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Documenting China brings together a series of linked texts, each one chosen for its impact when first published, and which together chart the core developments in twentieth-century Chinese history. With extracts spanning the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, popular culture, literary history, neo-nationalist discourse, and international relations, the book challenges advanced language learners to elevate their reading ability to the level necessary for handling real primary sources in an unmediated way while deepening their understanding of Chinese politics, society, and culture. Each chapter is structured around crucial passages from a core historical text, each chapter begins with an introductory essay in English that provides context for fully understanding the text, suggested further readings, and a glossary of key terms.

Chinese literature has traditionally been divided by both theorists and university course providers into 'classical' and 'modern.' This has left nineteenth-century fiction in limbo, and allowed negative assessments of its quality to persist unchecked. The popularity of Qing dynasty red-light fiction - works whose primary focus is the relationship between clients and courtesans, set in tea-houses, pleasure gardens, and later, brothels - has endured throughout the twentieth century. This volume explores why, arguing that these novels are far from the 'low' work of 'frustrated scholars' but in their provocative play on the nature of relations between client, courtesan and text, provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century.

In August 2015, a group of pastors and elders from an urban house church in Chengdu, Sichuan, posted 95 theses online. This bold move, challenging the state and the Chinese churches has created controversy in China and abroad. The theses address a series of issues on sovereignty and authority with regard to God, the church and the government. This article considers briefly the historical and theological resemblances to Luther’s act, then examines three of the most controversial aspects of the document: its analysis of church–state relations, its rejection of the “sinicization” of Christianity, and its excoriation of the state-registered church. Of these three, the article focuses on church–state relations, since perspectives on the state church and sinicization stem from the same arguments. The article shows how the thinking of this Reformed church and its senior pastor Wang Yi draws on a particular reading of the bible, church tradition, and the role of conscience, and traces these to pastor Wang Yi’s earlier writings and his reading of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed thought.

This essay traces the emergence of new categories of “spiritual writing” in Chinese literature, before offering an interpretation of Bei Cun’s 1992 novel The Baptizing River (Shixi de he 施洗的河) as an exemplar. Bei Cun’s first novel as a “Christian author” attracted much critical attention, given the contrast with the author’s prior works and its message of spiritual salvation at a time of political change and metaphysical searching. A psychosocial biography of its anti-hero Liu Lang, set in wartime China, the novel charts the protagonist’s criminal livelihood, descent into moral depravity, and gradual questioning of life and purpose. This essay foregrounds the structure of the novel and explores how narrative form and theological meaning interact. To do this, it traces the course of the river journeys that mark the different stages of Liu Lang’s life and which culminate in his unorthodox baptismal rebirth.

This article approaches the contours of contemporary intellectual faith through the work of Shi Tiesheng (d. 2012). Shi is best known in China as a “disabled writer,” while the theological depths of his writings on fate, life, and faith have rarely been the focus of attention. The article focuses on Shi’s representation of the human across his fiction and nonfiction writings, arguing that the more explicitly religious nonfiction toward the end of his career offers a philosophical commentary on his earlier stories, and that his non-orthodox interpretations of Christian ideas provide important insight into the spiritual quests of Chinese intellectuals.

\"Sino-Christian theology\" as a discipline comprises exploration of the history of Christianity in China and its present-day thought and social impact, but it is also a methodology, or a \"knowledge system,\" and this second sense—as a means of pursuing a range of questions in the humanities, including but not limited to Christianity and its place in Chinese life and thought—provoked much discussion among seminar participants. Literature has offered scholars like Yang Huilin a prism through which to understand Christianity, and comparative literature a place to conjoin ethics and biblical studies with literary criticism, critical theory, and translation theories. Yang's expert reading tracks how Ricci tried to make Christianity more palatable to his Neo-Confucian readers by paraphrasing and adapting the Greek Encheiridion in relation to Chinese classics, engaging in intercultural and interlingual maneuvers that have implications for the study of ethics and the self today. If the starting point for understanding Chinese theology is to be found in literary studies, as Jasper suggests, the Chinese blending of theory and theology that this Special Issue presents offers a challenge to ways of conceiving disciplinary boundaries elsewhere in the world.