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A. Between 1840 and 1950, Christian missionaries spent one hundred years in China, with little result in terms of numbers of people converted. Why did they have so little success? Do you see any parallels to Japan, where Christianity has very few adhereents, or to Korea, where it has a lot? What explains the somewhat larger number of Chinese who have become Christians since 1980? Do you see any informative parallels or contrasts with the introduction of Buddhism almost two thousand years earlier?
B. Raphael Israeli, in his book Muslims in China, the important chapter of which is soon to be found on e-reserve, asserts that Islam and Chinese society are fundamentally incompatible, because Islam's ideal includes not just belief but practice in the form of an ideal community ruled by Islamic law. For this reason, he sees opposition between Muslims and others in China as inevitable. But, as shown by the Sufi texts discussed in Hatanaka's book and by the participation of many Muslims in the Qing imperial state and the Republican and People's Republic governments, conflict does not always seem to come about. So do Israeli and others who take this view misunderstand Islam, is there something in China that he missed out on, or is conflict just waiting to happen?