'In the Grip of Bandits, Yet in the Hands of God': Western Missionaries Meet Chinese Outlaws

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In the 1920s and 1930s, Western missionaries, as the most visible and most vulnerable of all the foreigners working in the Chinese interior, became the commonest of all ransoming targets for rural bandits. The nature of the encounter, however, for various reasons, has never been adequately examined. This paper will seek to assess the real nature of the clash that took place when "Greenwood heroes" came face to face with "Crusaders for Christ". Paradoxical though it may sound, missionaries and the bandits whose victims they frequently became had much in common. On the one hand, bandits could be all things to all people: scourge of the weak for those historians whose sensibilities were, consciously or unconsciously, closer to those of the security policeman; or revolutionary rebels to those who were equally blinkered but by a different set of preconceptions. As for missionaries, while most Chinese historiography was anxious to portray the missionaries as the insidious vanguard of Western imperialism, Western chroniclers were until recently usually more concerned with the "good works" of the individual under study than with the fundamental problems that made those good works seem necessary. Caught between these two stools, hostility and hagiography, both bandits and missionaries became enigmatic existences, serving as convenient footballs for the preconceptions of one set of observers or the other, while their essential humanity often became lost in the process. Bamdits and missionaries both encompassed a range of individual types hedged between the stereotypes of right and left. True, some bandits preyed on the weak and came to be regarded as purveyors of death and mayhem; but others-for a price, usually-provided a level of security that could sometimes be more reliable than that provided by the regular army. Similarly, some missionaries strutted among their "flock" as arrogantly as any Chinese official, gave selective protection when required-again, at a price: ritual obeisance to their God-and came to be regarded with the same mixture of awe and fear as their Chinese counterparts. Yet others by their selfless deeds showed themselves to be the precise opposite, and were able to create links that endeared them strongly to a rural population inured to expect nothing from their superiors. The effect was not lost upon those villagers who for one reason or another were forced to "ting er zouxian" -to cast themselves onto the "dangerous path" of banditry.

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