Introduction
In his study of Hong Kong as a global frontier in the Cold War era, Prasenjit Duara suggested that ‘while the spread of economic and migrant networks from Hong Kong has been well documented’, less noted has been the historical role of Hong Kong as a space of facilitation which allowed religious networks to fan out from China to South East Asia.Footnote 1 Ying Fuk-tsang, a noted historian of Chinese Christianity, is one of the handful of scholars who have paid attention to this overlooked role of Hong Kong. In his recent study of Protestant Christian literature and publishing work in post-war Hong Kong, Ying pointed out that Shanghai [上海] in East China, Hankou [漢口] in Central China, and Guangzhou [廣州] in South China had long been the centres for Chinese Protestant literature and publishing before the Communist takeover of China in 1949, with Shanghai as the most important. However, from the 1950s onwards, they were replaced by Hong Kong thanks to the migration of renowned, experienced Chinese Protestant writers and publishing professionals, as well as the relocation of Protestant publishing agencies from mainland China.Footnote 2 During the 1950s and 1960s, these people and agencies produced in Hong Kong many hundreds of Protestant publications including devotional literature, evangelistic writings and periodicals. Given the difficulty of sending books from Hong Kong to mainland China owing to the latter’s political situation, these publications increasingly targeted Chinese living outside mainland China,Footnote 3 who, as suggested by the estimate of the American Bible Society (ABS), amounted to more than twenty million in total by late 1949.Footnote 4
According to Ying, at the same time, Hong Kong gained new status as the world’s supply centre of Chinese Protestant Bibles. As early as the period from 1949 to 1952, twenty-eight editions of the Bible, twelve editions of the New Testament and nine editions of biblical portions, of which most were in Mandarin, and which in total amounted to 2,485,975 volumes, were published by the Hong Kong Bible House (HKBH). The HKBH was an agency which enabled the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), the ABS and the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), the three major Chinese Bible publishers and distributors in late Qing (1842–1911) and Republican China (1912–49), to continue their work among Chinese-speaking people after they were forced to withdraw from mainland China in 1951. The Chinese Bibles, New Testaments and biblical portions published by the HKBH were supplied not only to Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also to South East Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia and Malaya, as well as countries like New Zealand and the United States of America.Footnote 5
As Bible publishing and distribution were not the focus of Ying’s study, it is natural that he did not explore in depth why Hong Kong, a British colony occupying a geographically peripheral position at the southern end of China, became a world centre for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution. The brief account of the HKBH’s work during the 1950s and 1960s in Ying’s article is based on only a few published sources.Footnote 6 Building on Ying’s account, this study draws on the archival materials of the Bible societies connected with the HKBH to argue that the Chinese Civil War (1946–9) and the Korean War (1950–3) were catalysts for the British and American Bible societies’ desire to have an agency in Hong Kong for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution. This resulted in the establishment of the ‘Emergency Office’ of the Chinese Bible House (CBH) in Hong Kong in 1949, which, in 1951, became the HKBH. Thanks to the work of the Emergency Office, and subsequently of the HKBH, Hong Kong was set on the path towards becoming a world centre for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution in the Cold War era, in contrast to its pre-war peripheral role in Chinese Protestant Christianity as a Western Protestant missionary society or denomination’s station in its South China mission, diocese or synod.Footnote 7
The CBH’s Hong Kong ‘Emergency Office’: A Contingency Measure in Response to the Chinese Civil War
In Republican China, Chinese Bible publishing and distribution was mainly facilitated by three British and American Bible societies, namely the BFBS, the ABS and the NBSS, which had begun their work among the Chinese in the nineteenth century. For many years, they worked across the country without a clear division of territory, which unavoidably resulted in competition among them. This became more problematic when the Protestant church in China was making a transition from a mission to an indigenous church in the Republican era, since Chinese Protestants were generally unconcerned about ‘whether their books come from an American office or a British office’,Footnote 8 whereas Western missionaries usually supported a specific Bible society corresponding to their country of origin.Footnote 9 In 1932, delegates of the three Bible societies met in London to discuss ‘how to reach fuller co-operation in view of the present position and problems in the world’.Footnote 10 One of the resolutions of this conference related to China, recommending that the three Bible societies should work together to encourage ‘the formation of a China Bible Society, which, having the same basic principles as the co-operating Societies, shall share with them in the world-wide work of the distribution of the Scriptures’.Footnote 11 In 1937, the BFBS and the ABS united their work in China under a single organization known as the CBH, which had its headquarters in Shanghai. With the integration of the NBSS’s work in China into the CBH in 1946, the CBH was qualified to be considered as the national Bible society of China, since it functioned as the sole organization through which all three Bible societies carried out Bible publishing and distribution work in the country.Footnote 12
Although it was the intention that the CBH would become a self-governing and self-supporting Bible society, it was not until December 1950 that Baen Lee [李培恩; Li Peien], former president of Hangchow University, was appointed as the first full-time Chinese general secretary.Footnote 13 Before his appointment, except during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), when E. S. Yu [俞恩嗣; Yu Ensi] and Chester S. Miao [繆秋笙; Miao Qiusheng] served, for a brief spell, as honorary general secretary (1942–4) and acting executive secretary (1944–5), respectively, the CBH’s executive heads, known as ‘secretaries’, were Westerners representing the three Bible societies.Footnote 14 The first were George Carleton Lacy of the ABS, who resigned in 1941 on his election as bishop of the China Central Conference of the Methodist Church, and William H. Hudspeth of the BFBS, who was interned by the Japanese in October 1942 and released in 1945. They were followed by Ralph Mortensen of the ABS, who succeeded Lacy but could not arrive in China until 1944, and David McGavin of the NBSS, who, after Hudspeth’s relocation to Canada in 1947, also represented the BFBS.Footnote 15 These Western secretaries were members of the CBH’s executive committee and also accountable to the Bible societies they represented. Moreover, the three Bible societies furnished most of the CBH’s budget until 1951, when, as will be discussed below, the CBH severed its relationship with them and no longer received foreign financial support.Footnote 16
Shortly after the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, China was again embroiled in conflict, through a civil war which raged from 1946 to 1949 between the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 1948, given the prospect of the Communist takeover of China which could put an end to Chinese Bible printing in the country, the CBH began to consider plans to produce ‘with all speed the greatest possible stock’ of Chinese Bibles.Footnote 17 One of the measures taken was to place an additional order for printing Chinese Bibles, New Testaments and biblical portions which amounted to two years’ supply, and to deliver the books as speedily as possible. For example, a Lutheran mission aeroplane named ‘St Paul’ was chartered to ‘make at least five trips transporting eighteen tons of Scriptures [from Shanghai] to Peiping [北平, now 北京; Beijing], Tientsin [天津; Tianjin], Sian [西安; Xian], Lanchow [蘭州; Lanzhou] and Chengtu [成都; Chengdu].’Footnote 18 This decision was made at a time when John R. Temple, concurrently general secretary of the BFBS and the newly founded United Bible Societies, was visiting Shanghai in November 1948 as part of his final Far East tour. His ‘wise words of counsel’, for which the CBH’s executive committee thanked him,Footnote 19 could have been a factor leading to the CBH’s decision, as revealed in a letter written by Temple on his way to Hong Kong after visiting Shanghai:
Many missionaries and business people are evacuating the country because of the Communist victories, and Shanghai itself is threatened. I was thankful to share with my colleagues the dangers: and plan with them the sending of about 250,000 copies of the Scriptures to the threatened areas in planes flown to evacuate the missionaries. Had I not been with them they would have hesitated to act in this way because of the expense. Hope the Committee [of the BFBS] will stand by me. It might be our last chance to get the Scriptures into Communist areas, and who knows how God can use them for the comfort and strengthening of His people in the hard days before them. They also may be used to convert many to the faith.Footnote 20
Additionally, the CBH’s standing committee decided at its meeting on 10 December to establish ‘an auxiliary headquarters’ in Hong Kong, ‘as soon as conditions require, in order to ensure adequate printing of Scriptures, and to leave to the judgment of the Secretaries the decision of when to start.’Footnote 21 This decision was not surprising, as by the end of November 1948, the Communists had won the Liaoshen [遼瀋] campaign of the Chinese Civil War for control of Manchuria, while the Pingjin [平津] campaign was taking place in Peiping and Tianjin, and the Huaihai [淮海] campaign in Xuzhou [徐州].Footnote 22 Given the proximity of Xuzhou to Nanjing [南京], the capital of Republican China, and Nanjing to Shanghai, if the Communists proved victorious in the Huaihai campaign, they would soon take over Shanghai, which could result in the closure of the CBH’s headquarters.
Indeed, the idea of setting up an auxiliary headquarters in Hong Kong as a precautionary measure had been deliberated among the CBH’s secretaries for some time. In a letter written on 9 December 1948 to William C. Somerville, the NBSS’s general secretary, McGavin explained that he and Mortensen ‘have been considering the advisability of arranging for printing to be done in Hongkong and it is felt that one of [them] ought to get down there to establish an auxiliary headquarters.’ They also felt that ‘it might be unwise to wait until the Communists, if they come, forbid us to continue further printing.’Footnote 23 Here McGavin and Mortensen shared a similar view with Temple, who believed that Hong Kong should be a base for Chinese Bible publishing and distribution if the Communists took over Shanghai. In a letter to William J. Platt, the BFBS’s assistant general secretary, composed just two days before he died in Hong Kong on 30 November, Temple wrote:
Two days after I had been in Shanghai my mind was made up to press for your taking hold of the China Field – the greatest job in Bible work … . But what if the Communists overrun China? … . The South will never be completely conquered by the Reds and we must have a base in Hong Kong with 2 or 3 hundred Gutzlaffs penetrating China – see G’s story in [William] Canton’s history [of the BFBS] … . I am sure it can be done, though it will cost money. If Shanghai falls to the Reds then I would urge that we find immediately a base in Hong Kong – the one stable secure place in the Far East … . Let us lead and fight the Reds with the ‘Sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God’.Footnote 24
The three Bible societies’ archival records, despite not stating explicitly their reasons for agreeing with the decision of the CBH’s standing committee, hinted at why Hong Kong was considered as a suitable location for the CBH’s auxiliary headquarters. As recorded in the minutes of the BFBS’s Overseas Administration Sub-Committee ‘B’, which oversaw the society’s work in China, of a meeting on 16 December 1948, Platt, who succeeded Temple as the society’s general secretary, had had talks with Canon Henry August Wittenbach of the Church Missionary Society, who had been a prisoner of war in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation of the city,Footnote 25 and with Harold Burgoyne Rattenbury of the Methodist Missionary Society. These two former China missionaries ‘spoke of the advantages of Hongkong as a base, should the Communists’ invasion envelop Shanghai and South China.’ One of these advantages was the stability of the Hong Kong dollar, which was pegged to the pound sterling.Footnote 26 According to Wittenbach and Rattenbury, the Hong Kong dollar ‘even in the Japanese occupation had been used, by underground channels, to support the Chinese Church on the mainland’.Footnote 27 This financial consideration reflected an earlier observation of William Shenton, a member of the sub-committee who retired from Hong Kong in 1936 after a legal career there.Footnote 28 Referring at the sub-committee’s meeting on 20 May 1948 to discussions with friends who had recently returned to Britain from China, Shenton commented that ‘the normal currency has been very largely superseded by Hongkong currency’.Footnote 29
Another advantage of Hong Kong was its geographical location. In a letter to Arthur H. Wilkinson, another general secretary of the BFBS, dated 17 December 1948, McGavin indicated that Hong Kong was well-located for the Bible societies’ work among the Chinese, suggesting that although printing in Hong Kong would cost more, the Bibles produced there would ‘help to meet the need in southern areas and in the many countries to the south from which come large orders for Chinese Scriptures’.Footnote 30 McGavin reiterated this view in a letter to I. C. Mawer, the BFBS’s assistant secretary, a month later, in which he added that he expected to ‘save something in shipping costs’.Footnote 31
The availability of printing resources could also give Hong Kong an edge. Before the Chinese civil war, modern printing presses had already been available in Hong Kong.Footnote 32 Two notable examples of printing establishments there were the Hong Kong Printing Works of the Commercial Press, and that of the Chung Hwa Book Company, established in 1924 and 1933 respectively.Footnote 33 Indeed, in August 1949, the Hong Kong Printing Works of the Commercial Press was commended as ‘a good printing plant’ in a conversation between McGavin, Paul A. Collyer, the ABS’s associate secretary, and Gilbert Darlington, the ABS’s treasurer.Footnote 34 Also, it was not difficult for Hong Kong to have a supply of paper for Bible printing through importation, given that it was a port city. It is thus unsurprising that in late 1948, thirty tons of paper were ordered by the CBH from Sweden for shipment to Shanghai, but with the option of landing in Hong Kong.Footnote 35 In addition, as revealed in the report of McGavin’s conversation with Collyer and Darlington, Hong Kong had a supply of newsprint, a low-cost paper that could be used for printing cheap editions of the Chinese Bible for mass distribution.Footnote 36
Eventually, the CBH’s executive committee decided that McGavin should go to Hong Kong ‘for a period in order to start printing going there just in case work on the Shanghai presses should prove to be no longer possible’.Footnote 37 McGavin rather than Mortensen was sent to Hong Kong because ‘it was felt that, since there were only two Westerners’ in the CBH’s national headquarters in Shanghai, and McGavin happened to be ‘the British member of the staff’, it would be better for him to proceed to Hong Kong.Footnote 38 McGavin travelled to Hong Kong in early January 1949 ‘to see what can be done and to prepare for the printing of the Scriptures in Hongkong’,Footnote 39 setting up the CBH’s ‘auxiliary headquarters’ there, which later came to be known as the ‘Hongkong Emergency Office’.Footnote 40 At the CBH’s executive committee meeting on 23 March 1949, McGavin reported that ‘in view of the possible need for emergency headquarters in Hongkong early in January 1949, he had arranged for the use of the veranda of the Bible, Book and Tract Depot, Hongkong, as his temporary office’.Footnote 41 This arrangement was necessary because none of the Bible societies had ‘any [office] accommodation of its own’ in Hong Kong.Footnote 42 Moreover, he had placed an order for the printing of 500,000 Gospel portions in Hong Kong, in addition to receiving estimates for the printing of Bibles and New Testaments. Six cases of shells (paper matrices for printing) and three cases of zinc plates had also arrived in Hong Kong for safe keeping. The shells included those of the Mandarin Bible, the Wenli (literary Chinese) Bible, the Cantonese Bible, the New Testament in the Fuzhou [福州] dialect, and the New Testament in the Nasu language (the Eastern Yi [彝] language); while the zinc plates were all of the Mandarin Bible.Footnote 43 The CBH’s executive committee subsequently agreed to ‘approve the purchase of substantial stocks of Bible paper wherever available at reasonable prices for the emergency printing of Bibles and New Testaments in Hongkong and/or Shanghai.’Footnote 44
During the first year of its operation, the CBH’s Hong Kong Emergency Office published the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in Chinese, as well as the complete Chinese Bible.Footnote 45 In early 1950, the CBH’s executive committee noted that ‘besides publishing Scriptures [it] was doing good work in arranging for the distribution of Scriptures to such places that could not be reached directly from China’.Footnote 46 McGavin reported on his work in Hong Kong for 1950 that 57,080 Bibles, 42,000 New Testaments, and one million portions of the Bible in Chinese were printed during the year ending 31 October 1950.Footnote 47 These books were dispatched not only to Guangzhou, where the CBH’s South China agency was located, to supplement the CBH’s work in that region,Footnote 48 but also to many other parts of the world to meet the needs of Chinese residents there, including Indo-China, Burma, Siam, Malaya, Indonesia, Japan, the United States of America, South America, the South Seas, and New Zealand. Korea was also among the destinations of the Chinese Scriptures published by the Emergency Office: ‘twenty-eight parcels containing 500 copies of Chinese New Testaments’ were sent there for the use of the chaplain of the United Nations’ Command in the Korean Campaign, Ivan L. Bennett, probably for work among Chinese prisoners.Footnote 49
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Hong Kong became an important source for supplying Chinese Bibles to Taiwan, as exporting them directly from Shanghai to Taiwan was no longer possible. Therefore, it is not surprising that an order for printing 100,000 Chinese New Testaments was placed by the CBH’s Hong Kong Emergency Office for Taiwan in early 1951, while a quarter of a million copies of the Gospel of John were shipped to the island for ‘the special work being done there by the Youth For Christ Team and the Every Creature Crusade’.Footnote 50
The Chinese Scriptures published by the Hong Kong Emergency Office bore the imprint ‘China Bible House’. This indicated its status as a branch of the CBH.Footnote 51 However, 1951 witnessed the publication of the first Chinese Bible with the imprint ‘Hongkong Bible House’,Footnote 52 which indicated the beginning of a new era for the Emergency Office.
From an Emergency Office to the Bible Societies’ Sole Agency for Chinese Bible Publishing and Distribution
Although the Korean War, which began on 25 June 1950, was originally a military conflict between North and South Korea, security concerns – and specifically its fear of a growing military threat from the United States – led the PRC to enter the war in October-November 1950.Footnote 53 As the war unfolded, the Communist Chinese government accelerated the implementation of its policy aimed at purging Western-imperialist influences from China – and thus from Chinese Christianity – in order to stabilize the nascent regime.Footnote 54 The consequent political pressure led to the severance of the CBH’s relationship with the three foreign Bible societies and thus to the end of its foreign financial assistance. In 1951, the CBH was taken over by a Chinese board of directors; by that spring, all the CBH’s foreign staff had withdrawn except Mortensen, who failed to secure an exit permit from the Communist Chinese government and remained in Shanghai until January 1953.Footnote 55 The CBH’s board decided at its meeting on 14 March 1951 ‘in order to realise in their best effort the new movement of self-support’, to ‘receive from the year 1951 no more contributions from friends of the American Bible Society’. This was followed by its decision in May to ‘cut completely the relationship with the U.S.A. and to decline acceptance of the £5,000 remitted by the British & Foreign Bible Society through the Kincheng Bank’, which ‘will be reported to the Government Bureaus concerned in order to express the Board of Directors’ strong support’ to the Communist Chinese government for its stance against the United States in the context of the Korean War.Footnote 56
Moreover, the CBH intended to sever its connection with the Hong Kong Emergency Office in May 1951. Baen Lee wrote to McGavin on 14 May 1951, informing him that ‘it is the intention of the Board to have your office entirely separated from the C.B.H.’ Lee indicated that at the board meeting on 11 May ‘discussions were made as to how the Hongkong office may be made independent of China because the Board feels that close relationship at the present time is undesirable’, although the minutes do not mention such discussions. He asked McGavin whether it was possible for the Emergency Office ‘to become an agency of the BFBS, NBSS, or such organisation’, suggesting that it would be ‘much more convenient’ for McGavin to ‘take care of other areas than China for the supply of Chinese Bibles and Scriptures’. He also proposed that if the Emergency Office, after being separated from the CBH, received orders of Bibles for the overseas Chinese but could not supply them, it could order them from the CBH ‘by paying cash’, and the CBH ‘can export such Scriptures as ordered upon the receipt of the remittance, especially earmarked for the purchase of Scriptures’.Footnote 57 A subsequent letter from Lee to McGavin, which was received by the latter in early June, explicitly requested that ‘it is hoped that in the future you will change your letter heads … . This will avoid the difficulty of misunderstanding by outside people’.Footnote 58 The separation was just a matter of time.
By the end of June 1951, all three Bible societies had reached a consensus that the name of the Emergency Office would be changed to the HKBH, which was originally suggested by McGavin as an unofficial name.Footnote 59 The HKBH was later officially confirmed as a joint agency of the three Bible societies under the BFBS’s administration, being financially supported by them: the ABS and the BFBS each contributed forty-five per cent of the funding, and the remaining ten per cent came from the NBSS.Footnote 60 As indicated by the minutes of the NBSS’s board meeting quoted by Somerville in a letter to Platt dated 11 July 1951, the renaming of the Emergency Office resulted from the Bible societies’ acceptance of the CBH’s recommendation that the Emergency Office should no longer be reckoned as part of the CBH.Footnote 61 The change of the Emergency Office’s status could be understood as an outcome of mutual understanding, rather than a forced action due to the CBH’s unilateral decision. Strictly speaking, the HKBH was not established as a successor to the CBH, as the CBH still operated at least till the end of the 1950s.Footnote 62 The HKBH’s establishment should therefore not be regarded as a result of a move by the CBH from Shanghai to Hong Kong.Footnote 63
The Korean War contributed to the renaming of the CBH’s Hong Kong Emergency Office as the HKBH, which marked the office’s beginning as the three Bible societies’ sole agency for Chinese Bible publishing and distribution. However, it also gave rise to the possibility that Hong Kong might be ‘liberated’ by the Communist Chinese government owing to the United Kingdom’s involvement in the Korean War. This was one reason why McGavin suggested the advisability of shipping the shells and plates of the Chinese Bible from Hong Kong to some other place for safe-keeping.Footnote 64 However, the decision-makers at the headquarters of the three Bible societies had a more optimistic outlook for Hong Kong than McGavin. Eric North, the ABS’s general secretary, wrote: ‘I find it very difficult to think that anything would happen to Hong Kong until after something critical has happened about Formosa’.Footnote 65 Although he also suggested that duplicate sets of plates of the Chinese Bible could be sent to Japan for storage and, if necessary, printing, North felt that the situation in Hong Kong was unlikely to ‘increase in difficulty unless British strategy involved negotiations for transfer of Hong Kong to Communist China’, which he ‘would really doubt’.Footnote 66 Platt of the BFBS, who agreed with North that Japan would be the best place for this purpose, also felt that ‘things will settle down and there will be no incident beyond Korea’.Footnote 67 Somerville of the NBSS was less optimistic than his English and American counterparts, but still told McGavin that his feeling and hope were that ‘there will be no war and that printing may be possible in Hongkong for a long time to come.’Footnote 68 Nonetheless, for safe keeping, two sets of shells for printing the Mandarin Bible and one for the Mandarin-English New Testament were shipped from Hong Kong to Canada, while three sets of shells for printing the Bible, the New Testament, and the Gospels and Acts in Mandarin were shipped to Japan.Footnote 69
Like the Emergency Office, the HKBH’s chief concern in its early years was to print and distribute Chinese Bibles to Taiwan and the overseas Chinese, the majority of whom lived in South East Asia.Footnote 70 The printing of these Bibles was mainly done by the Printing Works of the Commercial Press, and sometimes by that of the Chung Hwa Book Company.Footnote 71 The former even allowed free storage of the plates and book stock of the HKBH.Footnote 72 As the BFBS reported in its periodical The Bible in the World, ‘over a million copies of the Scriptures in Chinese’ were printed in Hong Kong during 1951 for use among Chinese populations outside China.Footnote 73
The work priorities of the HKBH could be due to three factors. First, opportunities arose from the influx of Chinese immigrants in countries neighbouring mainland China. For example, in the few months after the Communist takeover of China, more than twenty million Chinese left for Hong Kong, Taiwan and South East Asian countries. This, together with the fact that South East Asia was a major geographical destination for Chinese evangelicals as missionaries at that time,Footnote 74 gave rise to great demand for Chinese Bibles for special campaigns of evangelism, such as those among refugees and Chinese soldiers.
Second, the Korean War led to a prohibition on the importing of Chinese Bibles from Hong Kong to mainland China, which had previously been possible and had allowed the Hong Kong Emergency Office to supplement the work of the CBH. For example, according to a report from McGavin in November 1951, the CBH had ordered the printing of two editions of a cheap newsprint Chinese Bible to be sent into mainland China. Unfortunately, after 1,500 copies were forwarded, the CBH had to request the HKBH to ‘send no further supplies’ until the CBH received an import permit from the Communist Chinese government. Once it became clear that the CBH could not expect to receive such a permit, it agreed that the HKBH should ‘dispose of the books wherever they are required’.Footnote 75 Given the Bible societies’ policy that they should not operate contrary to the laws of any country, the HKBH had to target the Chinese-speaking populations outside mainland China.Footnote 76
Nevertheless, the HKBH initially continued to be able to do what Baen Lee proposed in the aforementioned letter from him to McGavin on 14 May 1951, namely ordering supplies of the Chinese Bible from the CBH, by which it provided additional funds for the CBH’s work.Footnote 77 For instance, reflecting its position as a Bible supplier for the overseas Chinese, the HKBH ordered supplies of certain luxury Chinese Bible editions from the CBH in 1951 since, whereas these editions had ‘little or no sale’ in mainland China, there was ‘a fair demand for these more expensive books’ outside China, while the HKBH at that time restricted itself ‘to the production of “Missionary” editions’, as its priority was ‘to meet the need from many quarters’.Footnote 78 However, in early 1954, the Communist Chinese government prohibited the export of Chinese Bibles since this was deemed to reflect the CBH’s dependence on a foreign organization. Although the ban was lifted shortly afterwards, Douglas Lancashire, McGavin’s successor, thought it unwise to continue importing Bibles from mainland China.Footnote 79
A third factor was the sole agency rights of the Bible, Book and Tract Depot (BBTD) for the distribution of Chinese Bibles in Hong Kong before 1955, which meant that during its early years, the HKBH ‘was unable to sell Scriptures direct to any person or organization in the Colony’.Footnote 80 An independent and interdenominational body, the BBTD was solely a distribution agency for Bibles and Bible portions issued by Bible societies, and Christian books and tracts in Chinese and English.Footnote 81 In 1948, a sole agency agreement had been drawn up between the CBH and the BBTD, and the BFBS obtained the BBTD’s shares in 1949.Footnote 82 In November 1954, the BBTD decided to relinquish its sole agency rights, which allowed the HKBH to completely take over Chinese Bible distribution in Hong Kong in 1955 and to develop its work in the city.Footnote 83 Nonetheless, special business discount arrangements were continued in view of the BBTD’s long-standing service to the Bible societies: the discount on Bibles supplied to the BBTD was increased from thirty per cent to thirty-five per cent after it relinquished the sole agency rights, while the discount to other Christian bookshops in Hong Kong was fixed at twenty-five per cent.Footnote 84
Conclusion
Circumstances make the marginal begin to be central. Providing insights into a hitherto understudied aspect of the history of the British and American Bible societies, this study has attested to what Craig Browne and Philip Mar suggested about Hong Kong’s peripherality: ‘Hong Kong demonstrates that the periphery is not a static category and that the periphery can undergo major transitions in relation to a dominant center.’Footnote 85 Hong Kong, a location for a mission station in South China, was considered of relatively little weight in Chinese Protestant Christianity before the Communist takeover of China. Nevertheless, this study has shown that the British colony began to emerge as a world centre for Chinese Protestant Bible publishing and distribution at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, thanks to two decisive wars for modern China, which led to the birth of the CBH’s Hong Kong Emergency Office and subsequently the HKBH, through which the BFBS, the ABS and the NBSS maintained their presence among Chinese-speaking people, so as to continue their century-long work of Chinese Bible publishing and distribution. This reflects Hong Kong’s role in Chinese Protestant Christianity in the 1950s: thanks to its peripheral autonomy as a British colony separated from the PRC, Hong Kong became a place for Western missionary societies and missionaries to continue to implement their visions for China.Footnote 86
Moreover, the Chinese in China had been regarded as the central group and the overseas Chinese the relatively marginal group in the context of the Protestant mission effort among Chinese-speaking populations. Printing and distributing Chinese Bibles to Taiwan and the overseas Chinese as the HKBH’s chief concern in its early years reminds us that since the PRC was inaccessible to Western Protestant missionary societies or denominations, the overseas Chinese, who used to be the marginal, began to be made central.
McGavin, who oversaw the Emergency Office’s establishment, wrote to Platt shortly after its becoming the HKBH in 1952, expressing his view that ‘it is a fact that, for supplying Scriptures to Chinese outside of China, the Hongkong Bible House has replaced the China Bible House.’Footnote 87 Indeed, to McGavin, the HKBH’s significance was more than that, since its work ‘is not that of a normal Bible Society Agency but is rather that of a manufacturing centre, producing Scriptures in various languages for the whole of South East Asia and even further afield’,Footnote 88 as attested by its publication of not only the Chinese Bible but also, for instance, the New Testament in the Lisu language and the Gospels and Acts in Vietnamese.Footnote 89 According to Atalanta Myerson, by the early 1960s, it was evident that Hong Kong was going to evolve into a major international printing centre.Footnote 90 As the process of such evolution overlapped with the later development of the HKBH, it is reasonable to ask whether the latter was among those contributing to the former. A foundation for further research into this question has been laid by this study, which itself has offered insights into the Christian dimension of the emergence of Hong Kong’s global relevance in the Cold War era.
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