The first missionaries arrived in the Taihang Mountains in the decade after 1840, following the defeat of China in the First Opium War. They were Italian Franciscans. In the latter part of the nineteenth century these Italians were reinforced by French and Dutch priests of the same order. From all that I could learn in Long Bow, it was the Dutch who concentrated in the Shangtang region and built the mission in Changchih to which the church in Long Bow was a satellite.
The Franciscan fathers, once they gained admission to the region, went vigorously to work; they bought land, built buildings, brought in Catholic converts from other areas, and set up small Christian communities. Through the Chinese Christians as intermediaries, rather than through preaching or evangelism, they hoped to reach out to the local people and eventually establish entire Catholic villages and even Catholic counties.
With each defeat suffered by the Ch’ing Dynasty at the hands of the Western powers, greater and greater concessions were granted to the Catholic missionaries, all of whom, regardless of nationality, were under French protection. The French government lost no opportunity to win special privileges and powers for foreign priests, which enabled them to influence the population around them more effectively and to gain converts.
The treaties forced on the Chinese government by the Second Opium War (1856-1860)
placed not only missionaries, but Chinese Christians under the aegis of foreign powers. This gave to the converts a certain assurance of protection and stimulated the numerical growth of the church. The provision had, however, implications and results which were, to say the least, unfortunate. It tended to remove Chinese Christians from the jurisdiction of their government and make of Christian communities imperia in imperio, widely scattered enclaves under the defense of aliens.*
Missionaries usurped the powers of civil officials over their converts; and it was not surprising to find that
Catholic missionaries interfered from time to time in lawsuits in which Christians were one of the parties. Sometimes a mere gesture from a missionary—a visit or his card—was enough to obtain a decision in favor of a convert, for the official did not wish to become embroiled with foreigners who, through their consuls and ministers, could make trouble for him with his superiors. It is not strange, then, that individuals and families and even entire clans and villages professed conversion in the hope of obtaining support against an adversary.**
Nor was it so strange that by the end of the nineteenth century “the confusion between the Christian religion and European politics had become inextricable. The missionaries profit from Europe’s armed might and suffer from the hatred it arouses.”*
In 1899, under French pressure, an imperial rescript was issued which granted to Catholic bishops—all of whom were foreigners—equal rank with regional viceroys and provincial governors, and to foreign priests equal rank with provincial treasurers, provincial judges, and county magistrates. This only confirmed and made official a practice which had been growing since 1860. Bishops had long flaunted official buttons, caused cannons to be fired when they arrived in town, had an umbrella (a Chinese sign of rank) carried ahead of them, and issued proclamations in forms similar to those used by officials.**
Such factors as these, at a time when the great powers were quite openly preparing to divide up China, led the peasant rebels of 1900—the Boxers—into anti-foreign and anti-missionary action.
Shansi Province, under Governor Yu Hsien, was one of the storm centers of this revolt. In the Shangtang area Catholic churches were sacked, Catholic priests and their Christian converts killed, and Catholic property seized.
Due in part to the treachery of the Empress Dowager, who pretended to back the movement while at the same time encouraging foreign intervention to crush it, and in part to the spontaneous, poorly organized nature of the Boxers themselves, the rebellion failed.† A joint expedition of eight powers marched to Peking, sacked the city, and forced on the government a treaty which demanded, among other things, the execution of various leaders of the rebellion, 450 million silver dollars in indemnities and the death penalty for any Chinese who joined an anti-foreign society in the future.
Overnight the situation in the Shangtang was reversed. From almost complete rout, the Catholic missions came back stronger than ever. Over two million dollars of the indemnity money was turned over to the Franciscans in Changchih and they began to build churches, settle Catholic believers, and win converts on an increasingly large scale.
In the two decades that followed the Boxer Rebellion, 57 churches were built in Lucheng County alone—along with rectories, nunneries, seminaries, and orphanages. Enormous compounds of brick and stone rose from the ground. With this “renaissance” the church threatened to become the dominant community organization in the region. For many years people dared not openly oppose what the church initiated, carried on their Buddhist rites in secret, and lived in fear of exposure to the priests.
It was during this period that the huge church in Long Bow was built. Even before the structure itself was completed, a concerted drive for new membership was launched by the Dutch fathers. This drive, as it was described to me by villagers who remembered it, took many forms.
First, the Church brought in Catholic families from villages where larger Christian communities existed. Some of these families were recruited locally, and some came from as far away as the Hopei plain. These immigrants were settled on land belonging to the Church or its auxiliary organizations, or on land of local gentry who had been converted. Thus the nucleus of Catholics in Long Bow was greatly enlarged. Second, the Church used charity to attract new members. Reliable Catholics who had stood by the Church during the rebellion received four ounces of silver per person from the Boxer indemnity funds. Similar favors in the form of money and grain were handed out, especially in poor crop years, to those who would agree to enter the Church and study its doctrines. In this way many poor people in desperate need were drawn into the fold.
A third great source of recruits was the orphanage that was housed in an extensive complex of buildings adjoining the Church. Because the peasants lived from year to year on the verge of starvation and in bad years often died themselves, it was impossible for them to raise all their children. Boys, when they grew up, stayed home to help support their parents. Therefore every effort was made to save them. But girls, after 12 years of feeding, could only be sold for a few bags of grain, or given in marriage for the equivalent of a few dollars. Therefore in times of distress girl children were sometimes abandoned or even killed at birth. The orphanage in Long Bow was built specifically to care for such abandoned children. From picking up babies in the streets and fields, the custom developed of accepting babies directly from their parents, or even of paying modest sums for girl children in order to encourage their mothers to part with them. Once they become the property of the orphanage, the infants were farmed out to wet nurses, in some cases their own mothers, until old enough to eat millet. They were then reclaimed by the Church to be raised as Catholics.
At a very early age these girls were put to work cleaning, cooking, and sewing. Certain products of their labor were sold on the market to provide a source of income for the orphanage and the Church.
Having paid their way by long hours of toil—the older girls often worked up to 12 or even 14 hours a day—the young women were betrothed in their early teens to local peddlers, traders, peasants, or soldiers in return for a substantial remuneration. This not only helped the Church financially, but also insured new converts and a younger generation brought up as Catholics. For in order to obtain a wife from the orphanage the husband had to promise to become a Catholic, and any children resulting from the union were automatically pledged to the faith. Since the orphanage was the main source of unpromised brides, and since its prices were about one-third lower than the average in the region, many poor peasants who wanted to get married had little alternative but to buy a Catholic wife.
If the operation of the orphanage created ill w
ill and distrust, the economic activities of the Church sharply aggravated this feeling. The institution through which the financial affairs of the Church in Long Bow were handled was called the Chin Hsing Hui, or “Carry-On Society.” This was ostensibly a charitable organization set up after the 1911 revolution to help fellow Christians in distress. The Catholic peasants were taught that by contributing to it they would earn merit in the eyes of God and get to heaven faster after death. When members of the group died all the Catholics in the village prayed for their souls. Those who did not join got no such support in the after-life. Many poor peasants contributed a coin or half a coin to this venture. In the beginning the total capital was about three ch’uan (altogether about one-third of a silver dollar). By loaning this money out at high interest rates amounting to 30 percent a month, the Society made money, bought land, and acquired land through default on loans. By the late 1930’s the Society owned 30 acres of land, collected rent from 25 tenant families, and extracted interest from another 32. It was the largest single landholder in the village.
Loans from the Society were given out with a written contract that was standard for the whole region and included many oppressive clauses not ordinarily stipulated by landlord-usurers. Article Six of this contract forced any debtor who was in default to pay the travel fees of the collectors who came to demand the money. The fee demanded was ten cents for every ten li (three miles) traveled, plus room and board if the trip involved an overnight journey. (Lest anyone wonder why there should be travel fees for collecting Long Bow loans, it should be explained that this was for loans made from the central office at the Cathedral in Changchih.) The seventh article called for an additional five percent per month interest on all defaulted debts, and this interest was compounded.
Of the 32 families in Long Bow who owed money to the Society in its last years, three were forced to sell all the land they had in order to clear their debts. Another three sold their houses. The Society occupied by force the land of another three. Other families sold sons, daughters, and draft animals to pay off their debts.
Since the Society, as a religious institution, paid no taxes on the land it owned, the tenants had to pay all levies demanded by the various government bodies in addition to the heavy rents. Rents to the Society varied over the years, but ran as high as a bushel of wheat for each mou—something like 50 percent of the crop. Catholics could rent land more cheaply than non-Catholics. They paid one eighth of a bushel less per mou per year. Tremendous pressure was exerted on all tenants and borrowers to become members of the Church.
For the wealthy landlords and rich peasants of the village the Society served as a sort of bank. They could put funds into it and draw 15 percent a month in interest. The advantage of this was that they could get their money out at any time instead of only after the harvest or at the approach of the new year as was the case when loans were made to individual peasants. Sheng Ching-ho, Fan Pu-tzu, and the other leading landlords all had sums invested in the Carry-On Society. It thus had the backing of the landlord group as a whole. The peasants, for their part, had a different name for it. They called it the “Peel and Pare Society.” (“Peel and pare” is the literal translation of the word “exploit” in Chinese.)
Charity was the professed aim of the Society and charity it always practiced. For one thing, it gave ten bags of grain each year for the support of the church orphanage. This was by no means enough to keep the orphanage going, but as we have seen, it had other sources of income.
Various Catholic laymen managed the affairs of this profitable charitable society over the years. In the decade prior to 1945 the manager was a man named Wang Kuei-ching. He began life as a poor laborer, but from the day he took over the affairs of the Carry-On Society, with the backing of the leading gentry, he prospered mightily. The foreign fathers dealt with no outsider directly. Whenever they had any business to do they called in Wang Kuei-ching. All they knew about the village and the community they learned through him. Thus, Wang became a power to be reckoned with and a man to be feared. He himself tilled the best land owned by the Society. It was rumored that he got 50 percent of all interest on loans. Whether this was true or not he most certainly got a commission on all transactions that passed through his hands, and this included not only the business of the Carry-On Society but all the financial affairs of the Church as well. He was the business manager for the whole institution, holding the key to the safe and letting the contracts for new construction. It was common knowledge that he kept eight percent of the wages of those who built the church buildings. But this was not enough for him. When the construction was over, he managed to carry home such valuable items as the steel cable used on the hoist.
Society Chairman Wang made use of his key position in the Church to extend his influence both inside the hierarchy and in the realm of politics. His eldest son, Wang En-pao, was early recruited into the Kuomintang Party and in the 1940’s became its district secretary. A second son became a Catholic priest. A daughter became a nun.
In handling the financial affairs of the Society and the Church, Wang Kuei-ching was ruthless. Hu Hsueh-chen, a poor peasant woman, was allowed to borrow a hundredweight of grain from the Society in the spring, for which she had to pay 1.2 hundredweight in the fall. It was a dry year and her whole crop amounted to less than she borrowed. Society Chairman Wang seized everything that she had grown, including the poor beans she had planted between the rows of corn, and left her without any food at all. She had to go into the streets to beg soon after the harvest.
During the famine year this same woman went to Chairman Wang’s door and asked for something to eat. “I am poorer than you,” he said as he picked bits of his last meal from between his teeth with an ivory toothpick. “You had better get out of here.” With that, he kicked her from his entry and closed the gate in her face.
Wang was as hard on his poor relatives as he was on everyone else who had too little to invest in his Society. A cousin named Hsiu Feng worked for many years in his household as a maid servant. He cheated her of her wages and gave her very little to eat. During the famine year she was forced to sell her own children and look for work as a wet nurse in another village. But Society Chairman Wang told everyone that he fed and cared for her over the years out of the kindness of his heart.
Wang knew all the traditional methods for cheating the peasants and was noted far and wide for the practice of them. When he loaned out millet it was full of dirt and chaff, but when, after the harvest, he came to collect the rent or interest due he asked for pure, clean millet. He winnowed and rewinnowed it until only the big, full kernels were left. The millet he loaned out he measured with a small bushel measure, but the millet he took in he measured with a large measure.
When Wang loaned out money he first subtracted a month’s interest so that if one borrowed 30 dollars one actually received 20 dollars, but paid interest, after the first month, on 30. Emergency loans were more expensive. Wang charged as high as 10 percent per day compounded. He never loaned money to landless persons. He invariably demanded land as security, and when, because of the high interest rates, the poor borrower defaulted, the land changed hands as surely as autumn gave way to winter.
The Carry-On Society was not above using the special legal power and privilege possessed by the mission to add to its holdings. For decades half an acre of irrigated land adjacent to the Church had been tilled as public property and the proceeds used for education, charity, and other community needs. In 1925 the Society tried to buy this land for the Church and turn it into a vegetable garden. The people of the village refused to sell. Then Fan Ching-ch’eng, a landlord and leader of the Catholic minority, began a campaign of slander against the non-Catholic majority. He persuaded a young co-religionist named Chang Kuo-chi to claim the land as his inheritance. One night Chang’s father was found cutting a tree on the land. A crowd gathered to stop him. The Catholics turned out in force to protect him and a pitched battle ensued. Into the fray stepped Fan Ching-ch�
�eng as mediator. His solution, presented a few days later, was to sell the land to the Church.
This so angered the people that 900 of them walked all the way to the Yamen at Lucheng to protest and petition for the return of the land to the village. Under pressure from the mission and fearful of repercussions should the foreigners be angered, the county magistrate ordered soldiers to drive the petitioners away. Deserted by their own government they had nowhere to turn. The Church took the land without payment. As far as the mission was concerned, the incident was closed, but the people did not forget so easily.
Nor did peasants like Wang Ch’eng-yu forget the long years of abuse they suffered at the hands of the Church and its Carry-On Society. The story this land-poor peasant told me was certainly very one-sided, but I report it here as he remembered it. His memory was bitter.
Before the turn of the century Wang Ch’eng-yu’s father rented land in Horse Square, one mile north of Long Bow. He was a Buddhist in a village that boasted a large Catholic mission and a Catholic majority. He may well have taken part in the attack on the Church that marked the Boxer uprising. In any case, when the Rebellion was crushed, he fled to avoid persecution at the hands of vengeful Catholics. Hunger finally drove him back to Horse Square. The priest ordered him arrested. He was strung up and beaten. He decided to move to Long Bow where the Church was not so powerful. But the priest in Long Bow called him in and said, “Wherever you go you must be a Christian, for if you do not join the Church you will be taken for a Boxer and you will suffer for it.” In the end, without food, land, or house, he accepted relief from the Church and was listed thereafter on its roster of members. The relief during this period consisted of one silver dollar a month—a fair sum in those days.
This peasant had four sons. His brother had four daughters. He swapped with his brother—a son for a daughter. Both he and his wife became very fond of the baby girl but found it difficult to support four children. The church orphanage then stepped in with an offer of aid. The parents turned the girl over to the orphanage. The orphanage, in turn, left the little girl with her mother to be nursed, fed, and care for, and paid a small subsidy for her support. There was one condition that had to be met—the arrangement was valid only as long as the girl’s parents faithfully followed the teachings of the Church.
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