Not long ago if you mentioned to academic acquaintances that you were studying China missionaries seriously, the response was one of surprise and a quick change of subject. In the world of China analysts, missionaries were dismissed as a horde of fanatics or as a club of wellintentioned but impotent meddlers.

Today, as more attention is paid the transnational influence of service organizations, China missionaries are, if not precisely in vogue, becoming a respectable field of academic inquiry. In January, 1972, the Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the American Historical Association sponsored a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on China missionaries. Assorted historians gave papers on theology and American foreign policy, the corporate structure of the missionary movement and its influence in China, theories of missionary imperialism or lack thereof, among other topics. (The papers are to be published by Harvard in a book edited by John K. Fairbank, organizer of the proceedings.)