This panel contributes to World Christianity scholarship by examining how Chinese and Taiwanese Christians negotiated ideological pressures, diasporic displacements, and institutional constraints across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Challenging Western-centric narratives of Christian globalization, the papers collectively foreground non-Western Christian actors as theologians, activists, and institution-builders in their own right. One paper exposes how the Cultural Revolution simultaneously cast Catholicism as subversive in mainland China while enlisting it as a cultural-nationalist ally in Taiwan, revealing how local political regimes shaped distinctly Chinese forms of Christian identity. Another repositions postwar Taiwan as an underexplored site of Chinese Christian diaspora through Chow Lien-hwa's indigenous theology. A third traces CCCOWE's evolving missionary eschatology from apocalypticism toward holistic public engagement within global Chinese Protestantism. The final paper argues that Chinese-language seminaries must critically remap World Christianity curricula to avoid replicating epistemological dependency. Together, these papers advance polycentric understandings of global Christianity from Chinese and Taiwanese perspectives.
The Cultural Revolution served as a critical catalyst that shaped Catholic politics on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In mainland China, local authorities persecuted clergy and believers, portraying Catholicism as an ideological enemy of the revolutionary state. To oppose the Cultural Revolution that destroyed traditional culture, the Taiwan government encouraged Catholic leaders to align religious practices with state–sponsored cultural nationalism. Some clergy even incorporated rituals honoring figures such as the Yellow Emperor into Catholic ceremonies and prayed for the Republic of China. Drawing on newly discovered local archives from mainland China during 1966–1976, records from the Taiwan government, church documents, and Catholic memoirs, this paper argues that despite opposite political treatments, enemy in mainland China and ally in Taiwan, Catholicism in both societies was ideologically instrumentalized by competing Cold War regimes. These processes reshaped church–state relations, religious practice, and Catholic identities across the Taiwan Strait.
This paper examines the Chinese indigenous theology of Baptist pastor and theologian Chow Lien-hwa (1920–2016), focusing on how the Chinese diasporic context of postwar Taiwan shaped both the content of this theology and the form of “Chinese” identity it articulated. The mass migration of mainland Chinese to Taiwan after 1949—of which Chow was a part—created a distinctive diasporic setting in which a displaced Chinese community maintained cultural and linguistic dominance under the Republic of China regime while interacting with a postcolonial Taiwanese society. Through close textual analysis of Chow’s theological works from the 1970s, this paper argues that mainland memory, ROC political ideology, and long-term settlement in Taiwan together reshaped Chow’s Chinese Christian identity as the product of a distinctive diasporic experience. Situating Chow’s theology within this context highlights Taiwan as an underexplored site of Chinese Christian diaspora for understanding Chinese Christianities as World Christianity.
This paper examines how shifting eschatological imaginaries shaped the missionary and public-theological development of the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism (CCCOWE), the most extensive transnational Chinese Protestant network since its founding in 1976. Early CCCOWE leaders, especially Rev. Thomas Wang, drew on Dispensationalist apocalypticism to frame Chinese evangelism as an urgent “final baton relay,” mobilizing global missionary activism. By contrast, younger leaders influenced by the Lausanne Movement’s “Whole Gospel” articulated holistic understandings of mission that integrated social concern, public engagement, and emerging forms of Christian counterculture. Through analysis of CCCOWE publications and archival materials, this paper traces how these contrasting eschatologies circulated across Hong Kong, North America, and the United Kingdom, generating new modes of public theology within global Chinese Christianity. It argues that the movement’s gradual shift from apocalyptic anxiety to eschatological hope reshaped Chinese evangelical identity and expanded Christian social participation by 2010.
Chinese-language seminaries, both in East Asia and across the diaspora, have largely not incorporated the insights of world Christianity scholarship into their curricula, even as Western theological institutions increasingly offer such courses as part of efforts to decolonize theological education. This paper argues that Chinese-language seminaries cannot simply adopt world Christianity curricula as developed in Western institutions. The field’s prevailing cartography, organized around a Global South/Global North axis, reflects a Western subject position that does not map onto the positionality of Chinese theological education. A direct transplantation risks replacing one form of epistemological dependency with another. The paper identifies five areas where curricular remapping is necessary, including attention to the East-West axis of Christianity under communist regimes, Indigenous Christianity in North America, and Christianity in the East Asian. It further addresses practical questions of implementation, including AI-powered translation tools and a thematically organized course outline as a model for adaptation.