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.
This dissertation explores how specific actors such as French Catholic missionaries of the Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) translated and disseminated the universality of the Christian message into the particular context of northeast China from the 1830s to the 1930s, and how Chinese Catholic converts, especially, female converts, interpreted and transformed the Catholic faith as a language to articulate an awareness of self.
