This page is China Judaism and Christianity for China Information. Judaism’s role in Chinese history has been minor, albeit colorful. Records of Jewish settlement in China extend back to the year 950, when 70 Jewish families were listed in the city register of Kaifeng in Henan Province. Probably originating in Persia, Kaifeng’s Jews erected their first synagogue there in 1163. The community remained intact through the 18thguencury, by which time its members had been totally assimilated into the Chinese ethnic and social fabric. By the early 20thycentury, however, apart from a handful of aging citizens still practicing some Jewish rites (including the proper slaughtering of chickens), vestiges of Kaifeng’s Jews had all but vanished. In the decades prior to 1949, substantial numbers of Jewish migrants from Russia and Central Europe had established prominent Jewish communities within the foreign settlements of Tianjin and Shanghai but, here again, scant physical evidence of these now dispersed groups has survived to the present day （readers are referred to the best current work on the subject in English: Michael Pollack, Mandarins, Jews, and Missionaries: The Jewish Experience in the Chinese Empire (1980).

Christianity. Christianity made four major attempts to enter China.
The first was by the Nestorians, who came from Persia through fie route of the silk road in the 7th century; Judaism and Islam also came to China by the same route. The second attempt was headed by Father John Mon-tecorvino of Rome in the 13th century. Then came the Jesuit Matteo Ricci in the end of the 16th century who brought, along with his religion, astronomy, mathematics, and physics to the Imperial Court-the Chinese were interested in modernization even then. Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries came in large numbers during the 19th and 20th centuries, almost in parallel with Western expansionism. Christianity and imperialist economic and political interests penetrated China and together enjoyed special advantages in the imbalanced relations between a technologically backward China and technologically advanced West.

With the Communist victory of 1949, Mao Zedong announced at Tian’anmen in Beijing that the Chinese people had finally stood up-the culmination of a 150-year effort to rid themselves of foreign domination and exploitation and a decaying social order. Through the Communist-led revolution, they gained the dignity and pride that go with selfhood, an important aspect of the religious dimension of life. To some degree, Chinese Christianity was also part of the struggle for the selfhood of the Chinese people, as it attempted to stand up against the domination of the churches of the powerful West and their well-intentioned missionaries. Thus it was that the Protestant churches in China for over a century strove to be selcgoverning, self-supporting, and self propagating.