{"product_id":"9780197623695","title":"PRE-ORDER NOW Making Catholicism Chinese : The Catholic Church in a Modernizing China by Stephanie M. Wong","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003cstrong\u003e PRE-ORDER NOW - Published: 22\/01\/2026 \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMaking Catholicism Chinese examines a little-known chapter of Catholic life in China, when a coalition of foreign-born and Chinese Catholics strove to make the Church indigenously \"Chinese.\" This book demonstrates how the indigenization movement, begun as a bid to render Catholicism a Chinese religion, came to support Chinese state-building instead.   In the first half of the 20th century, China transformed from a faltering and semi-colonized empire to a tentatively pluralistic republic to an increasingly militarized one-party state. Religious communities were driven to \"modernize\" for the sake of the new nation. In the case of Catholicism, the Belgian-born Lazarist Vincent Lebbe most publicly advocated for a Chinese Church, though the wider movement was guided by an array of Chinese clergy, newspaper magnates, scholar-politicians, artists, and army medics and combatants striving in various ways to be both faithful Catholics and patriotic citizens. Their indigenization project coincided with a national embrace of modernity as an ideal, leading Catholics to take up a variety of causes: promoting Chinese clergy as bishops in opposition to French dominance in the missions, experimenting with new forms of education and mass media, and ultimately joining the right-leaning Nationalist regime's war effort against Japan. Stephanie Wong thoroughly documents this history and definitively shows that the movement failed to establish the local Church as a distinct Chinese religion \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eBinding: Hardback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367782330741,"sku":"9780197623695","price":64.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780197623695.jpg?v=1763547976","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780197623695","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}