Chapter 4: In This Generation

The Student Volunteer Movement and the Institutional Infrastructure

A Thousand Lives to China

He shaved the front of his head, plaited his remaining hair into a queue in the Manchu style, and donned the long blue changshan¹ of a Chinese gentleman. The European residents of Shanghai called his small company the “Pigtail Tribe”. He was twenty-one years old.

James Hudson Taylor² had landed at Shanghai on March 1, 1854, in the fourth year of a civil war that Hong Xiuquan had launched from a Guangxi village and that would, before it ended, kill between twenty and thirty million Chinese. He was the son of a Methodist chemist whose evening prayers, his children would later remember, included the unevangelized millions of the Chinese empire. By then he had abandoned his medical studies, signed on with a small London missions agency, and sailed aboard the Dumfries for a country he had never seen. What he did when he arrived was, in the eyes of his fellow Western missionaries, very nearly scandalous: the queue, the changshan, the interior. The treaty ports, Taylor had concluded after his first year in the country, would never reach China. What reached China was a man who looked Chinese, spoke Chinese, ate Chinese food, and lived in a Chinese house in a Chinese town.

He returned briefly to England in 1860 to recover his health and finish his medical degree, and it was during that interlude—in a letter to his sister Amelia, dated February 14, 1860—that he wrote the sentence that would later be inscribed beneath his portrait in mission halls from London to Toronto:

Had I a thousand pounds China should have it. Had I a thousand lives China should claim every one. No, not China, but Christ! Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a Saviour?³

It was a private letter to a sister; Taylor would have been embarrassed to learn how far it would travel.

On June 25, 1865, walking alone on the beach at Brighton, carrying a number he could not put down—four hundred million Chinese going to what he called a Christless eternity—Taylor opened his Bible on the sand and founded, in his own mind and on his own authority, the China Inland Mission. The mission’s principles were as radical as its name: no fundraising appeals, no denominational tests, Chinese dress and diet, governance from China itself, and above all a commitment to the inland provinces that other Protestant societies had left untouched. The next year Taylor and his wife Maria sailed from the East India Docks with sixteen recruits and four of their own children aboard the tea clipper Lammermuir⁴—the Lammermuir Party. Nine of the sixteen were single women, an arrangement that scandalized the established boards and prefigured the female majority that would come to characterize Protestant missions worldwide.

For the next forty years Taylor built, recruited, and led. In 1886 he called for one hundred new missionaries; the hundred came by the end of 1887. By June 3, 1905, when Taylor died in Changsha—a thousand miles upriver from the treaty port where he had stepped ashore half a century before—the CIM counted 825 missionaries, more than three hundred stations, and some twenty-five thousand baptized converts.

But his deepest impact on the American generation came through seven men he had recruited. In February 1885, seven young Englishmen of conspicuous social rank announced that they were sailing under Taylor’s CIM. They became known as the Cambridge Seven⁵: six were from Cambridge University, one from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Their leader was Charles Thomas Studd—a cricketer of the first rank, captain of Eton, captain of Cambridge, chosen for the England XI that toured Australia to recover the Ashes. He was twenty-four years old. He had given up his athletic career and whatever fortune his family might have settled on him.

The British public, accustomed to thinking of foreign missions as the calling of provincial dissenters, could not look away. The Times covered the Seven’s farewell meetings. A book, The Evangelisation of the World: A Missionary Band, was rushed into print and reached a circulation of hundreds of thousands. Across the Atlantic, American college students read the book and heard the story in their chapels. C. T. Studd was evidence that the highest life of the English universities was bending its shoulder to the missionary enterprise. If Cambridge could produce a Studd, the question ran, what might Yale produce?

The answer came on a Massachusetts hillside in the summer of 1886. The conference that gave birth to the Student Volunteer Movement inherited from Taylor its foundational conviction: that the Great Commission was not aspirational but operational, that one generation could complete it, and that the great unevangelized field at the heart of the world was China.

Mount Hermon, July 1886

The two hundred and fifty-one young men who gathered at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1886 had come for a Bible conference, not for a vocation. They arrived from eighty-nine colleges and universities—Yale and Princeton and Harvard, the smaller denominational colleges of the Midwest, the seminary schools of the South—and they spent the better part of the month of July on the hillside above the Connecticut River, under the shade of the old pines that Dwight L. Moody had acquired along with the school he had founded there five years earlier. It was Moody’s school and Moody’s conference, though the organizer of record was Luther Wishard, the YMCA’s collegiate secretary, who had pressed Moody for the invitation for a year⁶. The conference ran from July 7 to August 1. Mornings were devoted to Bible study; afternoons to athletics and conversation; evenings to preaching. The speakers were eminent men of the American revival tradition—Arthur Tappan Pierson⁷, Adoniram Judson Gordon⁸—and the Cambridge Seven, though Studd and his companions were already in China, were spoken of in the dormitories as men who had given everything away for a conviction.

What happened at Mount Hermon was not planned. It emerged.

On the evening of July 24, in what the conference would remember as the meeting of the ten nations, ten students rose to speak for the countries they had come from or grown up in. Seven were foreign-born—an Armenian, a Japanese, a Siamese, a German, a Dane, a Norwegian, an American Indian—and three were sons of missionaries in China, India, and Persia. Each spoke for three minutes or less, and each closed with the same three words in his own language: God is love. When the last had finished, the hall emptied into the pines above the river. “Everybody was quiet”, a twenty-one-year-old Cornell undergraduate named John Raleigh Mott⁹ recalled. “We scattered among the groves.” Nobody discussed the speeches. The grove on the ridge above the Connecticut River became, that night, a place of prayer that lasted into the small hours. “I know many men who prayed on into the late watches of that night”, Mott would say. “The grove back there on the ridge was the scene that night of battles in which the unselfish and heroic in men won the victory.”¹⁰

The evenings after July 24 multiplied in intensity. A young man from Princeton named Robert Wilder¹¹ had come to the conference with an explicit hope: that the meeting might produce a body of students willing to commit themselves to foreign mission service. His sister Grace, who had not come to Mount Hermon, had laid it on her heart to pray for a specific number: one hundred. Wilder and a small circle of friends began, quietly, to circulate a statement:

We are willing and desirous, God permitting, to become foreign missionaries.

By the last day, ninety-nine students had signed. The conference closed, and the next morning the ninety-nine gathered for a farewell meeting of prayer in Recitation Hall. There were not seats enough; some had to stand. They knelt. And while they were kneeling, the hundredth man came in and knelt with them. They were immediately given a name: the Mount Hermon Hundred. Mott was among them. He had heard J. Kynaston Studd—C. T.’s older brother—deliver a sermon at Cornell the previous January whose three sentences, he later said, had changed his life. On that July evening at Mount Hermon he wrote a line into a notebook that he would keep for the rest of his long life:

Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not. Seek ye first the kingdom of God.

Mott was not the only figure in the Hundred whose life Mount Hermon set in motion. Wilder would become the SVM’s first traveling secretary and spend the following year visiting American colleges to repeat the experiment on other campuses. Among those the movement drew in were Robert E. Speer, a Princetonian who became the formidable foreign secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, a position he would hold for forty-six years¹², and Horace Pitkin, from Yale, who signed the pledge at Northfield in 1889, sailed for China, and was killed during the Boxer Rising of 1900¹³. These were young men in their late teens and early twenties. Within fifteen years they would be running American Protestantism’s foreign arm.

The Mount Hermon Hundred dispersed in August. They took with them a conviction that the moment they had witnessed deserved an organization. Within two years, one had been created: the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, an inter-denominational body that would, for the next four decades, funnel the idealism of American college students into the mission fields of the world. Within five years of Mount Hermon, the SVM counted 6,200 volunteers from 352 schools in the United States and Canada. By 1920, over 8,140 graduates had sailed under its auspices—more than 2,500 of them to China, a larger number than had gone to any other country in any other period of Christian history¹⁴.

A pencil line on a piece of paper in a summer encampment had become a generation.

And a generation more female than the early histories acknowledge. The secondary literature on the SVM orbits around men like Mott and Wilder, whose names appear in the founding documents. But from its first decade the movement was, in its rank and file, heavily female. Women could not be ordained in most Protestant denominations in the 1890s, could not sit in the councils that set denominational policy, and could not vote in American civil elections until 1920—but they could sign the SVM declaration, and they could sail. By the early twentieth century, women constituted roughly sixty percent of all American Protestant missionaries in the field, a proportion higher in China than in any other mission region. The vocation offered educated Protestant women of the 1890s the single largest professional opening in American society: a chance to run a hospital, lead a school, manage a budget, author a book.

Matilda Thurston¹⁵, Mount Holyoke class of 1896, signed the SVM declaration after a missionary delegation visited her campus and sailed for China. In 1915 she opened Ginling College in Nanjing—the first women’s college in China to grant bachelor’s degrees—with six faculty and eleven students in a rented compound called the House of a Hundred Rooms, leased for thirty-two dollars a month.

The enterprise they staffed—as teachers, physicians, administrators—drew, in considerable part, on graduates of Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Bryn Mawr who had signed Wilder’s pledge. The mission field was the one place in early-twentieth-century America where a woman with a college education could exercise the authority her training had prepared her for. Many of them never came home.

The Watchword

On the morning of March 25, 1876, Arthur Tappan Pierson’s church burned to the ground. Fort Street Presbyterian was the largest Presbyterian church in Detroit; when the fire was out, nothing remained but the cold gray walls and the spire, which had crashed onto the street. Pierson rented an opera house and preached there for the next sixteen months. The congregation that filled the opera-house seats was not the congregation that had filled the pews: the well-dressed families of Fort Street gave way to working men who had never paid a pew rent. At forty, amid the revival that followed, Pierson concluded that he had spent his career seeking the approval of the rich. He abolished pew rents, accepted his salary on faith, and began to read the Scriptures with a literalism that his earlier postmillennialism¹⁶ had never required. George Mueller of Bristol—the English evangelist who ran his orphanages without asking for a penny—became his model. By the time Pierson moved to Philadelphia in 1883, he had crossed from post- to premillennialism, and the crossing had changed the tempo of everything: if Christ’s return was not a distant culmination but an imminent possibility, then every unevangelized soul was a delay. In 1886, while the Mount Hermon students were still dispersing to their campuses, he published a book called The Crisis of Missions, and in it he linked the timing of the end, through a particular reading of the Olivet Discourse,¹⁷ to the completion of the missionary task.

The key text was Matthew 24:14, the verse that provided the grammatical backbone of the whole enterprise:

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

The tense is future. The agent is collective. The timing of “the end” is conditional—suspended on two words: and then. To Pierson and to the missionary generation he inspired, this verse was not an ornament but a program. Pierson put the logic bluntly: “Peter exhorts us both to ‘look for and hasten the coming of the day of God;’ and what if our inactivity delays His coming?”¹⁸ The end of history—the return of Christ, the consummation of all things—was suspended upon the evangelization of the nations. The church did not merely have a duty to preach the Gospel; the church had the power, through preaching, to hasten the last day. And the phrase that expressed this conviction¹⁹ became the movement’s watchword and its signature:

The evangelization of the world in this generation.

The South African missiologist David Bosch²⁰, writing a century later, identified what this formulation had done to the Protestant imagination: “Christ’s return was now understood as being dependent upon the successful completion of the missionary task.”²¹ The Gospel, in this construction, was not simply good news about a past event; it was a lever on the future²². To delay was to delay the Second Coming itself. The phrase went out on banners and letterhead, from Nashville to Shanghai, and the grammar of Matthew 24:14—and then—supplied the urgency.

Why China

On the map that hung behind every SVM platform, China filled a quarter of the world. Four hundred million souls—the number appeared in every pamphlet, on every banner. If the evangelization of the world was to be completed in a generation, and if China remained unevangelized, the world remained unevangelized. The mathematics were as simple as they were staggering: no scheme for the completion of the Great Commission could succeed that did not, at its center, include the conversion of China.

And to this mathematical case was added the scriptural one. Isaiah 49:12, which circulated through nineteenth-century American Protestantism as a prophecy of China’s inclusion in God’s redemptive plan. For the students who sailed under the SVM banner in the 1890s and 1900s, the verse was not a scholarly curiosity; it was a commission. Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim. The end of the age would not arrive until they came. And they had not come. Therefore the work remained.

China thus occupied, in the psychology of the movement, a peculiar and powerful position. It was the hardest field and the most necessary. It had, in Morrison’s and Parker’s and Williams’s generation, resisted the first assault with the Canton system and the Qing prohibitions; its conversion rates remained, by any measure, disappointing. And yet its resistance only sharpened the sense of destiny: because it was hard, its yielding would be the decisive event; because it was large, its yielding would compensate for every smaller disappointment elsewhere. To go to China was to go to the frontier of the last days.

What moved that generation of college graduates to the other side of the world—to a country whose language many of them never mastered and whose customs many of them never understood—was the conviction that they were participating in the final chapter of human history, and that China was the page on which that chapter would be written. Henry Winters Luce²³, Yale class of 1892, had planned a career in law; he abandoned it, sailed for Shandong, and raised a son in Tengchow who would grow up to found Time magazine.

Events in China seemed to confirm the conviction. The Qing dynasty, humiliated by Japan in the war of 1894–95, was widely perceived as a civilization in crisis. The essays of Kang Youwei²⁴, Liang Qichao²⁵, and Sun Yat-sen, translated into English and reprinted in missionary journals, carried the impression of a China whose ancient order was dissolving and whose educated class was searching for a new synthesis. Missionaries concluded, not unreasonably, that the providential moment had arrived. The Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898—undertaken by the Guangxu Emperor under Kang’s influence and crushed within months—was read in American missionary circles not as a domestic political drama but as evidence that the old order was breaking. The fields were white already to the harvest. The workers were few.

The Mobilization

In the autumn of 1888, John R. Mott—twenty-three years old, newly appointed as the YMCA’s traveling secretary—set out for the college circuit. Between the pledge on a piece of paper and the gangplank at San Francisco stood a continent’s worth of organizational machinery: denominational approvals, language training, salary commitments, field assignments, and the money to fund it all. Mott built it. By 1915, when he assumed the chairmanship of the SVM itself, he had assembled what was effectively a recruiting army on the American college campus. He visited hundreds of institutions. He assembled, through a vast correspondence network, a list of every student volunteer in North America and tracked them, year by year, through their college courses and into their deployment. He negotiated with denominational mission boards, which supplied the funds and the field assignments. He spoke, by conservative estimates, to more than a million students in his working lifetime.

His most visible instrument was the quadrennial convention—the great gathering held every four years in cities like Cleveland, Toronto, Nashville, Des Moines, and Kansas City, where for five days returned missionaries described their work, student delegates sat assembled by institution in color-coded blocks, and collection envelopes went out and came back full. A twenty-year-old who entered the Nashville hall in 1906 sat among four thousand others and looked up at the banner above the stage. The question it posed was not whether the world could be evangelized in his generation. The question was whether he would go. American Protestantism had never produced a recruiting apparatus on this scale, and would not again.

The universities that supplied the movement’s recruits were not random. Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, Oberlin, Williams, Amherst, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith: the target institutions were the most selective colleges in the country, and the SVM’s appeal was pitched, self-consciously, to the most accomplished of their undergraduates. To volunteer for the foreign field was, in the language of the 1890s, to “give one’s best”. The movement did not want the mediocre; it wanted the valedictorians. It argued, and was widely believed, that missionary service was the highest calling available to educated youth—a vocation higher than law or medicine or the ministry at home, because it combined the personal sacrifice of the pioneer with the cosmic significance of the last days.

The class dimension was not incidental. The SVM exported a substantial fraction of the American Protestant elite to the mission fields. The pipeline ran from preparatory school to selective college to theological seminary to the foreign field—Yale Bachelors of Arts, Wellesley women with musical training, seminary graduates fluent in Greek. Their children, born in Shandong and Hangzhou and Chengdu, Chinese before English, would return to attend the same colleges their parents had attended and become a distinctive class within the American establishment. The SVM was planting the seed corn of what would later be called, when the trouble started, the “China Hands”.

Morrison and Milne and the Canton men had made the missionary a dictionary-maker—a patient linguist building the apparatus by which Americans could know China at all, author of a Bible in Chinese and a grammar and a college at Malacca. Parker and the physicians who followed him at Hog Lane had made the missionary a surgeon at an operating table—practitioner of an entering-wedge strategy in which the knife opened what the preacher’s tongue could not. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission had made the missionary a man who looked Chinese and lived in a Chinese town—an indigenizer convinced that only absorption could reach what the treaty ports had missed. And Strong and Pierson, the theorists of the 1880s, had made the missionary the vanguard of Anglo-Saxon civilization itself—agent of a Christian order whose spread was read as the providential architecture of the last days. Mount Hermon drew from all four—dictionary, lancet, changshan, and banner—and sent one generation to carry them all.

The Human Current

The numbers numb. Eight thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand—looking at the tables in the SVM records, it is easy to lose the weight of what each line represents: a farm in Ohio left behind, a young woman in Kansas saying goodbye to her mother, a trunk packed for a voyage of forty days. It helps to look at one life, and then at one family.

Lottie Moon²⁶ went out to Shandong in 1873, a Southern Baptist from Virginia, and stayed thirty-nine years. In the villages of P’ingtu and Tengchow she learned Chinese well enough that her neighbors stopped calling her a foreigner, took a Chinese name, lived in courtyard houses, ate Chinese food, and spent her letters home pleading with the Baptist boards for more workers. “I would I had a thousand lives”, she wrote in October 1887, “that I might give them to China.” She never married. She never came home for more than a furlough. In the famine of 1911 she gave her savings to starving villagers; by late 1912 her colleagues had her sent down the coast to Shanghai, where the steward who carried her up the gangway of the SS Manchuria was sure she did not weigh fifty pounds. On the night of December 18, the nurse who had escorted her on board heard her stir in her cabin and speak: “Well, he has come. Jesus is right here, now.” Six days later, on Christmas Eve, with the ship at anchor in Kobe harbor, she raised her hands, pressed her fists together in a Chinese greeting to someone the nurse could not see, and died. A century later, the annual Southern Baptist offering named for her would still fund the board that had never been able to spare her a second nurse.

Donald N. Clark, professor emeritus at Trinity University in San Antonio, writes about the missionary enterprise in part because he is its product. Both sets of his grandparents were caught up in the Student Volunteer Movement in the 1890s. They came, he has written, from Minneapolis, Chicago, and Philadelphia. None of them had ever met a Korean. None had heard a word of the Korean language. None had eaten kimchi. They had read Pierson and they had heard Mott and they had signed the declaration, and at the end of the process, because that is where the mission boards assigned them, they “shortly found themselves in the muddy towns of Korea”. The family would spend, in Clark’s accounting, 216 combined years in Korea across three generations.²⁷

Moon and the Clarks are two among thousands. The SVM was one current among many—the older denominational boards, Hudson Taylor’s CIM, the women’s societies. The families they sent left their letters in archives scattered across the United States: the Goforths²⁸ in Manchuria, the Gamewells²⁹ in Beijing, the Neviuses³⁰ and Mateers³¹ in Shandong, the Sydenstrickers³² in Zhenjiang³³. Each name in the register stands for a family; each family for decades of labor; each decade for a set of decisions—about where to live, what to eat, what language to speak at the dinner table, what to teach the children—that most Americans of any period never have to make.

The people who made them had given up everything the American middle class offered in exchange for a life in a country that did not want them. Many died young. Many buried their own children in Chinese graveyards. Many outlived their usefulness and returned to spend their old age in New England mission boarding houses, writing memoirs that sold a few hundred copies. The enterprise was, in certain respects, a catastrophe—one whose terms they largely failed to understand. They believed. They gave. They suffered. The graveyards still remain.

Building the Kingdom

What Morrison could not have imagined from his cramped quarters on Hog Lane—a handful of men and a printing press grown into a continental apparatus—was, by the end of the First World War, operational.

In 1887, a Welsh Baptist named Timothy Richard helped found a Shanghai press house³⁴ and set it to work. The presses of Shanghai, Fuzhou, and Tianjin produced Bibles, hymnals, textbooks, children’s papers, and translated Western literature; their annual print runs reached millions of pages. The Chinese religious vocabulary of the twentieth century—the words that Chinese Christians used and still use for terms³⁵ like grace, salvation, holiness, sin—was substantially forged in these presses, through collaborations between foreign missionaries and Chinese associates over fifty years of revision and argument.

The deepest argument was over a single word: God. In the 1840s, when missionary delegates sat down to produce a unified Chinese Bible, the British faction insisted on 上帝 (Shàngdì)—the Supreme Ruler of the pre-Confucian classics, a term that carried millennia of indigenous authority. The American faction countered with 神 (Shén)—a generic term for spirit, unburdened by Chinese philosophical associations. Wang Tao³⁶, the Chinese scholar who polished the committee’s literary Chinese, sat with Medhurst daily from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. The committee split. The British published with 上帝; the Americans with 神. Forty years later, when the CUV committees convened at the 1890 Shanghai conference—chaired, on the Mandarin side, by Mateer—the argument was still open. Wang Yuande³⁷, Mateer’s Chinese secretary, later recalled the summer sessions at the Anxie Lou (安歇樓, Ānxiē Lóu, “Rest Pavilion”) in Yantai: the delegates crowded into a single room with their drafts and argued for days—pounding the table, storming out, returning with smiles to begin again. In the end, he wrote, the Western missionaries held authority, “seeking only fidelity to the original text, with little regard for the refinement of the Chinese”. The CUV, completed in 1919, was published in two editions—one with 神, one with 上帝—because seventy years of argument had produced no consensus. Even now, Chinese churches still choose between them. The word for God was never settled.

In 1885, American missionaries organized the first Chinese student YMCAs at church schools in Fuzhou and Tongzhou; a decade later, in 1895, the first Chinese city YMCA opened its doors in Tianjin. By the 1920s chapters operated in most major cities—literacy classes, athletic leagues, civic training, night schools for workers. A young man who passed through a YMCA in Shanghai absorbed, along with the English lessons and the basketball drills, a particular vision of what a modernizing society ought to look like. He did not sign a confession of faith. He learned to show up on time.

From Parker’s single hospital in Canton, the medical network multiplied. By 1931, missionaries operated roughly half the hospitals in China and Hong Kong. The crown jewel was the Peking Union Medical College, established by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board in 1917 and formally inaugurated in September 1921. John D. Rockefeller Jr. attended the dedication and spoke to the assembled faculty in a spectacular complex of jade-green-tiled buildings designed, in the phrase of Simon Flexner, to be “the Johns Hopkins of China”³⁸. But the Foundation was not a mission board; it was the secular philanthropic arm of the Standard Oil fortune. The difference between a mission hospital and a Rockefeller hospital was not visible in the wards. It was visible in the chapel, which the new college made optional.

In the summer of 1918, behind the Western Front, James Yen³⁹ sat with Chinese laborers who could not write letters home to their families. The men were Shandong farmers, five thousand to a camp, sleeping shoulder to shoulder on three tiers of wooden shelves behind barbed wire. They had spent ten hours digging trenches. Yen wrote their letters by day and translated the news for them by night. Then he asked for volunteers willing to learn to read. Forty men came. They skipped their dinners to attend his evening classes. He selected the characters not from the classics but from the vernacular the men used in their letters and the news they asked him to translate—a thousand in all. After four months, thirty-five of the forty could write a letter and read the newspaper he had started printing for them. “For the first time in my ignorant intellectual life”, he later wrote, “I found the value of the common people of my own country.”

In 1919, four earlier Christian colleges merged to form Yenching University in Beijing, led from its inception by John Leighton Stuart, born in Hangzhou to Presbyterian missionary parents and raised speaking the local dialect. By the early 1920s, thirteen major Protestant universities⁴⁰ operated in China under the United Board for Christian Higher Education—among them Ginling College, St. John’s University in Shanghai, Lingnan University in Guangzhou, Shantung Christian University in Jinan, and West China Union University in Chengdu. These were full institutions of higher learning—Western curricula, libraries, laboratories, graduate programs—staffed by professors with doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford. Their students, increasingly Chinese by the 1920s, would become the leading intellectuals of Republican China. Yenching alone would train Bing Xin and Fei Xiaotong.

By the 1920s, approximately 160 Protestant missionary societies⁴¹ were operating in China, from enormous multi-denominational boards to small faith missions that relied on prayer letters. Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission remained the largest of the latter—by the early 1920s over a thousand missionaries in the field. Below the universities stood a vast lower tier: mission primary and middle schools enrolling over 150,000 students⁴² across China’s roughly 1,900 counties. The density was such that in some provinces a traveler could move for days without passing out of the operational range of at least one mission station. For many Chinese children of the 1910s and 1920s, the first book they ever held that was not a Confucian classic was a mission school reader. The characters were the same. The world they described was not.

Taken together, these institutions constituted a civilization within a civilization. The missionaries had built, by the middle 1920s, a parallel institutional order in China—one with its own hospitals, schools, universities, social welfare networks, and publications—that interlaced with traditional Chinese society but operated on distinct principles and, crucially, under foreign charters and foreign jurisdiction. It was not a boast. It was a description. In 1922 the enterprise would publish one, under the title The Christian Occupation of China—a 468-page survey that counted every convert, mapped every station, and shaded the unevangelized districts in white. The Chinese intellectuals who read it did not miss the word Occupation. They had a phrase of their own for what the book described: cultural aggression.

The Civilizational Package

When a medical missionary in Chengdu trained a Chinese doctor to perform appendectomies, he believed he was introducing not merely a surgical technique but an entire rationalist epistemology—one that would, over time, dispose the student toward Christianity as its natural corollary. When John Stewart Burgess, Princeton class of 1905, founded the sociology department at Yenching and sent his students into Beijing’s hutongs to survey rickshaw pullers, he was preparing a generation for a form of society in which Christianity would feel at home. The missionaries did not think of themselves as having built schools instead of churches. They had built schools as a form of evangelism, hospitals as a form of evangelism, YMCAs as a form of evangelism. In 1909, the YMCA’s first national physical director in China, Max Exner, designed a two-year training course for Chinese athletic coaches that required its students to study the Bible alongside anatomy, physiology, and hygiene—the civilizational package made literal curriculum. Education, medicine, civics, athletics, democratic politics: all were facets of a single project. Christianity was not a religious confession that could be separated from the civilization that had produced it. It was the living principle of a whole way of life—one that included representative government, the scientific method, monogamous marriage, and the hospital as an institution. To Christianize China was to modernize China. To modernize China was to Christianize China. The two verbs were, in the operative logic of the enterprise, interchangeable.

This was the transformation thesis in its first and fullest expression—not in the trade policies of the Cold War or the engagement rhetoric of the 1990s but here, in the civilizational package of the SVM generation. The Protestant missionaries of the 1890s were not the first to assume that contact would transform China—the Jesuits had hoped as much, and so had the treaty-port merchants—but they were the first to organize the assumption into a program and export it at continental scale. They were the first to treat China as a project rather than a civilization—and to assume that the vector of cause and effect ran only one way.

The missionary enterprise failed to convert China. It succeeded, beyond its founders’ imaginings, in converting the American establishment to a particular way of looking at China—and the assumptions the missionary generation had carried, that China was on the verge of transformation and that contact was itself the agent of change, would be carried by the China Hands long after the mission fields had closed. The thesis outlived the theology that had produced it, because its carriers did not die. They only changed uniforms.

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1. 長衫 (chángshān), literally “long robe”—the ankle-length robe worn by Chinese men from the Ming dynasty through the early twentieth century. The women’s fitted variant (旗袍, qípáo), also descended from Manchu dress and often called cheongsam in English, is a different garment.

2. James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), born in Barnsley, Yorkshire. He sailed under the Chinese Evangelisation Society, arriving Shanghai March 1, 1854.

3. Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor (1912), Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul, p. 503.

4. The eighteen missionaries aboard the Lammermuir when she sailed on May 26, 1866: James Hudson Taylor, Maria Jane Taylor, Lewis Nicol, Eliza Nicol, George Duncan, Josiah Alexander Jackson, William David Rudland, John Robert Sell, James Williamson, Susan Barnes, Mary Elizabeth Bausum, Emily Blatchley, Mary Bell, Mary Bowyer, Louise Desgraz, Jane Elizabeth Faulding, Jane McLean, and Elisabeth Rose. Only two had previous overseas experience.

5. The Seven were Charles Thomas Studd, Montagu Harry Proctor Beauchamp, Stanley P. Smith, Dixon Edward Hoste, Arthur T. Polhill-Turner, Cecil H. Polhill-Turner, and William Wharton Cassels. Hoste was from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; the other six were from Cambridge.

6. John R. Mott (1911), “The Beginnings of the Student Volunteer Movement” in The Student Volunteer Movement After Twenty-five Years 1886–1911, pp. 1–2. Wishard visited Moody in 1885 and pressed him to lend his name and preside over a Bible study conference for college students.

7. Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837–1911), born in New York City, educated at Hamilton College and Union Theological Seminary. He pastored successively in Binghamton, Waterford, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia, and edited the Missionary Review of the World from 1888 until his death. It was Pierson who addressed the Mount Hermon conference with the charge that became its rallying cry: “All should go, and go to all!”

8. Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836–1895), Baptist pastor of Clarendon Street Church in Boston and founder of the Boston Missionary Training School (later Gordon College).

9. John Raleigh Mott (1865–1955), a Methodist born in upstate New York but raised from infancy in Postville, Iowa. He had transferred to Cornell in 1885 after four years at Upper Iowa University and arrived at Mount Hermon having spent the previous months undecided between a career in law and his father’s lumber business. He lived long enough to see the apparatus decline: in 1946 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Emily Greene Balch, for what the committee called “a peace-promoting religious brotherhood across national boundaries”.

10. Basil Mathews (1934), John R. Mott: World Citizen, pp. 59–60.

11. Robert Parmelee Wilder (1863–1938), son of Royal G. Wilder, an American Presbyterian missionary who had served nearly thirty years in Kolhapur, India.

12. Robert Elliott Speer (1867–1947). He took the position at twenty-four and held it until 1937, making him the longest-serving foreign secretary in the Board’s history.

13. Horace Tracy Pitkin (1869–1900), Yale class of 1892. He served at the ABCFM station at Paotingfu from 1897 until his death during the Boxer Rising.

14. These numbers come from the internal records of the SVM, preserved at the Yale Divinity School Library. They count only those who actually sailed, not the much larger number who signed the declaration and remained at home. By 1945 the total would reach roughly 20,500. See Mott, “Report of the Executive Committee” in North American Students and World Advance (1920), pp. 61–62.

15. Matilda Calder Thurston (1875–1958). She sailed for China in 1902 with her husband to help establish the Yale Mission in Changsha, returned to teach there in 1906, and was elected president of Ginling College in 1913. Her first graduating class of five women in 1919 included Wu Yifang (吳貽芳, Wú Yífāng), who succeeded her as president.

16. Postmillennialism holds that Christ will return after a long period of Gospel triumph on earth—a view that tends to encourage patient, gradualist social reform. Premillennialism holds that Christ will return before that period, often suddenly and imminently—a view that tends to produce evangelical urgency. The shift from the former to the latter, common in late-nineteenth-century American evangelicalism, transformed foreign missions from a long-term civilizing project into a race against the clock.

17. The teaching of Jesus in Matthew 24 (with parallels in Mark 13 and Luke 21), delivered on the Mount of Olives and concerning the destruction of the Temple, the end of the age, and his return. Matthew 24:14, quoted below, is the verse most frequently invoked by nineteenth-century missionary literature.

18. Pierson (1886), The Crisis of Missions, p. 368.

19. Pierson either coined or first popularized the phrase; the precise attribution is disputed, with some tracing it to Robert P. Wilder. By 1888 it was publicly associated with Pierson.

20. David Jacobus Bosch (1929–1992), South African missiologist of the Dutch Reformed Church. Born near Kuruman, Cape Province; doctorate from the University of Basel (1957); professor of missiology at the University of South Africa from 1971. He was killed in an automobile accident at sixty-two.

21. Bosch (1991), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (1991), p. 316.

22. Pierson’s premillennialism was part of a broader shift in late-nineteenth-century American evangelicalism, one associated also with the rise of dispensationalism through the influence of John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield. The Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, would systematize the dispensational reading and embed it in the home Bibles of millions of Americans.

23. Henry Winters Luce (1868–1941). He toured as an SVM traveling secretary in 1894 alongside two fellow Yale men: Sherwood Eddy, who was bound for India, and Horace Pitkin, who was bound for China. Luce served thirty-one years as a Presbyterian missionary in Shandong. His son Henry Robinson Luce, born in Tengchow in 1898, co-founded Time in 1923.

24. 康有為 (Kāng Yǒuwéi, 1858–1927), from Nanhai, Guangdong. Confucian scholar and constitutional monarchist, he was the principal intellectual architect of the Hundred Days’ Reform. After Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the reform and ordered his arrest, he escaped with British assistance and spent fifteen years in exile across Japan, Southeast Asia, and North America.

25. 梁啟超 (Liáng Qǐchāo, 1873–1929), from Xinhui, Guangdong. A student of Kang Youwei, he became the foremost Chinese journalist and political essayist of the early twentieth century. After the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform he fled to Japan, where his newspaper essays on nationalism, constitutionalism, and civic virtue reached a vast Chinese readership.

26. Charlotte Digges “Lottie” Moon (1840–1912). The account of her final weeks comes primarily from her escort, the nurse Cynthia Miller. The historian Regina Sullivan has argued that the starvation narrative was substantially mythologized; see Sullivan (2011), Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend.

27. Between 1902 and 1973. The last of them were deported by Japanese authorities on the eve of Pearl Harbor; some returned after the Second World War to help rebuild. Clark himself grew up in Seoul, joined the Peace Corps, trained at Harvard, and became a professor.

28. Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936), the first Canadian Presbyterian missionary to China, and his wife Rosalind Bell-Smith (1864–1942). They pioneered the North Henan mission from 1888, lost five of their eleven children in infancy, fled under sword attack during the Boxer Summer of 1900, and later sparked the Manchurian revival of 1908. Rosalind’s memoir Goforth of China (1937) became one of the most widely read missionary biographies of the twentieth century.

29. Francis Dunlap Gamewell (1857–1950), American Methodist Episcopal missionary in Beijing; studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell, graduated from Dickinson College, and joined the mission in 1881. During the Boxer Siege of the Legations in 1900, he served as chief of the Committee for Fortifications and built the barricades, which successfully protected the besieged community.

30. John Livingston Nevius (1829–1893), American Presbyterian missionary; Ningbo from 1854, Shandong from 1861. He published his method in the Chinese Recorder in 1885—self-propagating, self-supporting, self-governing churches, free of foreign money and leadership—but it found little purchase in China. In 1890 he spent two weeks advising the young Presbyterian mission in Seoul; the Korean church adopted his method wholesale, and it became the foundation of Korean Protestantism’s rapid indigenous growth.

31. Calvin Wilson Mateer (1836–1908), American Presbyterian missionary who arrived in Shandong in 1864 and founded the school that evolved, through mergers, into Cheeloo University’s predecessor. He chaired the translation committee for the Chinese Union Version of the Bible, though he died in 1908, a decade before its completion. His wife Julia Brown Mateer was a pioneering educator in her own right. Calvin spent forty-five years in Shandong, Julia thirty-four; both died there.

32. Absalom Sydenstricker (1852–1931), Southern Presbyterian missionary who first served in Hangzhou and Suzhou, moved to Zhenjiang in 1883, transferred to Huai’an from 1887 to 1896, and then returned to Zhenjiang. He traveled across Jiangsu planting stations. His daughter Pearl, born during a furlough in West Virginia in 1892, would grow up in Zhenjiang speaking Chinese before English and write The Good Earth.

33. 鎮江 (Zhènjiāng), Jiangsu Province. The Sydenstricker family lived there from the 1880s through the 1920s. Zhenjiang had been opened to foreign residence by the Treaties of Tianjin (1858) and hosted a small community of American and British missionaries.

34. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge Among the Chinese, founded 1887, later renamed the Christian Literature Society for China. Richard served as its Secretary from 1891 to 1915.

35. Canonised in the Chinese Union Version, this vocabulary remains standard across mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese churches today.

36. 王韜 (Wáng Tāo, 1828–1897), from Jiangsu. His father worked at the London Missionary Society Press in Shanghai. After his father’s death in 1849, Wang Tao took over the position and became Medhurst’s Chinese assistant for the Delegates’ Version of the Bible. He later assisted James Legge in translating the Chinese Classics into English. He became one of the foremost journalists and reform advocates of the late Qing.

37. 王元德 (Wáng Yuándé, 1879–1942), also known as Wang Xuanchen (王宣忱, Wáng Xuānchén), from Changle (昌樂, Chānglè), Shandong. He enrolled at the Presbyterian school in Weixian in 1895. Mateer chose him as his Chinese secretary for the Bible translation in 1904. Wang knew some Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. After the CUV’s completion he produced his own New Testament translation (1933), known as the Qingdao translation, and a hymnal of 633 hymns for public worship and 315 for choir (1941). His account of the translation sessions is from the preface to the 1933 New Testament.

38. The Rockefeller Foundation would spend roughly forty-five million dollars on PUMC—the largest single philanthropic commitment to any institution outside the United States in its era.

39. 晏陽初 (Yàn Yángchū, 1893–1990), also known as Yen Yang-ch’u, born in Bazhong (巴中, Bāzhōng), Sichuan. He took a BA at Yale in 1918 and an MA at Princeton in 1920. During the First World War he served with the Chinese Labour Corps in France, where—with British and French assistance—he developed the thousand-character primer that would become the foundation of his later literacy work.

40. The full thirteen: Fukien Christian University (Fuzhou), Ginling College (Nanjing), Hangchow University (Hangzhou), Huachung University (Wuhan), Hwa Nan College (Fuzhou), Lingnan University (Guangzhou), Nanking University (Nanjing), St. John’s University (Shanghai), University of Shanghai, Shantung Christian University (Jinan), Soochow University (Suzhou), West China Union University (Chengdu), and Yenching University (Beijing). Some contemporary sources count sixteen operating under foreign charters; the discrepancy reflects smaller or specialized institutions not consolidated under the United Board.

41. 差會 (chāihuì), literally “dispatched associations”. The Chinese term marked every missionary society, however independent it felt in London or New York, as an arm sent from somewhere else.

42. Lower primary schools enrolled 151,582 students; higher primary schools 32,899; middle schools 15,213. Chart on The Christian Occupation of China (1922), p. 405.