On the Front Lines with the China Inland Mission: A Review Essay Daniel W. Crofts onventional wisdom suggests that Western missionaries The CIM’s outreach to the small-town and rural backwaters Cin China changed course by the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of China was largely invisible to outside observers. “Christians of itinerant preaching in pursuit of individual conversions— in America know nothing about our mission,” Todd tartly stock-in-trade for the hardy pioneers who reached China in the observed. Denominational missionaries who worked in “large latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of enough places to have hospitals and schools” left “most of the hard the twentieth century—the more culturally flexible team players places to reach untouched.” They worked among “up and outs,” of the post–World War I era jet- Todd wrote, “and we among tisoned evangelism and instead down and outs. We also can emphasized good works. They Missions to China’s Heartland: The generally get closer to the peo- organized medical dispensaries, Letters of Hazel Todd of the China ple just because we do live in hospitals, schools, and universi- Inland Mission, 1920–1941. closer touch with them.”5 ties, and they worked to establish Edited by Robert Gardella. Portland, Maine: In order to get close to the YMCA chapters and agricultural MerwinAsia, 2009. people, CIM missionaries need- 1 cooperatives. Pp. vii, 237. Paperback $45. ed to speak the language. The Hazel Todd (1893–1941) and first order of business for newly Arnolis Hayman (1890–1971) of A Foreign Missionary on the Long March: arrived CIM recruits was a crash the China Inland Mission (CIM), The Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman of the course in what would now be the principals in two recently China Inland Mission. dubbed Chinese immersion. The published books, offer striking women went to a special CIM exceptions to the conventional Edited by Anne-Marie Brady. Portland, Maine: school in Yangzhou; the men to wisdom. For Todd and Hay- MerwinAsia, 2010. Pp. v, 160. Paperback $32. a comparable facility in Anqing. man, as for the organization After months of intensive study, that brought them to China, young apprentices were directed evangelistic outreach remained the sine qua non. Their lives in- to a locale where they could improve their language skills and volved abundant good works, but as the means toward an end. begin evangelistic work under the supervision of experienced Working among “the poorest of the poor” at a time of political older missionaries. Over time those greenhorns who had the breakdown, revolutionary upheaval, and desperate hardship, right mix of skills and tenacity learned to stand on their own feet. they were sustained by a deep and unquestioning faith.2 Their Hayman, who first reached China in 1913, learned both Chinese world was providentially guided. Even if God’s will was at times and the language of the Black Miao, aboriginal peoples who difficult to discern and even if advances came only in the tini- clustered in eastern Guizhou, where he headed several mission est increments, they knew that “God makes no mistakes.” They stations. Todd, who first arrived in 1920, found herself able to embraced Christ’s admonition to “teach all nations,” and they communicate effectively in Hunan by 1922. When relocated to were sustained by his promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even Anhui in the late 1920s, she gained comparable facility with a unto the end of the world.”3 quite different dialect. Marauding Chinese soldiers during the troubled 1930s were startled—“that foreigner talks Chinese.”6 Hudson Taylor’s Mission Hazel Todd: CIM Veteran The China Inland Mission was the brainchild of British evangelist J. Hudson Taylor. It was a “faith mission”—meaning that it was Todd’s letters, expertly edited by Robert Gardella, were origi- entirely dependent on voluntary support. It abjured denomina- nally sent to her family in California. She remained single and tional backing or overt fund-raising. Its goal was to carry the self-reliant. The cause of evangelism gave her life a focus and Christian message to ordinary folk in China’s vast interior. Ini- direction that snuffed out any competing personal agenda. tially British, the CIM became genuinely international. A signifi- Much of her life was spent on the road, preaching at periodic cant number of its missionaries originated in the United States, markets and outstations. She routinely walked long distances continental Europe, and the Commonwealth (Canada, Austra- and stoically accepted spartan creature comforts. Her attachment lia, and New Zealand).4 Hazel Todd was born in Minnesota and to narrow CIM orthodoxies was absolute. Christian “Modern- lived in Los Angeles before heading to China; Arnolis Hayman, ists” who accepted the theory of evolution were attempting “to born to a missionary family then living in Ceylon, grew up in tear down faith in the Bible.”7 She regarded traditional Chinese New Zealand. religion and a belief in “idols” as superstitious nonsense—an obstacle to be exposed and overcome. An outburst of Chinese Daniel W. Crofts, Professor of History at the Col- nationalism among students in the 1920s was “anti-foreign and lege of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey, is the author anti-Christian.” She keenly resented unfairness and inequality— of Upstream Odyssey: An American in China, “so many people lack proper food and clothing while others have 1895–1944 (Norwalk, Conn.: EastBridge, 2008). such plenty”—without asking why an all-powerful God allowed such conditions to exist in the first place. She could recount how a mob destroyed the mission in Changde, even while serenely insisting that “the Lord has a purpose in all this.”8 Because the CIM emphasized “direct evangelism,” it gave July 2011 171 lower priority to medicine. Fewer than 2 percent of its mis- Todd admired Chinese Christians. Her letters include sionaries in China were doctors.9 But early-twentieth-century frequent words of appreciation—for the young woman who advances in Western medical technology encouraged missionary resisted family pressures to accept an arranged marriage, for amateurs to learn by doing. Quinine could overcome malarial the pregnant woman with bound feet who walked nine miles attacks, injections of serum could provide some immunity against to take Communion, and for the three hundred believers who deadly typhoid and cholera, and santonine could kill intestinal flocked to attend a Christmas celebration at an unheated building roundworms, a nearly universal scourge in rural China. Todd in an outlying town. She bemoaned the loss of “one of the finest was appalled by the medical conditions she encountered—ghastly Chinese Christian workers with whom it has been my privilege infant mortality, a lack of sanitation, and virulent diseases that to work, who has walked many a mile with me preaching the had been controlled in prosperous industrial countries. “A greater gospel and shepherding the flock”—killed, alas, by Communists. knowledge of medicine and how to use it would be worth nearly Todd took a special interest in Paul Hsu, who started to prepare everything to me,” she exclaimed within months of first being for a career as an evangelist when she sponsored his enrollment dispatched upriver. Not until a furlough in the late 1920s did she at a Bible institute in Changsha.13 receive any formal medical training. Upon her return to China But Todd’s letters also reveal much about the disconnect she discovered that medical work could be “just as productive between missionaries and their intended beneficiaries. In all in spiritual results” as overt evangelization. She was told by her kinds of ways, some trivial and some consequential, the West- erners and the Chinese poorly understood each other. Todd noted that paring knives were unknown in China—therefore Todd was annoyed when Chinese cooks left “the peeling” on vegetables such as carrots and cucumbers. But cleavers were another story—“when chop- local women showed ping up anything they do it quicker and better than we do.” greater interest in seeing Todd was annoyed when local women showed greater interest in seeing the inside of the home where the mission women lived the inside of the home than in listening to the sermon. Subtle matters of language usage where the mission women deterred easy communication. “The Chinese after all are so dif- ferent from what we are, and it is easy to say the wrong thing or lived than in the sermon. say it in the wrong way,” Todd reported in 1925. Weeks before her untimely death in 1941, the same thought persisted—“many of the Chinese ways of thinking and talking remain strange to us.”14 patients that she could “beat” Chinese doctors—and that she Like any organization of its era, the CIM was led by men. should concentrate on medicine and leave to others the visiting But its ideology demanded that all Christians had a paramount of church members and “working to reach outsiders.” Candidly obligation to spread the Gospel. Christian women therefore reporting both her medical triumphs and her shortcomings, Todd had a responsibility to reach out to Chinese women. Over time, personified the CIM’s ambiguity regarding the proper balance CIM women came to outnumber men, a pattern apparent in between medicine and evangelistic outreach.10 other missionary organizations. And even if women were sup- Todd’s writing was direct and forceful, with pithy assess- posed to be subordinate to men, those with leadership potential ments of people and circumstances. A fellow missionary was “our increasingly found ways to exercise their talents. Hazel Todd was pocket edition of Scotland.” He had been “fearfully spoiled before a striking case in point. “Women need some way of expressing coming to China, and his hat still is not big enough for him.” An themselves,” she once wrote.