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This article is a book review of "Beyond indigenization: Christianity and Chinese history in a global context" by Feiya Tao. The book is a collection of twenty articles from the Chinese journal Zongjiao yu lishi [Religion and History], published between 2013 and 2018, with an introduction by the editor. The book argues that the concept of indigenization in the history of Christianity in China is too simplistic and needs to be explored in greater depth. The articles cover various topics, including the relationship between Christian thought and Confucian philosophy, seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic poetry, and press coverage of a dispute in 1906. The book provides valuable insights into Chinese scholarship on the history of Christianity in China and is a useful resource for researchers. [Extracted from the article]

Filial piety and loyalty were the twin pillars of the Qing state, and family relations were at the heart of China's twentieth-century social revolutions. It is effective in giving a sense of the attitudes underpinning the Qing legal system and the nature of power between superiors and inferiors in the Qing bureaucracy. The book begins with an examination of how filial piety was imposed through the Qing legal system. [Extracted from the article]

This paper looks at the choice, reception and afterlife of both the Chinese and the British gifts given during Britain's first embassy to China. Earlier studies have tended to fault the Qing court for understanding the gifts they received as tribute and failing to appreciate the scientific items given by the British. However, gift-giving was a highly charged political issue in the domestic politics of both countries at this time and the terms in which the argument was conducted differed widely. This paper argues that the Chinese term that has been translated into the English 'tribute' did not have the same resonance in China, and that instead the gifts were received by both sides as part of the negotiations that accompanied the embassy. The most successful gifts in this context were those with an accepted monetary value in the existing trade between the two countries, notably high-quality textiles. British military gifts were also of importance in shaping the outcome of the embassy. However, attempts to use the gifts to present the culture or wider philosophical outlook of the giver were much less successful in this diplomatic context. After the embassy ended the vast majority of gifts given by both sides became exotic items in royal collections where they added to the glory of the recipient rather than that of the donor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the letter by the Qianlong Emperor in response to the diplomatic mission to China led by Lord Macartney in 1793. Topics discussed include the popularity of a quotation from the letter illustrating the failure of traditional China to acknowledge the rising power of the West, factors that brought the letter to public prominence, and ways in which Lord Macartney's embassy has been interpreted.

This paper uses the diary and other records of Liu Dapeng 劉大鵬 (1857-1942), a Shanxi village resident, to examine how people in rural China experienced and understood illness at an important time of transition for medical systems in China. It explains how Liu understood the illnesses that afflicted himself and members of his family in terms of providence. The healing methods he used ranged through self-medication with folk remedies and modern patent medicines; remedies provided by families friends and neighbours (including acupuncture and prescriptions based on classical Chinese medicine); remedies provided by gods and shamans; and prescriptions provided by professional doctors of Chinese medicine, whom Liu deeply distrusted. It also examines the arrival of Western medicine in Shanxi and argues that while this existed it was incorporated into networks of medicine provided by family and friends, rather than functioning as a separate institutional system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spring-summer 1965 lay Catholics facing the pressures of the Socialist Education Movement in rural north China began to see visions and to preach. This article examines these events, their origins in local history, their relationship to the Chinese and international political context, and their interaction with the ongoing campaign that led into the Cultural Revolution. It argues that local context is crucial in understanding religious repression in the Maoist era and that these events are important to Catholics in the area today because the memory of them shapes ongoing relations between Catholics and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Chinese popular response to the U.S. atomic bombings of Nagasaki, Japan, and Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II and the subsequent development of nuclear weapons and power. The author explains how early interpretations of the atomic bomb were largely influenced by the Chinese millennialist religious tradition and subsequently colored with an apocalyptic outlook. Consideration is also given to the frightening portrayal of atomic weaponry in anti-American propaganda released by China's Communist government. Chinese people's support for the anti-nuclear Stockholm Peace Appeal of 1950 is outlined, as is Chinese propaganda supporting nuclear technology and power development. The Chinese state's support of nuclear physics is also explained.

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior to the Opium War the Italian missionaries in Shanxi were dependent on the local Chinese population both for their safety and their funding. This meant that only missionaries who were willing to conform to Chinese customs could succeed and thus it was impossible to implement the rulings against various Chinese customs made by the papacy in the eighteenth century. The treaties that followed the war greatly reduced the penalties on missionaries discovered in the interior and made it possible for French charitable funding to reach them. Once the missionaries were no longer dependent on the Chinese but on sponsors in Europe those with much more hostile attitudes to Chinese customs were able to enforce them, leading to a century of alienation and hostility between them and the Chinese Catholics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the French Holy Child Association (HCA), a French Catholic international aid organization that attempted to curb the practice of infanticide in China in the nineteenth century. The author chronicles the activities of the HCA in China and its rapid growth from 1843 into the twentieth century. The author also discusses the issue of baptizing Chinese children and the European practice of infant abandonment as a means of ridding a family of unwanted children. The author contends that the HCA was the first international aid organization.

Focuses on the relationship between authenticity and the representation of power in the costume of the Taiwan indigenous people. Combination of cultural and gender subordination; Factors that defined adulthood for indigenous men; Degree of covering of the body demanded of Chinese men.

Discusses the role of newspapers in transmitting nationalism into rural China from 1820-1929. Culturalism during the Manchu Dynasty; Preservation of the 'Shanxi Daily News' in archives; Introduction of Western-style newspapers into Chinese news network; Circulation of modern-style newspapers; Role of news in the formation of rural nationalism.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Use of Skin Lightening Creams," by Y. M. Olumide, in the November 23, 2010 issue.