This book is an integrated collection of essays looking at the shaping of Christianity in China with a special emphasis on the contributions of Chinese believers. As well as its geographical scope of the China Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the material covers a span of time from the end of the Ming Dynasty until the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. Also, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Charismatics, and various kinds of independents rub shoulders within its pages. This is, of course, how it should be. A recurring theme is what we might call 'history from below'; in many cases scholars were only able to access indigenous Chinese Christians in records and biographies which principally concerned Western Missionaries. The contributors include established academics and emerging postgraduate students, a mixture of Chinese and Western authors. Paul Woods is a Research Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, specialising in East Asia. He is the author of Theologising migration: Otherness and liminality in East Asia. His areas of interest are identity and otherness and postsocialism. In previous incarnations he obtained doctoral degrees in Chinese Linguistics and in Biblical Theology.
