The Acta Pekinensia (1705–1712), compiled by the Jesuit Kilian Stumpf, is among the richest documentary sources for the Chinese Rites Controversy. While scholarship has focused primarily on European missionaries, the papal legate, and the Kangxi emperor, this paper shifts attention to the collective petitions submitted by Chinese Catholics concerning the Chinese rites and the names of God.
I argue that these petitions are more than evidence of a theological dispute. They reveal the emergence of a Chinese Catholic community that understood itself not simply as the recipient of missionary instruction but as a moral and theological agent within the life of the Church. Often drafted by Christian literati while speaking in the name of a broader body of believers, the petitions combined sophisticated theological reasoning with the deferential language of Qing official culture. Women also appear among the petitioners, offering a rare glimpse of female participation in public religious advocacy despite the gendered constraints of late imperial China.
Rather than reading these documents solely as ecclesiastical records, I situate them within the broader moral and political culture of the Qing. Their collective appeals echo the practice of mingyuan (鳴冤), public cries against injustice through which ordinary subjects sought redress from higher authorities. Yet these petitions did more than protest. They insisted on making visible the qing (情)—the lived circumstances, moral experience, and cultural realities—of Chinese Christians as indispensable to the Church’s discernment of the rites. Read through the lens of historical theology, these petitions reveal how Chinese Catholics appropriated familiar forms of political communication to articulate a distinctly Chinese mode of ecclesial participation. The Acta Pekinensia thus preserves not only the history of a controversy but also one of the earliest collective expressions of what it meant to reason—and to speak—as Chinese Catholics.
Xueying Wang’s research focuses on Catholicism in China, especially the late imperial period. She pays special attention to the writings of Chinese Catholics, whose voices have traditionally been neglected. She has published articles on the work of Chinese Catholic intellectuals including Yan Mo, Zhang Xingyao and Xia Dachang, who offered divergent perspectives on how their Confucian heritage could be harmonized with their newfound Catholic faith. Through careful examination of their writings, Wang explores theological topics such as human nature, sacrifices, and Jesus Christ in the cultural context of late imperial China. She is also interested in the translation of Catholic concepts into Chinese. She is currently writing a monograph tentatively titled: Chinese Literati on the Rites Controversy: A Comparative Theological Perspective.
The seminar is sponsored by the Liu Institute's East Asia Working Group.