Missionary Mobility and the Cold War: Protestant Missions from China to Southeast Asia, 1920 -1989 (Routledge Studies in Modern History)

Exploring how war, revolution, and communism in China irrevocably altered Protestant Christianity and the mobility of missionaries in the twentieth century, this book focuses on the China Inland Mission (CIM), later known as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), once the largest Protestant missionary force in the world, and analyses how missionary mobility produced and disseminated ideas about religion, race, empire, human rights, and the Cold War. This volume follows the trajectory of Protestant missions in Asia in three broad strokes.The first section analyses missionary mobility as “pioneers” bound for the “frontier” of global Christianity in the Chinese countryside and outer lying regions such as Tibet in the first half of the twentieth century.The second section traces the mobility of missionaries as Cold War “exiles.” Expelled from the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC), former China missionaries were redeployed to posts along the “Bamboo Curtain” in East and Sout