Philip L. Wickeri, Ed. Philip L. Wickeri's Edited Volume, Unfinished

book reviews 353

Philip L. Wickeri, ed. Unfinished History: Christianity and the Cold War in East Asia. (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), pp. 283, isbn 978-3-374-04074-2.

Philip L. Wickeri’s edited volume, Unfinished History, consists of papers that were presented in the conference, “Christianity and the Cold War in East Asia, 1945–1990,” at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Hong Kong in April 2014. In the “Introduction,” Wickeri states that there is the need to examine the impact of the Cold War on Christianity in Asia. He says that “the time for more careful study is long overdue” (p. 10). In “Religion and us Policy towards China during the Early Cold War,” Qiang Zhai examines how religion affected the United States’ policies towards China in the 1940s and 1950s, highlighting the cultural aspects of international relations. The emphasis is on how Christianity influenced policymaking in the United States. In “Changing Perceptions and Interpretations of the Cold War,” Peter Chen-main Wang focuses on the Na- tional Christian Council of China, which was a major Christian institute, and the perception of its leaders from 1945 to 1949. Philip L. Wickeri’s article, “’Cold War Religion’ and the Protestant Churches in East Asia and the West,” studies what the author calls the “Cold War Religion” and the “unfinished history” of the impact on the region. In “The Survival of the ‘Instrument,’” Weiqing Hu explores the different ways in which the churches in Shantou adopted to maintain their survival before the Cultural Revolution. Then Fuk-tsang Ying, in “Voices from the Bamboo Curtain,” studies the 132 letters written from individual listeners in mainland China to the Far East Broadcasting Company (febc) in Hong Kong from 1959 to 1968. In “The Cold War and Beyond,” Yang Weihua studies the identity of a prominent Chinese Christian intellectual, Xie Fuya (1892–1991) and his perception of the Communist rule in the mainland. In another article “A Catholic ‘Disturbance’ in Taiyuan Diocese, Shanxi Province, 1965,” Wang Meixiu also looks into a particular case, that of the miracles claimed by the Catholics who lived in the suburb of Taiyuan in the spring of 1965. Yosuke Matsutani, in “Crossing the Bamboo Curtain,” studies the visit of the Japanese Christian delegation of 15 people to China in April 1957. This article addresses the impression the Japanese had of Communist China, and the pros and cons of their visit to the mainland. In “Political Ideology and Theological Rhetoric,” Yen-zen Tsai evaluates the True Jesus Church in Taiwan from 1945 to 1990 as a case study of church-state relations. In “Churches in the Divided Nation,” Jin Kwan Kwon analyzes how the Cold War system structured Korean Christianity in the same time period from 1945 to 1990. Heung Soo Kim looks into the earlier stage of the Cold War, that is the Korean War, and sees how

354 book reviews the church leaders responded to the Korean War. Then in “Another Child of Conflict,” Volker Küster discusses in what ways Korean Minjung Theology was a manifestation of the Cold War in Asia.

Cindy Yik-yi Chu Hong Kong Baptist University [email protected]

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