This book depicts the revival of Protestant Christianity among diverse groups of people in the commercially prosperous coastal city of Wenzhou, and shows how resurgent and innovated Christian beliefs and practices in the reform era reveal emerging patterns of power formation, place making and morality building in the context of a market-oriented, modernizing China..

An anthropological theorization of the unity and diversity of Christianity, this book focuses on Christian communities in Nanping, a small city in China. It applies methodological insights from Actor-Network Theory to investigate how the Christian God is made part of local social networks. The study examines how Christians interact with and re-define material objects, such as buildings, pews, offerings, and blood, in order to identify the kind of networks and non-human actors that they collectively design. By comparing local Christian traditions with other practices informing the Nanping religious landscape, the study points out potential cohesion via the centralizing presence of the Christian God, the governing nature of the pastoral clergy, and the semi-transcendent being of the Church.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Xiamen’s pursuit of World Heritage Site designation from UNESCO stimulated considerable interest in the city’s Christian past. History enthusiasts, both Christian and non-Christian, devoted themselves to reinterpreting the legacy of missionaries and challenged official narratives of Christianity’s troubled associations with Western imperialism. In this book, Jifeng Liu documents the tension that has inevitably emerged between the established official history and these popular efforts. This volume elucidates the ways in which Christianity has become an integral part of Xiamen, a Chinese city profoundly influenced by Western missionaries. Drawing on extensive interviews, locally produced histories, and observations of historical celebrations, Liu provides an intimate portrait of the people who navigate ideological issues to reconstruct a Christian past, reproduce religious histories, and redefine local power structures in the shadow of the state. Liu makes a compelling argument that a Christian past is being constructed that combines official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory, a realm of dynamic negotiation that is neither dominated by the authoritarian state nor characterized by popular resistance. In this way, Negotiating the Christian Past in China illustrates the complexities of memory and missions in shaping the city’s cultural landscape, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations. This groundbreaking study assumes a perspective of globalization and localization, in both the past and the present, to better understand Chinese Christianity in a local, national, and global context. It will be welcomed by scholars of religious studies and world Christianity, and by those interested in the church-state relationship in China.

The rise of China as a superpower and of Chinese Christians as vital members of the global church mean that world Christianity would be a dynamic transformation and bountiful blessing to the world by engaging with Chinese biblical interpretations among global theologies. This book, a twentieth-anniversary revised and expanded edition, includes studies that range from exploration of the philosophical structure of Eastern culture to present-day sociopolitical realities in Malaysia and China—all in support of cross-cultural methods of reading the Bible culturally and reading the cultures biblically.

Introduces readers to key sociological perspectives about modern Chinese society and social change.

While there are a growing number of researchers who are exploring the political and social aspects of the global Renewal movement, few have provided sustained socio-economic analyses of this phenomenon. The editors and contributors to this volume offer perspectivesin light of the growth of the Renewal movement in the two-thirds world.

Over the last thirty years, social entrepreneurship has boomed in the People’s Republic of China. Today there are hundreds of thousands of legally registered NGOs, and millions more unregistered, working in the areas of the environment, education, women’s issues, disability services, community development, LGBTQ rights, and healthcare. The rise of these Chinese NGOs and their implications for civil society merits the focus of significant scholarly attention. This book draws upon the personal stories of social entrepreneurs in China, as well as their supporters and beneficiaries, in order to examine what the rapid growth of social entrepreneurship reveals about China's complex and dynamic society in the 21st century. It discusses the historical, cultural, and political circumstances that allowed and inspired people to become social entrepreneurs and create new forms of democratic engagement. Examining what social entrepreneurship with Chinese characteristics looks like, the book explores how it is changing the relationship between Chinese citizens and the state, and goes on to explain the subsequent effect on Chinese society. Highlighting the importance of citizen activism in the PRC from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Chinese Politics, Civil Society and Sociology.