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D. E. Mungello, Albert Monshan Wu. From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1579–1580, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1579
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In From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950, Albert Monshan Wu attempts to show how German missionaries to China were distinct from their British, French, and American counterparts. Wu explains how they were shaped by unique historical circumstances, including the post–World War I collapse of the German economy and the racist, anti-missionary policies of the Third Reich.
Wu is very effective in his comparison of Catholic and Protestant missionaries by concentrating on the parallel histories of the Society of the Divine Word (in Latin, Societas Verbi Divini [SVD]), founded in 1875, and the Berlin Missionary Society (BMS), founded in 1824. He continues this approach in his parallel treatment of Ling Deyuan (1883–1951), a BMS pastor in remote areas of Guangdong province, and Chen Yuan (1880–1971), a prominent intellectual and president of the Catholic University of Beijing (Fu Ren University). Chen had been baptized around 1920 in the liberal Protestant church of the American John Leighton Stuart. While Ling attempted to conciliate Christians and Communists and died before the tide had turned against such efforts, Chen survived to face the escalating criticism. He defended himself in a series of retrenchments, publishing a self-criticism in 1952 in which he totally rejected his past scholarship. When the criticism continued to escalate, he joined the Communist Party in 1958 at the age of seventy-eight. He died during the Cultural Revolution, protected by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, but disillusioned and living under house arrest. In his old age, Chen denied that he had ever been a Christian, claiming that he had attended church merely for social reasons (288 n. 17).
