Authors

Discussion

Founded in 1712, the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in China existed until 1956 and was one of the longest continuous Christian missionary enterprises in the country. Throughout its long existence, the Mission is believed to have played a variety of roles in addition to religious proselytism (Zhang, Xiao, Samoylov). It developed from a de facto Russian embassy in China (Widmer) and the birthplace of Russian Sinology in the eighteenth - early nineteenth century (Afinogenov, Feklova and Vekshina) to an active religious mission in the late nineteenth – early twentieth century (Avtonomov) to an institution of support for refugees from the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union in the 1920s-1930s (Pozdniaev, Zhang). 

This presentation is going to explore the mechanisms of these changes and problematise this simplistic transition model particularly focusing on the twentieth century. It will show that during the heyday of Orthodox Christian proselytism in China in the 1900s-1910s (Bays), a Chinese Orthodox clergy developed whose priority was spreading the Orthodox Christian message and facilitating religious life of Chinese Christians. Despite the closure of a significant portion of the missionary outposts in rural China in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Chinese Christians were still baptised and Chinese Orthodox clergy continued to be ordained. The way in which their relationships with the newly arrived Russian Orthodox Christians developed is key to our understanding of the history of the post-1917 Russian Orthodox Mission to China and its place in the fractured landscapes of Republican China, early Soviet Union, and the Russophone emigration.