CONFLICT IN CHINA

An opposition to Buchman had, in fact, been steadily growing. Many missionaries objected to his concept of personal work, and his style and personality also came in for criticism. There was, as well, the awkward fact that wherever he went people queued up for talks with him, which was not the case with all the others.

The opposition finally came to a head over Buchman's part in the 1918 summer conferences at Kuling and Peitaiho. He had been an invited observer at the 1916 conference, and had been asked to conduct the sector on 'Personal Work' in 1917. Now, along with Miss Paxson and Tewksbury, he was to lead the conferences. He was determined that they should not be a repetition of the previous years, and for two reasons. The first was that concentrated work with small groups of missionaries had convinced him that their moral and spiritual needs were a good deal more basic than he had previously suspected.

The second was that he wanted conferences which could both bring greater effectiveness to the missionary community and give hope to men like Hsu Ch'ien. Hsu saw Christianity as a potentially revolutionary force. The best way of feeding that faith, Buchman felt, was to demonstrate that it was true. 'It will be no ordinary conference,' he wrote of his plans for Kuling. 'There will be men like Cheng Ching-yi and Hsu Ch'ien who believe that Jesus Christ is the only hope of China; another group who feel that the returned students must become a force in the present political crisis... They will come from all over China and one of the results will, we hope, be an endeavour to laicise the Chinese Church.' There were to be no 'bench-warmers', no 'grand-stand quarter-backs'. Kuling was no longer to be a private event for the missionary community. It was to be a 'fully personalised' training centre for the national leadership of China.1 All this, of course, totally upset the traditional pattern of the summer conferences.

At first, Buchman appeared to be getting his way. At a conference in Hangchow before Eddy left China, there was 'unanimous approval' from the missionary leaders both for the idea of inviting carefully selected foreigners and Chinese to Kuling and Peitaiho, and for the notion that both conferences should be intensive and selective.2 Buchman concentrated on Kuling. He sent personal invitations to leading Chinese and other 'marginal men'* whose presence would ensure that the conference there would be in touch with the actual needs of the country.

(* 'Marginal men', in the jargon of the day, meant people who were not already committed Christians or full-time Christian workers.)

60