LiYuantun Jiao-an And Conflicts Between Chinese And Western Cultures

Why so many Jiao-an happened in modern China? Fundamentally speaking, quantity numerous Jiao-an were caused by a series of collisions between Christianity and China local society in the process of doing Christian missionary work. How did the collisions happen? The basic point of this paper is that:most of the collisions between Christianity and the local society were caused by the conflicts between Chinese and Western cultures. This paper will carefully examine some important Jiao-an from the cultural angle of view. LiYuantun Jiao-an had led to the outbreak of the Boxer uprising directly. So this paper will choose LiYuantun Jiao-an as a typical case for focused analysis.And this paper will analyze the effect and role of the conflicts between Chinese and Western cultures in LiYuantun Jiao-an.LiYuantun Jiao-an was caused by the missionaries and parishioners being going to build church on the Jade Emperor Temple foundation. In LiYuantun Jiao-an, the conflicts between villagers and parishioners were closely related to the Jade Emperor faith of the LiYuantun villagers. So this Jiao-an can be seen as a positive conflict between "God"and "the Jade Emperor". On the one hand, the Jade Emperor faith and the Jade Emperor temple were deep-rooted and sacred and inviolable in the eyes of the villagers. On the other hand, Christianity is the only faith in God of monotheistic religions and opposes all idolatry. They firmly established the Church on the foundation of Jade Emperor Temple. They needed to let Jesus Christ replace the Jade Emperor in the mind of the villagers.So the outbreak of Jiao-an was inevitable.Chinese and Western culture are two different types of culture. And this kind of difference inherently determines people's daily life and life convention being quite different. The traditional village society was a society of acquaintances and it had high level of transparency. The village social life, especially significant customs activities exactly as annual temple fair in the Jade Emperor Temple was fully open, and was also very lively. After the Church entered the village society, doors and windows of the Church closed throughout the year. Missionary activities were often conducted secretly at night. And the Church was very strict armed. These things undoubtedly made the village society become less transparent. And they made the people's social security greatly reduced. These things were very different from the bright village social life. If we say, differences in religious belief between villagers and parishioners made it difficult to understand and tolerate each other. We can say, differences in life convention between villagers and parishioners made the gap and misunderstanding of both sides further deepened. And it was this factor made LiYuantun Jiao-an tend to deteriorate continuously.Basically, the traditional village society was in autonomous or semi-autonomous status. In order to maintain social order in the village and achieve village community autonomy, the village gentry elite exercised their most important functions according to the folk culture. They mediated civil disputes of all kinds and they subsided village society interior various contradictions and disputes. After the Church broke into the local society, authority of local officials was badly damaged, village gentry elite also suffered a severe blow, and village mediation mechanism was also destroyed. In LiYuantun Jiao-an, in order to quell the disputes and litigation the local officials had to repeatedly enable the folk mediation echanism. But they did not have the effectiveness. The reason for this was that under the impact of the Church the original village folk mediation mechanism had been paralyzed and no longer work. In this case, if the villagers and parishioners want to solve the problem must be from outside the village to seek new solutions and ways. The Church side of course was always to rely on Power. And the villagers side, under the leadership of the village bottom elite, found new shelter power "Meihua Quan" organization from outside the village. Such a need of the villagers and parishioners eventually led to the external forms of confrontation between the Church and the Boxer.