Urbanisation, diaspora, and the tenacity of Chinese evangelicalism

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the role evangelicalism plays in three movements of ethnic Chinese – to Britain in the 1960s–70s, to the United States in the 1970s–90s, and to urban centres of mainland China in the 1990s–2010s. The basis of comparison is found in the fact that urbanisation and diaspora are fundamentally two forms of migration, though they may differ in the extent of physical and cultural distance travelled. In each of these movements, Chinese migrants encounter forms of evangelicalism which offer existential and material resources to understand, interpret, and engage the shifts towards one’s new home. Furthermore, this chapter argues that what is understood as ‘evangelicalism’ is contextualised in ways that somewhat differ from British or American evangelicalisms, and offers a unique form of Chinese evangelicalism.