The key works and representative studies listed below provide a robust starting point for understanding the Church in China today and how it has been shaped by its history. Meant for the general reader, these books draw on fields as diverse as history, sociology, and theology. All serve to illustrate how culture and history have shaped the Christian life and witness in China.
This list is far from comprehensive. In particular, insofar as it focuses on the Catholic Church, it omits many excellent works that discuss the history of Orthodox and Protestant Christianity in China.
Editor’s note: ChinaSource is grateful to the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame for permission to use this comprehensive reading list.
The Catholic Church in Contemporary China
(Dating from China’s Reopening in the Late 1970s)
The Catholic Church in Present-Day China: Through Darkness and Light
Anthony S. K. Lam
Verbiest Foundation (1997)
Written in the 1990s by Anthony Sui Ki Lam, a highly regarded staff researcher then at the Hong Kong Holy Spirit Study Centre, this book remains highly valuable for its up-close and in-depth look at recent Catholic history in China. Lam covers the Open Church’s recovery, the rise of the Underground Church, and the Communist Party’s policy towards religion. The author interviewed many older Catholics from the mainland, who shared their personal trials during the difficult years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), adding his insightful reflections as a veteran observer of Chinese affairs. The book also includes many useful appendices, such as lists of bishops consecrated illicitly, a resume of government regulations and key policy statements on religious activity, and more.
Note: This book is out of print and hard to find used. There is a scanned PDF available to borrow at archive.org.
China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society
Richard Madsen
University of California Press (1998)
A respected sociologist who conducted extensive fieldwork among China’s Catholics in the 1990s, Madsen discusses the revival and “astonishing vitality” of the Catholic Church after its suppression during the era of Mao. He interviewed Catholic believers of different ages, those from both urban and rural backgrounds, members of the “underground” and “above ground” communities, and staunch Catholics and those who were less devout. He also discusses the Church’s potential role in China’s rapidly changing society and limitations that the Church faces. Madsen is a friend of China and its Catholic community who offers a valuable account that is both critical and insightful.
Challenges and Hopes: Stories from the Church in China
John Tong
Holy Spirit Study Centre (2002)
The author has a long and distinguished career as a scholar, an observer of Chinese affairs, and as a pastor. Serving on the staff of the Hong Kong Holy Spirit Study Centre since 1979, he became auxiliary bishop of Hong Kong in 1996 and bishop of the diocese in 2009. In this volume, Tong provides an overview of the Church in China since 1949; then he introduces many of its leading clergy and other personalities. A bishop who knows the persons and the situation well, he discusses the divisions in the Church and its contemporary circumstances in a thoughtful and balanced way.
Catholic Church in China: 1978 to the Present
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu
Palgrave Macmillan (2012)
In this volume, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu offers the reader a multidimensional overview of the history of the Catholic Church in China since China’s “Reform and Opening,” that is, from 1978 to 2012. In particular, she provides an insightful account of the Church’s challenges during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a complex period that defies easy categorization. During this period, Catholics in the underground and official communities often related to each other in ways that were more fluid than many outsiders realize. And while most bishops in the official or registered church community had applied for and received recognition by the Holy See, Chinese authorities continued to appoint new bishops without Vatican approval. While not an exhaustive treatment, Chu helps the reader appreciate that nuance and ambiguity are central to the unfolding drama of the contemporary Catholic Church in China.
The Never-Ending March: China’s Religious Policy and the Catholic Church
Sergio Ticozzi
Chorabooks (2018)
Four of the six chapters of this book were previously published in earlier form by the Holy Spirit Study Centre (HSSC) as separate articles. The present volume now provides a coherent, thoughtful, and detailed account of the recent history and political circumstances of the Catholic Church in China. Ticozzi himself has lived in China for over 50 years and long served on the research staff of HSSC. Well-versed in the study of China’s religious policy, he examines key precedents under the Qing Dynasty before moving on to discuss its contours under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949. His analysis highlights key developments and their implications against the perennial background of China’s culture and traditions. Ticozzi provides an outline that is especially helpful for one who is not well versed in this history.
People, Communities, and the Catholic Church in China
Cindy Yik-yi Chu and Paul P. Mariani (editors)
Springer/Palgrave (2020)
Edited by two veteran observers of the Church in China, this collection of landmark essays penned by experts on a range of important themes will prove invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the issues facing Catholicism in China today. Topics covered include the vicissitudes of the Catholic Church in post-Mao China; the dilemmas facing the underground Church in particular; prominent bishops Jin Luxian of Shanghai and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong; the place of Marian apparitions in Chinese Catholic life; issues concerning the translation of the Bible into Chinese; Catholic charitable work in China; and Catholic youth ministry.
China’s Catholics in an Era of Transformation: Observations of an “Outsider”
Anthony E. Clark
Palgrave Macmillan (2020)
This book is a collection of essays written between 2005 and 2019 by Anthony Clark, a Sinologist and historian who has conducted first-hand archival research and interviews with key figures in the Chinese Church. Clark’s skillful treatment allows the voice of his protagonists to emerge from his pages, while he provides historical context to developments ranging from church demolitions to the Sino-Vatican agreement. Clark has a unique ability to bring to life the recent, often dramatic events that mark the life of the Church in China today.
The History of Christianity and
the Catholic Mission in China
Christians in China: A.D. 600-2000
Jean-Pierre Charbonnier
Ignatius Press (2007)
This major work consists of a series of brilliant historical portraits, each treating a seminal encounter between Christianity and Chinese culture in its historical context. Charbonnier is a masterful storyteller who is keenly sensitive to both the significance of the gospel and the cultural interaction its proponents foster at key moments in Chinese history. While telling the stories of various Christians throughout Chinese history, the author returns to key questions: How did the Church develop over many centuries in a culture so different from the West? How do Christians in China give witness to their faith? How do they contribute to the life of all who profess the Gospel, both inside China and throughout the world?
Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724
Liam Matthew Brockey
Harvard University Press (2008)
Liam Brockey retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually won over hundreds of thousands converts to their vision, a vision which transcended both Western and Chinese culture.
The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times
George Minamiki
Loyola University Press (1985)
The “Chinese Rites Controversy” refers to the debates that reverberated in China and in the Western Church regarding whether Chinese Christians could continue to engage in traditional Chinese practices such as the veneration of Confucius and of the ancestors. What is the meaning of such traditional Chinese practices? Do they accord with Christian faith? Can they take on new meaning in the context of Christian life? Where does meaning reside? And who decides the answer to these questions, Westerners, who have a traditional command of Christian theology, or Chinese, who are more familiar with Chinese culture? In this major survey, Minamiki reviews the events that pit one missionary group against another, emperors against popes, and Chinese against Westerners. These debates raged for over two centuries, with Rome providing shifting guidelines that had a vital impact on the fate of the missions. Minamiki provides a clear historical account and explains how the Chinese Rites Controversy was finally settled by a case that arose in Japan.
The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning
David Mungello (editor)
The Ricci Institute for East-West Cultural History (1994)
This collection contains fifteen essays by some of the most prominent scholars in the field of Chinese studies. Each breaks open a key development or dimension of the Chinese Rites Controversy. Did educated elites understand these practices differently than ordinary Chinese, and in that case, which understanding was most central to the “meaning” of these rites? How did the controversy affect how the Chinese viewed Christianity? What can we learn from past attempts to elucidate cultural misunderstanding? In the end, the issues addressed go beyond China itself and lead us to reflect on the relationship between the gospel and culture more broadly. Though in one sense, the question of the Chinese Rites has been settled in the Catholic Church, in another, the issues it poses are perennial.
Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai
Paul P. Mariani
Harvard University Press (2011)
Basing his account on internal party documents, Mariani, a historian at Santa Clara University, provides a gripping narrative of how dedicated Catholics in Shanghai in the 1950s tried to resist the Communist Party, and how the Party mobilized to crush them, despite assurances to the contrary. He shows how Party strategists used multifaceted campaigns against the Shanghai church, infiltrated Catholic organizations, and to divide Catholics from one another. Mariani also examines the effects of this legacy of persecution on the Catholic community in Shanghai today.
The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and
the Evolution of the Catholic Church
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu
Palgrave Macmillan (2016)
This project traces the origins of the Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood in Hong Kong and their history up to the early 1970s. These Chinese religious sisters worked in both Hong Kong and in Guangdong Province, on both sides of the bamboo curtain. This study makes a valuable contribution to the neglected area of study of Chinese Catholic women and their place in the history of the Church and society.
On the Road: The Catholic Faith in China
Lu Nan
Ignatius Press (2021)
From 1992 to 1996, Lu Nan, one of China’s most revered black-and-white photographers, traversed ten provinces in China to capture the images that comprise this moving photo essay. While he visited over 100 churches during this period, his images bring to life the way love and their Catholic faith sustain believers amidst the great challenges they face in daily life. Lu Nan’s images reveal how an inner union with God is imbued in the everyday actions of the faithful, and that deep in their hearts the true Church is found.
God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China
Liao Yiwu
HarperOne (2011)
In this volume, Chinese journalist Liao Yiwu presents gripping interviews with Chinese people of many backgrounds, both Protestant and Catholic, who tell their stories of embracing Christian faith. His protagonists search for answers to the emptiness on the inside, and they struggle to endure hardships imposed by political and societal pressures from the outside. Liao interviewed, among others, a 100-year-old nun who resisted the government and endured thirty years’ hard labor, an avant-garde poet who found life’s meaning, a priest who resisted the Communist Party, a Christian surgeon who left the city to serve the poor in mountainous regions, and a Tibetan Catholic seminarian. His accounts lay bare the reasons of the heart that speak to us all.
Christianity and Chinese Culture
Chinese Theology: Text and Context
Chloë Starr
Yale University Press (2016)
In this groundbreaking and authoritative study, Chloë Starr explores key writings of Chinese Christian intellectuals, from philosophical dialogues of the late imperial era to sermons and microblogs of theological educators and pastors in the twenty-first century. Through a series of close textual readings, she sheds new light on the fraught issues of Chinese Christian identity and the evolving question of how Christianity should relate to Chinese society.
Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality
John C. H. Wu (Wu Jingxiong)
Angelico Press (2017 [1965])
In these collected essays, Wu elucidates points of harmony between the spirituality of Catholic saints like Therese of Lisieux, John of the Cross, and Thomas Aquinas, on the one hand, and the great figures of China’s “three teachings,” Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, on the other. As scholar Robert Gimello notes, “Wu offers in these essays insight after insight into the deeper meanings of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, while also critically evaluating them from the rare perspective of an accomplished sinologist who was also a devout Catholic intellectual.”
China’s Christianity: From Missionary to Indigenous Church
Anthony E. Clark (editor)
Brill (2017)
This collection by leading scholars presents stories and arguments supporting the conclusion that over several centuries Christianity has become authentically Chinese. It includes treatment of the historical activities of foreign missionaries to China, in particular, their work towards indigenization. At the same time, it also brings into focus the contributions of Chinese Christians themselves, from the suffering endurance of ordinary believers to the erudition of contemporary Chinese scholars who study Christianity. As historian Jean-Paul Wiest writes in this volume, “The birth and growth of the Chinese indigenous Church is more than a result of the endeavors of foreign missionaries; it is as well the fruit of the efforts and sacrifices of Chinese Christians and their faith communities.”
Biography and Autobiography
China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (1644-1911)
Anthony E. Clark
Lehigh University Press (2011)
This book narrates the lives of martyrs during the Qing dynasty, both Western missionaries and Chinese Christian converts. Anthony Clark approaches the stories of these martyrs from the unique perspective of one who is both a careful scholar working with rare archival materials and, at the same time, a widely-traveled explorer familiar with the places and people connected to their stories. Wielding the tools of the scholar, Clark analyzes the differing cultural viewpoints that led to misunderstanding and conflict. He also describes the role that the suffering of these martyrs played in the growth of the Church in various locations. There the memories of those who suffered became the “seeds of the church” and led to the indigenization of Christianity that continues to the present time.
Ways of Confucius and of Christ
Dom Pierre-Célestin Lu, O.S.B. (Lu Zhengxiang)
Ignatius Press (2023 [1946])
Lu Zhengxiang received a traditional Confucian education and in the early twentieth century, rose in China’s diplomatic service to become the nation’s premier and prime minister of foreign affairs. Most Chinese know him by his Chinese name in connection with his representing China at the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles. He took up the Catholic faith in 1912. Following the death of his Belgian wife, he entered a Benedictine monastery in Belgium as the monk Pierre-Célestin, eventually being chosen to serve as its abbot. In this reprint of his 1947 autobiography, Dom Pierre-Célestin, perhaps “the most influential Christian of the twentieth century” (according to historian Anthony E. Clark), recounts a profound journey in life that unites the “ways of Confucius and of Christ.”
Beyond East and West
John C. H. Wu (Wu Jingxiong)
Notre Dame Press (2018 [1951])
When first released in 1951, this autobiography of John C.H. Wu was an immediate best seller. Wu received a traditional Chinese education in Ningbo just as the last Chinese dynasty was about to give way, taking a world with it. Wu then narrates his first encounter with Christianity through American missionaries, a fascination with law that led him to study in the US, and a deep friendship with US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
After also studying in Europe, Wu returned to Republican China and helped draft its new constitution. During the sorrow-filled years of the Japanese occupation, Wu embraced the Catholic faith. After World War II, Wu served as China’s delegate to the Holy See, and the Chinese civil war flared up again. In the midst of war and constant activity, Wu still found the inspiration to translate the Psalms and the New Testament into classical Chinese. In reflecting on this odyssey through Chinese humanistic and religious thought, Western law, and Christian spirituality, Wu concludes that the great traditions of China served as teachers that prepared him to recognize the truth of Christ. This edition includes a new foreword by his youngest son, John Wu, Jr., and an additional chapter, “European Reminiscences.”