For a very long time, studies on Chinese-Christian encounters during the late Ming tend to focus on how the two value systems went through a process of conflict or accommodation. Historians are particularly interested in trying to identify and distinguish the Christian or Confucian components in the thought of individual scholar-official who were engaged in such interactions. For this reason, when the Christian scholar-official Wang Zheng (1571-1644) produced a collection of texts to recount how he was forced by his family to take a concubine because he had no son and how he felt ashamed of himself for failing to observe the Christian precept concerning adultery, modern scholars tend to interpret Wang’s distress as a manifestation of the dilemma of an individual who were caught between two incompatible value systems: the Confucian tradition that criticizes the inability to produce an heir as unfilial and the Christian tradition that forbids sexual intercourse with another woman who is not your legal wife. Wang’s struggle, according to these scholars, is indicative of the difficulty that Christianity faced when it was trying to gain a foothold in Confucian China.
This article will show that we cannot do justice to the complexity of the texts produced in relation to the incident by simply analysing them using a pair of highly essentialized concepts as in Confucianism and Christianity. Instead, we should follow the logic of the narrative closely to try to understand Wang Zheng’s reflection within the context of the rise of the notion of qing in the late Ming. Only then could we fully appreciate Wang’s unique take on the connections between religious belief, missionary work, family affection and obligation, bodily desire and discipline, and salvation. Wang’s view might be idiosyncratic, but it is also a product of its time.