The growth in the study of church history in China is one outcome of Deng Xiaoping's policy of ‘reform and opening’, as well as a result of increasing exchanges of scholars and ideas between China and the west during recent years. Since the 1980s Chinese scholars have to a great degree abandoned the Marxist interpretative framework, and gradually developed their own interpretations and methodologies for the study of church history. In consequence, academic studies in the 1990s displayed a fair, honest and objective character which marked the process of maturation in the development of church history as a discipline. In this process Professor Yu Ke played an important role, of inheriting the past and ushering in the future as the real founder of the discipline in China.