A Study Of Church Charities In Modern China

This thesis mainly studies the charity started by the Western Christian Church (including the Protestant and Catholic) in modern China. With the foreign invasion, a large number of missionaries coming into China started to offer a series of charity in order to open up a new situation for missionary work and demonstrate the Christian spirit of love. At present, studies of the church are more focused on their political activities, education, text publication and so on . There are few systematic and comprehensive academic research results of charity, and the aim of this thesis is to make a complement in this aspect.This thesis makes a multi-angle and multi-level systematic analysis on historical data occupied, based on the results of previous studies, guided by the basic theory of historical materialism, using research methods of combination of history and sociology, and then it comprehensively studies development of Church charities in hundred years in modern time and the impact it having on china.Church charities has various forms which includs the medical and health, Salesian feeding, famine relief and others, playing an active role in treatment of disease for people, housing and training infants and young children, alleviating people' s sufferings and etc. It can be found after systematic researches that church charities helps a number of vulnerable groups needing to rescue and ease the pressure on social assistance, and it helps to stabilize social order and coordinate social development, despite the purpose and motivation of missionary work and some limitations. The charity started by western missionaries shows a new concept and mechanism for charity which Chinese People learn from and which inspires the people to continuously improve themselves, the result of which is promotting the China charity into the modernization. Meanwhile, starting church charity strengthens exchanges and cooperation between China and the West, and brings about a advance in health and educationg in modern China, which is on some extent conducive to the progress of modern Chinese society.Overall, church charity has a profound impact on modern Chinese society, lefts us a number of important enlightenment, and provides historical experience and lessons learned to the development of contemporary China' s charity.