A Short-lived Experiment in Bible Work among the Chinese Populations outside China: The Bible Society Service for Overseas Chinese, 1955-1957

Motivated by the situation that more than twenty million Chinese lived outside Mainland China after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, mostly in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian countries (Pearson 1968, 207), the American Bible Society (ABS) appointed Ralph Mortensen, former general secretary of the China Bible House, the national Bible society of China, in 1954 to be “Secretary-at-Large in Southeast Asia” to “promote schemes of increasing Scripture circulation among the Chinese” there (Pearson 1968, 206). Thanks to the support of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) and the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), Mortensen’s position was retitled as “Travelling Secretary” and his work was known as the “Bible Society Service for Overseas Chinese” in 1955 (Pearson 1968, 206-7). However, upon Mortensen’s resignation in 1957, the Bible Society Service for Overseas Chinese came to an end. 

This paper aims to illustrate the history of this short-lived experiment as a programme of the ABS, the BFBS and the NBSS to continue their presence among Chinese-speaking communities outside China, following their withdrawal from the People’s Republic of China as well as the Communist Chinese government’s prohibition of importation of Chinese Bibles and the Bible societies’ policy of not operating contrary to the laws of any country (Howsam and McLaren 2015, 75). Based on relevant archival materials of the three Bible societies, this paper will examine how Mortensen, as a Bible society staff member with China experience, worked with the secretaries of the Bible societies’ East and Southeast Asian agencies to develop a series of measures and promotional activities to increase Bible distribution among the Chinese residents in the regions, as well as keeping the Bible societies’ headquarters informed of the developments in the regions and Mainland China.

This paper will also pay attention to the role of Hong Kong in the Bible Society Service for Overseas Chinese, since the Hong Kong Bible House, the joint agency of the ABS, the BFBS and the NBSS in Hong Kong, was designated by them as “a wholesale and retail distribution and colportage centre with a view to the promotion of wider circulation of the Scriptures among the Chinese populations outside China” (Pearson 1968, 186). This paper will conclude with a discussion on the legacies of the Bible Society Service for Overseas Chinese to the institutional indigenization of Bible societies in the Chinese-speaking world, including but not limited to the appointment of Chinese assistant secretaries, a notable example of which was Lai Ping Tung, who was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Hong Kong Bible House for its work in Taiwan in 1956 (Pearson 1968, 199) and eventually became the first general secretary of the Bible Society in Taiwan in 1965. 

It is believed that the findings presented in this paper will further our understanding of the Bible societies’ institutional role in the post-war era in fostering transnational Protestant connections consisting of flows of people, money and Bibles through which Chinese Protestant Christianity could receive support to gain a footing in countries outside Mainland China as an ethnic and cultural form of the faith (Wuthnow and Offutt 2008, 216-217, 221, 223; Stanley 2018, 338, 341, 352). Moreover, the Chinese in China had been regarded as the central group and the overseas Chinese the relatively marginal group in the context of the Protestant mission effort among the Chinese-speaking populations. The importance of printing and distributing Chinese Bibles for the Chinese outside China for the Bible societies’ ministry, as this paper will highlight, reminds us that since the People’s Republic of China was inaccessible to Western Protestant missionary societies or denominations, the overseas Chinese, who used to be the marginal, began to be made central.

Reference

Howsam, Leslie, and Scott McLaren. 2015. “Producing the Text: Production and Distribution of Popular Editions of the Bible”. In The New Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 4: From 1750 to the Present, edited by John Riches. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. 

Pearson, Janice E. 1968. “ABS Historical Essay #15, VII-F-2, Distribution Abroad, 1931-1966: China, 1931-1966”. American Bible Society Archives, Philadelphia. 

Stanley, Brian. 2018. A World History of Christianity in the Twentieth Century. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Wuthnow, Robert, and Stephen Offutt. 2008. “Transnational Religious Connections”. Sociology of Religion 69, 2: 209-232.