Christianity is often praised as an agent of Chinese modernization or damned as a form of cultural and religious imperialism. In both cases, Christianity’s foreignness and the social isolation of converts have dominated this debate. Eugenio Menegon uncovers another story. In the sixteenth century, European missionaries brought a foreign and global religion to China. Converts then transformed this new religion into a local one over the course of the next three centuries.
It is the focus of this chapter to examine who Bible women were, why they were needed, what role they played in the Chinese church in the late Qing period, particularly from the 1860s to 1911, and how they overcame both their own limitations and those restrictions imposed on women by the various Protestant denominations.
