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.

Anthony J. Miller is currently Associate Professor of History at Hanover College where he teaches courses in the fields of World and East Asian History. Prior to coming to Hanover, he was previously employed at Miami University, the University of Colorado Denver’s International College Beijing, and the University of Maryland University College’s Asia Program in Japan. A historian of the Cold War, his other publications exploring the ties in trade, diplomacy, religion, and culture between the US and Midwest and China include a chapter in American Chinese Restaurants: Society, Culture, and Consumption and articles in the journals of Annals of Iowa, Chinese America: History and Perspective, and The Diplomat. He is a regular participant at the annual Midwest History Conference, the Yale-Edinburgh Group for the study of World Christianity and Missions, and the China Christianity Studies group at the Association for Asian Studies.