Ji Li

Assistant Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures (China Studies), University of Hong Kong; Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS)

Ji Li is Assistant Professor of Chinese history at the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.A. and M.A from Peking University and Ph.D. from The University of Michigan. Her research areas centre on the social and religious history of late imperial and modern China, with particular emphases on the history of Christianity, religion and local society, women and gender, and cross-cultural studies between China and the West. Her publications include God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria (The University of Washington Press, 2015).

Christianity on the Move: Routes and Religious Mobility in Late Imperial and Modern China

This project studies the intricate and largely overlooked relationship between religious circulation, transportation routes and urban space in the historical context of state building and global connection in mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth-century China. Focusing on the case of Christianity, it examines three cities and regions that have played a significant role in the flow of Christian groups, institutions and practices. In an era that China’s connection with the world increasingly relied on new transportation routes and means, these cities served as strategic hubs reinforcing the transnational religious exchange and the construction of indigenous religious identity. Case studies include Shenyang in northeast China, Hong Kong and Canton in southeast China and Chongqing in southwest China. With geopolitical significance in different regions, they demonstrate how different cities in different historical and spatial contexts would construct ties within China and between China and the rest of the world through religious engagement.