Missionaries And Shandong Social Economy Before The Anti-Japanese War(1860-1937)

To take root and flourish in exotic land,any cluture must be adapted to local societies.Moreover,the dissemination and development of any religion are inevitably affected and limited by economy.Therefore,it is very necessary to examine the relationship between the spread of Christianity and Local Economy.After Opium War,the Christian Missionaries came to China again with the strength of colonialism artillery fires.Shandong,as the hometown of Confucius and Mencius,the birthplace of Confucian culture,has become the key preaching areas of every church,who came to china aiming at achieving the "China owned master".In this article,I try to see about the relationship between missionaries and Shandong social economy before the war of anti-japanese, as a preliminary attempt in this regard.The Preaching groups in Shandong Province at the modern times,were the two factions within Christianity-Catholic and Protestant.After their arrival,they had witnessed the poverty and backwardness of Shandong social economy,and expressed some feelings.In order to achieve their causes of preaching smoothly,they adapted all aspects of their works to particular circumstances of Shandong social-economy,which reflected its influences on the missionary work;Meanwhile, missionaries have also been active in Shandong agriculture, handicrafts improvement and relief activities and so on,and they also had put forward broadly economic reform proposals.However,besides this,they had also participated in a variety of predatory activities,which showed different characteristics of its preaching,and their activities also had a significant impact on Shandong social economy and so forth. This thesis that is made use of the available church documents, local historical materials,recent economic history materials, relevant writings and etc,is to comprehensively study the relations between Catholic, Protestant's missionary work and Shandong social economy, namely mutual influence and inter-constrain.The first part of this paper briefly describes the two factions about the course and development of their preaching in Shandong,their understandings of Shandong social economy before the anti-japanese war,then stressly explains how Shandong social economy influences on the missionary work in its gradual process of modernization,and how missionaries accommodate their works in such conflict; For socio-economic backwardness of Shandong and the influences on missionary work,the second part of this article emphases on showing what specific economic activities had been done by missionaries.who declared themselves working by the principle of salvation";Based on this,the third part summarizes the characteristics of their economic activities and analyses the reasons for their engaging in economic activities in detail;We can say that,preaching is the outset of all the activities of missionaries, although they participated in a number of constructive economic activities, and the aggressiveness is its significant features that can not be avoided.However, compared to the conservative Catholic, the Protestant mission engaged in more social works, reflecting its idea of active revolution;Finally, this thesis analyzes the overall impact of the missionaries'economic activities,which had some significant influences either to the missionary work itself or to the pre-war social aspects of Shandong Province.Overall,the fact that the backwardness of social economy,imbalance of economic development between the eastern and western in modern Shandong and etc, 'had a significant impact on every aspect of missionary work,such as the districts, methods and believers; But the suggestions about economy improvements and various economic activities in which the missionaries engaged out of improving livelihoods of their believers and expanding the power of their churches and other reasons,had also great influenced all aspects of the missionary work and Shandong society.While their activities of plundering indemnities and estates extended the power of their churches and deteriorated the Shandong social economy.their activities of economy improvements promoted the progress of Shandong social economy and some other aspects.Of course,compared to the Protestant, the Catholic's activities reflected more on the former,which was also the cause of more conficts between the populace and believers,and more cases in their preaching areas.