Missionary Mobility and the Cold War

Exploring how war, revolution, and communism in China irrevocably altered Protestant Christianity and the mobility of missionaries in the twentieth century, this book focuses on the China Inland Mission (CIM), later known as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), once the largest Protestant missionary force in the world, and analyses how missionary mobility produced and disseminated ideas about religion, race, empire, human rights, and the Cold War.

This volume follows the trajectory of Protestant missions in Asia in three broad strokes. The first section analyses missionary mobility as “pioneers” bound for the “frontier” of global Christianity in the Chinese countryside and outer lying regions such as Tibet in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section traces the mobility of missionaries as Cold War “exiles.” Expelled from the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC), former China missionaries were redeployed to posts along the “Bamboo Curtain” in East and Southeast Asia to wage spiritual warfare and containment against communism in the 1950s and 1960s. The final section examines the return of Protestant missionaries to mainland China in the 1970s and 1980s as members of professional exchanges, foreign experts, and tourists, illustrating how their mobility was shaped by ideas about China’s underground house churches and the desire to promote rapprochement between China and the international community.

Missionary Mobility and the Cold War: Protestant Missions from China to Southeast Asia, 1920 –1989 will be of importance to researchers specialising in Sino-American relations, the Cold War in Asia, transnationalism and religion, the global Protestant missionary movement, and Christianity in China.