The sources of anti-Christian feeling were many and complex. On the more intangible side, there was a general pique against the unwanted intrusion of the Western countries; there was an understandable tendency to seek an external scapegoat for internal disorders only tangentially attributable to the West and perhaps most important, there was a virile tradition of ethnocentrism, vented long before against Indian Buddhism, which, since the seenth century, focused on Western Christianity. Accordingly, even before the missionary movement really got under may in the mid-nineth century, it was already at a disadvantage. After 1860, as missionary activity in the hinterland expanded, it quickly became apparent that in addition to the intangibles, numerous tangible grounds for Chinese hostility abounded.
In part, the very presence of the missionary evoked attack. They were, after all, the first foreigners to leave the treaty ports and venture into the interior, and for a ling time they were virtually the only foreigners whose quotidian labors carried them to the farthest reaches of the Chinese empire. For many of the indigenous population, therefore, the missionary stood as a uniquely visible symbol against which opposition to foreign intrusion could be vented. In part, too, the missionary was attacked because the manner in which he made his presence felt after 1860 seemed almost calculated to offend. By indignantly waging battles against the notion that China was the sole fountainhead of civilization and, more particularly, by his assault on many facets of Chinese culture per se, the missionary directly undermined the cultural hegemony of the gentry class. Also, in countless ways, he posed a threat to the gentry’s traditional monopoly of social leadership. Missionaries, particularly Catholics, frequently assumed the garb of the Confucian literati. They were only persons at the local level, aside from the gentry, who were permitted to communicate with the authorities as social equals. And they enjoyed an extraterritorial status in the interior that gave them greater immunity to Chinese law than had ever been possessed by the gentry.
Although it was the avowed policy of the Chinese government after 1860 that the new treaties were to be strictly adhered to, in practice implementation depended on the wholehearted accord of provincial authorities. There is abundant evidence that cooperation was dilatory. At the root of this lay the interactive nature of ruler and ruled.
In a severely understaffed bureaucracy that ruled as much by suasion as by might, the official almost always a stranger in the locality of his service, depended on the active cooperation of the local gentry class. Energetic attempts to implement treaty provisions concerning missionary activities, in direct defiance of gentry sentiment, ran the risk of alienating this class and destroying future effectiveness.
Provincial authorities ______.