Reality And Distortion

Based on all-around investigation and compiling of extensive data, this paper is an in-depth systematic illustration and analysis of Western missionaries' writings and comments in other forms on Fujian society in the late Qing Dynasty in the light of the theories and methodology of history, religious study, anthropology, comparative literature imagologie, Orientalism and Cross-cultural Communicology in search of the implications and features of the image of Fujian society in the late Qing Dynasty in the eyes of western missionaries and the perspectives from which they decoded Fujian society. Fujian regional archives and literature are also references of this dissertation. Through the probe into the mixed resource of information, the dissertation presents the reality and distortion, merits and demerits, value and falsehood, and consequent mixed influences of missionaries' record of and opinions on Fujian.Western missionaries' writings on Fujian society in the late Qing dynasty are numerous and multi-perspective, yet with shared focus on aspects of regional daily life and folk phenomenon, showing essentially microcosmic and intuitionistic ways of observation and reflections featuring a contrast between objectivity and subjectivity. Reality presented thus and distortion coexisting reflect western missionaries had been in delicate relationship to the circumstance of Fujian. Behind western missionaries' image of Fujian interweave Orientalism, Colonialism, conception of occidental center and Christians' ideological consciousness of "salvation" and "evangelic universalism". One thing that cannot be neglected is that missionaries inevitably marked the particularity of regional contextualization through their long-time interaction with Fujian society. There is no blinking the fact that even in the westerner's universal explanation of the east are to an extent colored with colonial hegemonic language and yet with divergences of particularities of locations and principles of embodiment of presentations. And there is no denying the fact that missionaries' writings and other related literature data has brought relevant influence bridging the east and the west with a specially important impact on the history of cultural communication between the East and the West, which is obviously significantly meaningful.