BiblioVault - Books by Bays, Daniel

China Enters the Twentieth Century

Chang Chih-tung and the Issues of a New Age, 1895-1909

Daniel H. Bays

University of Michigan Press, 1978

Focusing on the major currents of reforms and nationalism, China Enters the Twentieth Century provides an insightful look into the major changes, and those advocating for them, which took hold in China at the turn of the century. With the reorganization of central government and the array of new, competing interests and ideals, stemming from dynastic nobles to populist civilians, contemporary scholars have had many possible methods of approaching this period. However, Daniel H. Bays turns an eye to Chang Chih-tung (1837–1909), an eminent politician and Viceroy of Liangguang, whose political life serves well to mark the course of the Chinese political and cultural landscape. In doing so, Bays challenges old ideas on what provided the foundation for China's entry into the twentieth century.

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Early Communist China

Two Studies

Ronald Suleski and Daniel Bays

University of Michigan Press, 1969

Contains two detailed case studies. In “The Fu-t’ien Incident, December 1930,” Ronald Suleski describes the pivotal incident in the power struggle between Mao Zedong and the Communist Central Committee. Daniel Bays’s study of “Agrarian Reform in Kwangtung, 1950–1953” focuses upon the measures taken by the Chinese Communist Party to control and eventually collectivize rural elites in Kwangtung province.

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The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home

Explorations in North American Cultural History

Edited by Daniel H. Bays and Grant Wacker

University of Alabama Press, 2010

This volume is the first to examine at length and in detail the impact of the missionary experience on American cultural, political, and religious history.

This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways. Missions provided many Americans with their first significant exposure to non-Western cultures and religions. They helped to establish a variety of new academic disciplines in home universities—linguistics, anthropology, and comparative religion among them. Missionary women helped redefine gender roles in North America, and missions have vitalized tiny local churches as well as entire denominations, causing them to rethink their roles and priorities, both here and abroad. In fact, missionaries have helped define our own national identity by influencing our foreign, trade, military, and immigration policies over the last two centuries.

Topics in the collection range from John Saillant's essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker's essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long’s essay on the “Auca martyrs” offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment's power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico’s secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups—black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—sought to convert one another, stead-
fastly envisioning “others” as every bit as “heathen” as those in far-off lands.

The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home is an insightful, provocative collection that will stimulate much discussion and debate. It is valuable for academic libraries and seminaries, scholars of religious history and American studies, missionary groups, cultural historians and ethnographers, and political scientists.

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