Fulfilling Prophecies on China’s Ethnic Frontiers in Southeast Asia: Peripheral Peoples’ Encounter with Christianity in the Twentieth Century
Lian Xi（连曦）
（Duke University Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina, USA）
Church History（2023），92，99-121.
Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, an enchanted response to Christianity among minority peoples on China’s ethnic frontiers in Southeast Asia caught Western missionaries by surprise. This paper explores the historical circumstances and the dynamics of the mass Christian conversion among those hill peoples. Far from a cultural defeat and a grudging surrender to a conquering foreign faith, their embrace of Christianity was an exuberant, communal rush toward fulfillment of indigenous prophecies of redemption. Unlike the civilizing project of the modern state—a coercive mandate of assimilation and ideological transformation—the Christian movement offered them a choice and allowed them to channel their desperate prophecies of the past toward a reformist messianism. With its war on local shamanism, rituals of courtship, and inherited (and often inebriated) rhythms of ethnic life, Christian conversion was ostensibly a break with indigenous traditions.
However, it also ironically fortified the ethnic identities of the peripheral peoples—especially through the creation of the written script for the purpose of Bible translation—and generated fresh resiliency for their material and cultural survival.
Keywords: Ahmao; Lahu; Lisu; Miao; Wa; Bible translation; vernacular scripts
文章大意：本文探讨了中国西南少数民族地区大规模皈依J D J的历史背景和动态。作者认为，像阿卯、傈僳族、佤族等大规模的皈依，跟他们自身“历史记忆”中的“预言”有很大关系。并且J D J的到来所引起的一些东西恰好又勾勒出他们的民族认同感，尤其对于那些没有自己文字的民族，当新的文字出现后，对他们的精神和物质文化都产生了深远的影响。总的来说，接受一种新的“religion”，对他们的整个社会文化生活都产生了深刻的影响。
这是一篇英文学术论文，2023年刚发表，作者是连曦。
连曦在中国Christian研究上，是很著名的学者了，他此前出版的一本关于近代中国Christian英文学术著作（2011年港中大出版了繁体版），影响颇深，且很有深度，深得许多学者的青睐。不过国内较少能看到此书，所以除了那些关心的人，大多数人可能不太了解。当然，他还有其他的著作，比较那个，就不详细说了。
当然，笔者觉得，作者在这篇文章中讨论的一些问题，其实，也有中方学者有涉及过了。
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对此论文感兴趣的读者，请私信笔者！
文章名没有翻译好，感觉怎么译都怪怪的，如果有读者有更好的翻译，那就私信笔者，万分感谢！
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