulted in 18,000 Christian conversions, as well as the establishment of more than 300 stations of work with more than 500 local helpers in all eighteen provinces.
Most missionaries were white men, and although many came with a white wife and children, their effectiveness with Chinese women was limited. By the late 1890s, Baptist churches approved of sending white women missionaries to China.
The resistance and hostility among Chinese, described as 'yellow demons,' toward Christian missionaries attempting to convert them to Christian religious beliefs and practices is illustrated in an article published in 1900 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune which reported that Chinese made crudely drawn but pointed cartoon images that dramatically conveyed their negative feelings toward missionaries. The illustration below shows the hostility and resistance toward western missionaries and their attempt to convert them to Christianity.
The missionary, represented on the left by a hog tied to a cross, is being skewered with arrows shot by little Chinese demons at the command of a mandarin. The legend on the cartoon reads, "Ask the beast if he is still thinking of coming (to China)."
heading?
Missionaries may have had biases in their reports in seeking continued financial support. They had to convince their churches of a need for the Chinese to be saved i.e , poverty, drug abuse, crime, child abuse. The worse the picture that missionaries presented about the Chinese, the more likely they were to receive financial backing from their churches. Moreover, they had to show progress or success in the conversion of the Chinese to Christianity.
see MGM Cartoons:
Pearl Buck views
How Americans Acquired Their "knowledge" about Chinese
The accounts of the Chinese that Christian missionaries sent back to America were one of the primary sources of information about the Chinese for the American public and highly influential on how Americans perceived the Chinese.
As Lazrich (2006) observed: “Christian missionaries, deeply motivated by the zeal of their convictions and the imperative force of their religious ideology, served as the vanguard of Western cultural penetration wherever they ventured to establish themselves. And while their methods and goals were not always in harmony with those of their profit-seeking countrymen, missionaries would come to serve a predominant role in shaping the earliest formal diplomatic relations between the Western powers and the traditional societies and governments of the non-Western world.”
Missionaries had great influence in shaping the first U.S. treaties with the Chinese since their mastery of the Chinese language and experience in dealing with Qing officials were indispensable to the diplomats representing the United States.
Missionaries in China attracted some Chinese to study in the U.S, and some became Christians who wanted to return to China as missionaries, Being fluent in Chinese, and being Chinese, in many ways they could establish better rapport with the Chinese which facilitated their conversion rates.
Missionary Work with Chinese in the U.S.
Historian Derek Chang analyzed how the Baptist Home Mission approached conversion attempts among the growing number of immigrant Chinese around 1869, an increase due largely to the 10 to 20,000 Chinese brought from China to work on building the Central Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Using Portland for his analysis, Chang noted that although evangelical Christians made extensive efforts to convert the Chinese, they depicted the Chinese in a negative light, as heathens who worshipped false gods, engaged in opium smoking, and brought Chinese women over as virtual slaves who were forced into prostitution.
Chang also noted the simultaneous goal of Baptist missionaries toward converting black Americans in Raleigh, North Carolina. Although both the Chinese and blacks were viewed in a negative light and hence in need of conversion to Christianity, there was an important difference between the two populations. Most of the Chinese were unacquainted with Christianity and also found it acceptable to hold more than one belief system such as Buddhism and Taoism. In contrast, even before slavery was abolished, blacks already were practicing their own version of Christianity. Chang pointed out that white missionaries wanted to retain power in the churches involving Chinese and blacks, but found that these groups wanted autonomy and self-control.
Missionaries were much more successful in converting Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. than those in China. One attraction was the opportunity for the Chinese to learn English from missionaries and Sunday School teachers. Being in the U.S., the Chinese wanted to acquire better acceptance from the American public, and becoming Christians was a major means at a time when Chinese were generally disparaged and regarded as "heathens" who would never assimilate to American values.
A 1903 newspaper account of the Chinese in Birmingham, Alabama, showed that despite the harsh and discriminatory treatment of Chinese across the country in 1903 that began much earlier and continued for many subsequent decades, there were efforts by Christian churches in the highly segregated Deep South, to convert these "heathens" to Christianity through Sunday School classes.
The Second Presbyterian Church provided 15 teachers for 15 Chinese students of unspecified ages. It was felt that the 1:1 ratio would expedite their acquisition of English. It is questionable if there were as many as 15 Chinese children in Birmingham at all! The 1900 census showed only 5 Chinese, all adult males, and the 1910 census showed only 10 Chinese adult males. No women or children were listed in either census. This discrepancy probably is due to poor enumeration that failed to record any Chinese children, or women, if there were any.
The pastor cited the importance of this outreach "because the Chinese are subject to many temptations peculiar to American cities." He did not cite specific temptations but implied that Sunday School experiences would protect them. As an aside, he did not seem to recognize how effectively Chinese parents discipline their children to behave.
A final argument by the pastor for the value of Sunday School experiences for Chinese children was that when they retire and return to China, they may play a role in the evangelical goal of spreading the Gospel in China.
The evangelical mission in Birmingham was by no means an isolated one, but one that could be found increasingly in towns, large and small, across the country by 1900.
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