New Paradigm in the New Era: The Case of History of Christianity in China Today

During the 1950s, John K. Fairbank introduced the ‘Impact–Response’ paradigm for the study of the Christian mission in the non-Western world, focusing on the impact of Western civilization, including Christianity, in China, and the Chinese response. In the 1980s, Joseph Levenson and Paul Cohen proposed their ‘Tradition-Modernity’ and ‘China-Centered’ paradigms, respectively, shifting more focus onto the discovery of China’s own history. In 2002, Dana Robert adopted the concept of ‘globalization’ to the study of the Christian mission, yet remained ‘imperialistic’ and overlooked the consequences of the interplay between globalization and localization. It was in 2012, when Xi Jinping introduced his ‘China dream’, that Chinese scholars began to think more seriously about its implication and the significance of the ‘Sinicization of religion’. Zhuo Xinping, while exploring the concept of the ‘Sinicization of Christianity’, hinted at a new direction, where “China needs the world as the world needs China, …in which Christianity would play an important role” (p. 227). Just as the study of Christianity can help one to understand the development of civilization in the Modern West, the paradigm of the ‘Sinicization of Christianity’ would help provide a better picture of the history of Christianity by seeing it through the interplay between globalization and localization and taking Western Christianity as merely a partial representation of the global Christianity developed in the West. Hence, in this paper, the author attempts to propose it as a new paradigm for the study of the history of Christianity in China today.