343 Anthony E. Clark Ji Li Recent Years Have Seen the Emergence Of

Men, Women and Gender in China book reviews Nan Nü 17 (2015) 343-348 343 Anthony E. Clark Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014. xiii+219 pp. US$ 50.00. ISBN: 9780295994000. Ji Li God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-century Manchuria. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015. xii+218 pp. US$ 50.00. ISBN: 9780295994727. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new approach to the study of rural Catholicism in China. By closely examining the specific circumstances of local society, and taking seriously the beliefs and biases of individual actors, scholars such as Eugenio Menegon and Henrietta Harrison have moved the study of Chinese Catholicism beyond its previous fixation on moments of crisis such as the Rites Controversy, and come to embrace Catholicism as a Chinese local religion.1 New works by Anthony Clark and Ji Li represent another step in this very welcome trend. The title of Anthony Clark’s book promises a discussion of the Boxer Upris- ing, a topic that is already overshadowed by the magisterial work of Joseph Esherick and Paul Cohen.2 Each of these two dwells largely on the circumstances that immediately precipitated the event in its birthplace of Shandong province, and while neighboring Shanxi was where the Boxer movement argu- ably became the most violent, Clark’s short volume on the Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in that province might at first glance be perceived as a slightly derivative account of these now well-known events. That would be a mistake, as this book in fact takes a unique approach to very different questions, ones in which the uprising itself often appears as a backdrop, rather than the main narrative. The book divides into two sections: the “drought” and the “deluge,” dealing respectively with the prelude and event of the uprising in Shanxi. The divi- sion is somewhat notional, and much of the content falls outside of a linear 1 Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 2 Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press,1987); Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). ISSN 1387-6805 (print version) ISSN 1568-5268 (online version) NANU 2 ©Nan koninklijke Nü 17 (2015) brill 343-348 nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/15685268-00172p13 344 book reviews narrative. Clark, without much introduction, jumping right into the history of the Taiyuan 太原 mission, from its seventeenth century Jesuit origins, through suppression of Christianity in the mid-Qing, reestablishment of the mission under Franciscan auspices in the mid-nineteenth century, and formation of the Taiyuan Apostolic Vicariate in 1890. Along the way, he introduces a series of colorful characters: Bishops Gabriel Grioglio, Gregorio Grassi, and Francesco Fogolla, and the Missionaries of Mary among many others. However in a man- ner that is repeated throughout the book, the style of the chapter makes it dif- ficult for the reader to understand who is important and who is not, and indeed, many of the figures introduced here are never encountered again. The second chapter moves on to emphasize some of the unique features of Shanxi, notably the effect of the Dingwu 丁戊 Famine of 1877–78. This famine had hit Shanxi particularly hard, and two decades later, the trauma remained tangible in the region’s endemic poverty, and the fragility of its social in stitutions. The Franciscan focus on charity had served them well in Shanxi, initially muting the sort of conflict that would feed the Boxer movement else- where. Rather, it was the arrival of the notoriously xenophobic provincial gov- ernor Yuxian 毓賢 (d. 1901) that enabled the Boxers to begin recruiting in large numbers. Clark describes the training networks of the Shanxi Boxers in some detail, but leaves unanswered questions about their origin, or the source of resentment that fed their ranks. He hints at some difference in their beliefs, noting a preference for geomancy, purity and invincibility (the sort of practices that scholars like Susan Naquin have discussed in the context of rural rebel- lion) to the better known Boxer practices of spirit possession. Although I was not entirely convinced of viability of such a clear-cut distinction, the differ- ences in Boxer practices do suggest that the violence in Shanxi was in some ways less an extension of the Shandong Boxer movement, than an indepen- dent event that merely coincided with it, the difference between the two turn- ing on the question (one long debated in both Chinese and English language scholarship) of how the movement was distinct from existing traditions of popular belief. The analysis of spiritual warfare in the life of the Church is where the book comes into its own. Clark distinguishes between the sacred violence of the Church militant versus the Church triumphant, one major difference being whether battles fought were those of the earth or of the soul, but emphasizes that the two expressions are complimentary. As the clouds of conflict began to gather, Catholics interpreted their struggle and understood their choices in terms of these “imagined spiritualties” (p.64). While the French Lazarists in Beijing prepared to fight the Boxers on earth, the Franciscans in Shanxi chose to advance the same cause by taking the path of martyrdom. This they did Nan Nü 17 (2015) 343-348.

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