Representing Reformation Traditions in China: Missionary Strategies, Discursive Practices and the Politics of Religious Classification

This article examines the diverse approaches taken by missionaries from various Reformation traditions in constructing and communicating their confessional identities to Chinese audiences during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Moving beyond the retrospective and analytically unstable umbrella of “Protestantism”, it reveals how missionaries advanced competing projects of self-definition rooted in divergent theological claims, polemical engagements with Catholicism, and strategies of cultural adaptation. A noteworthy aspect of this endeavor was the quest for an appropriate Chinese term for “Protestantism,” which formed only a part of a larger discourse. The proliferation of labels – including “Religion of Jesus”, “Religion of Restoration”, and “Denomination Opposing Rome” – demonstrates how language served not simply as a tool of translation, but as an arena of confessional contestation and cultural positioning. The study situates these linguistic and theological strategies within the specific socio-political context of late Qing and early Republican China, characterized by imperial decline, legal pluralism, and shifting frameworks of cultural authority. Employing discourse analysis alongside the analytical tools of historical institutionalism – especially the concepts of path dependence, institutional layering, and the adaptation of inherited categories to new environments – it traces how European notions of post-Reformation Christianity were destabilized and reconfigured in the Chinese linguistic and intellectual field. Translation emerged as a process of negotiation, in which missionaries, local intermediaries, and Chinese observers collaboratively shaped and reshaped the boundaries of religious identity. The article argues that a seemingly stable category in Europe, however contested by historians, transformed in China into a fluid, historically contingent configuration. This transformation underscores the political and epistemic dimensions of religious classification in cross-cultural contexts and highlights that global Christianity evolved through processes of mutual interpretation rather than unilateral diffusion.