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Connected Histories: Asian Christians in the 1950s

Connected Histories: Asian Christians in the 1950s

Last updated on: October 9, 2025 at 12:56 am by Philip Jenkins

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Connected Histories: Asian Christians in the 1950s 2025-09-29T10:25:41-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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Another guest blogpost today.

By way of introduction, Frieder Ludwig is an outstanding scholar of World/Global Christianity, and especially in its historical dimensions. He is presently the co-editor of the two books bearing the title Transloyalties, which study the close and often surprising interactions and “connected histories” between various churches during the era of historical Christian expansion. Respectively, these are more fully Transloyalties: Connected Histories and World Christianity during the Interwar Period 1919-1939 and Transloyalties: Connected Histories and World Christianity during the Period of Decolonization and the Cold War 1945-1970. To give a full citation, they are edited by Frieder Ludwig, Ellen Vea Rosnes, Joar Haga, Marina Xiaojing Wang, and Jairzinho Lopes Pereira. They are published by Routledge, and they are very rewarding. Do check out the contents page here.

As a sample of this work – one of a great many that might have been chosen! – he offers a study of an interaction between a leading Indian church figure and his Chonese counterparts, in the mid-1950s. This work is so important because of the political setting, during the fall of European empires, and the rise of the new Communist state in China. At the time, it was by no means obvious that particular countries would adhere to one of the two great blocs, Western and Communist, or if it was possible to maintain a neutralist and Third World identity. All too often, we see things in terms of either/or loyalties, with clear cut plausibility structures in various “camps.” So were there really just two paths you could go by? What were the other options, the other historical roads that might have been taken?

The particular study offered here has a powerful contemporary relevance at a time when India seems to be detaching itself from a once-promising network of Western alliances, and is repositioning itself alongside Russia and China, with Putin and Xi.

Like the other essays in Transloyalties, the study strives to move beyond binary loyalties and acknowledges that individuals and groups constantly negotiate their loyalties. The study that follows is based on primary sources in the Archives of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and secondary literature.

The Negotiations Of The Indian Lutheran Bishop Manikam

With Chinese Christian And Chinese Political Leaders In 1956

Frieder Ludwig

In March 1956 Rajah Manikam, the first Indian Lutheran bishop in the historic diocese of Tranquebar, travelled to China. He not only met church representatives but also the Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. During this conversation Manikam raised critical questions about religious freedom in Communist China and about imprisoned Christian leaders; the differences of world views and loyalties became quite clear. Nevertheless, the meeting ended on a friendly note: The Chinese Prime Minister extended an invitation not only to an Indian Christian deputation, but also to Manikam personally: “You must bring your wife also, and the next time you come you must stay much longer and see China for yourself. You as an Indian Christian leader are always welcome to China.” Then the Prime Minister accompanied his visitors to the car, opened the door and bade them farewell. Manikam concluded: “Of the many interviews I have had with the Prime Ministers of countries in East Asia, none was kinder than His Excellency Chou-en-lai of China.”

Manikam’s visit took place during a time of rapprochement between China and India. After the end of the Korean war in July 1953, China’s strategy was to consolidate its power by strengthening relations with its neighbors. According to Gregg A. Brazinsky, the People’s Republic of China increasingly represented itself as a force for world peace and tried to win the trust of India and other nations in the region that claimed neutrality in the Cold War. In 1953, Zhou Enlai had formulated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. When he visited New Delhi in June 1954 “hundreds and thousands of people” greeted the Chinese Premier shouting the slogan ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai’, Indians and Chinese are brothers.” The Five Principles were also foundational to the famous Bandung conference in April 1955.

The warm welcoming invitation to Indian church leaders fitted into this context. However, Manikam represented not only the National Christian Council of India (NCCI), but also the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the International Missionary Council (IMC). Before he became bishop, he had been the first Joint Secretary of the IMC and the WCC in East Asia; and at the meeting with Chinese Church Leaders at Peking on March 17, 1956, he handed over letters from these two organizations. But in marked contrast to the invitation of the NCCI, the Chinese were apprehensive of the WCC, and especially of the IMC.

Any cooperation with the IMC, the Chinese church leaders felt, would undermine China’s new ecclesial independence. “We are not a mission field any more,” Dr. Wang (President, Union Theological Seminary, Peking) stated. Dr. Y. T. Wu (Chairman, Committee for the Realization of Self-Administration the Churches in China) added that “(o)ur friends abroad must rejoice with us if they are fair-minded” about the severance of connections with missions. In his response, Manikam emphasized that, “We in Asia owe a great deal — yes, our very existence, to missionary societies of the West.” As an Asian, he did not see it as demeaning for the NCC of India to be a member of the IMC, “one of the most important channels of ecumenical fellowship.”

The Chinese attitude towards the WCC was different, but the relationship had been estranged by a statement of the WCC Central Committee on the aggression of the North Korean troops in July 1950. This had led to the resignation of Dr. T.C. Chao as one the WCC’s’ presidents. Although in 1956 Chinese church leaders expressed a general wish to renew the fellowship, they still asked: “If the WCC is under American domination, how could we Chinese Christians who would be represented at a WCC meeting by only two or three delegates become a party to the condemnation of Communism, and then come back to China and live in this country?”

The Chinese church leaders emphasized their commitment to peace: “We want to promote the five principles of Nehru and Chou-en-lai. We are for peaceful co-existence. We want no military blocks. We hope the W.C.C. will do its best for peace. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace,” Dr. Y. T. Wu said. At the same time, Wu made the exclusion of Taiwan a conditio sine qua non for further involvement in the WCC. “There is absolutely no chance of any Christian Chinese going to a world conference if two Chinas are recognized, or if Taiwan is invited as China.”

An important topic in the conversations both with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese church leaders was the question of religious freedom. It was in this context that K.H. Ting, the Anglican bishop of Zhejiang and a leading personality in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, spoke about loyalties: “We are not communist-minded in our ideology. We are Christian in our attitude and also in our ideology. Our ‘yes and no’ are not decided by our loyalty to any ism, but only to the Christian Gospel. We support many reforms in China, because we have no reason to oppose them. (…) There are atheists who tell us that they do not believe in religion, and lay their cards on the table. (…) However, there are others who use religious slogans for their own ends and even begin their Congress with prayers. Beware of them. We have suffered a great deal at the hands of all these kinds of people.”

In his response, Manikam referred to his own loyalties and stated “(a)s far as he was concerned he found no clash of loyalties in serving the IMC and the WCC and the Churches of East Asia.” He also pointed out that the “WCC is interested in peace. But it is concerned also with the methods by which Peace is to be secured, and peace cannot come to this world except through fundamental freedoms.”

Thus, on both sides, the conversation partners were navigating between various loyalties. Ting’s statement that the only loyalty of the Chinese was to the Christian gospel was embedded in a context of an essentially political discussion in which the Chinese church leaders were weighing their loyalty to the state against loyalty to international ecclesial organisations. If the loyalty to the gospel was the sole loyalty, one could at least say that this loyalty was shaped by a certain understanding of it within a network of other loyalties.

Manikam, on the other hands, regarded the loyalty to his nation and his anti-colonial stance not as conflicting with his loyalties to the two international ecclesial organisations; he aimed to influence them from inside. In his bridge-building efforts, he strengthened the WCC and the IMC in East Asia, and at the same raised the sensitivity towards Chinese views within these ecumenical world organizations. In May 1956, for instance, he criticised “circular letters of China written by Americans, and particularly by ex-China missionaries, now at Hong Kong.”

Bishop Manikam’s negotiations with Chinese Christian and Chinese political leaders is one of the case studies which illustrates processes of transloyalties – a new term which strives to introduce a new dimension to border-crossing studies. It reflects the multipolar, polycentric socio-cultural frames and network structures in which individuals, groups and transnational organizations found themselves. By including religious, denominational, cultural, national and international dimensions, it aims to provide a tool for analyzing intercultural interactions and dynamics.

Frieder Ludwig (Dr. phil, Dr. theol.) is Professor of Global Studies and Religion at VID Specialized University in Stavanger, Norway. His research focuses on the intercultural history of Christianity. His publications include case studies on church and state and Christian-Muslim relations in Tanzania and Nigeria, on mission and churches during the First World War and on migration and Christianity. Ludwig taught at academic institutions in Germany, Nigeria, the USA and Norway.

Sources used generally here include Carl Gustav Diehl and Ernest Theodore Bachmann, Rajah Bushanam Manikam: A Biography, Christian Literature Society, 1975; and Philip L. Wickeri, Reconstructing Christianity in China: K.H. Ting and the Chinese Church, Maryknoll: Orbis 2007, 2015.

Philip Jenkins

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