The Land of Sinim

A Hope Deferred, Denied, yet Never Discarded

Prologue: The Land of Sinim

On an autumn Sunday in 1891, in a white clapboard church in the Western Reserve of Ohio, a missionary on furlough stood before a congregation of two hundred and opened his Bible to the book of Isaiah. He had been home for three months, and the furlough had its own rituals: the prayer breakfasts, the women’s society teas, the lantern-slide lectures in which he displayed photographs of Chinese faces—patients healed, students baptized, converts standing solemnly in their new faith. But the Sunday sermon was the main event, the moment when the appeal for funds acquired the force of prophecy.

He read from the forty-ninth chapter, twelfth verse, in the language of the King James Version that his listeners knew almost by heart:

Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.

He paused on the last word. Sinim. The congregation knew what it meant, or believed they knew. The land of Sinim was China. Isaiah, writing seven centuries before Christ, had foreseen the conversion of the Chinese people. Their donations—the silver dollars pressed into the collection plate, the pledges penciled onto subscription cards—were not merely charitable acts. They were participation in prophecy itself.

This was not an unusual sermon. Across the final decades of the nineteenth century, in Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania and Baptist churches in Virginia, in Congregationalist meetinghouses in New England and Methodist chapels in the Midwest, the same verse was quoted, the same interpretation offered, the same appeal made. Isaiah had spoken. China was in the Bible. The matter was settled.

Except that it wasn’t.

A Word That Appears Once

The Hebrew word that the King James translators rendered as “Sinim” is סִינִים. It appears exactly once in the entire Hebrew Bible—what scholars call a hapax legomenon—a word that occurs only once, its meaning stranded without the context repetition provides. For a text as extensively studied as Isaiah, this is an unusual degree of obscurity. The word is a proper noun, clearly referring to a place or a people in the east or south, but which place, which people, has been debated for centuries.

The manuscript traditions do not agree. The Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew version that underlies most Christian translations, reads סִינִים—Sinim. But the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a), found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 and dating to approximately 125 BCE, reads סוניים—Svenim or Syenim, a variant that points toward a different identification entirely. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, renders the word not as a transliteration at all but as Περσῶν—Persians—suggesting that the ancient Greek translators either read a different Hebrew text or understood the referent differently. The Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin translation, renders it as terra australi—“the southern land”—neither transliterating the Hebrew nor identifying a specific place, but interpreting the word as a direction.

These divergences matter. The Dead Sea Scrolls reading, Syenim, strongly suggests Syene—the ancient name for the city known today as Aswan, in southern Egypt. This identification is not speculative. A substantial Jewish military colony existed at Elephantine, an island in the Nile opposite Syene, from at least the sixth century BCE. The Elephantine Papyri, first acquired in the 1890s and excavated in the early twentieth century, document a thriving Jewish community there, complete with its own temple. Isaiah’s promise that the dispersed of Israel would return “from far… from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Syenim” fits naturally into the geography of the Jewish diaspora as it existed in the prophet’s era: the north (Mesopotamia), the west (the Mediterranean world), and the south (Upper Egypt). China, by contrast, lay far beyond the horizon of any biblical writer’s known world.

The scholarly consensus today favors Syene. The leading critical commentaries—Brevard Childs, John Goldingay, Joseph Blenkinsopp—identify the referent as Aswan in southern Egypt, and the reading is not controversial in most¹ academic circles.

But for most of the nineteenth century, it was not settled at all. And the man who unsettled it was one of the most influential Hebraists of the age.

From Lexicon to Pulpit

Wilhelm Gesenius, professor of theology at the University of Halle, published his Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament in 1810 and 1812—a Hebrew-Chaldee lexicon that became, in its various editions and translations, the standard reference work for biblical Hebrew throughout the Protestant world. Under the entry for סִינִים, Gesenius noted the phonetic resemblance between Sin and the name by which China was known in many Asian languages, derived from the Qin dynasty (秦, 221–206 BCE), formerly the State of Qin (as early as 9th century BCE), whose first emperor unified the country—and concluded, with the cautious hedging of a working philologist, that “China is at least not as unsuitable as several interpreters assume.”² Half a century later, Julius Fürst—who had taken his degree in Oriental languages and theology under Gesenius at Halle in 1832—published his own lexicon under the same title, and carried the identification further: he acknowledged that Jewish tradition had identified the place as the southern land of Egypt, but set that reading aside as “less fitting for the context.”³ The China reading was not original to either man; earlier scholars had floated it. But the successive imprimaturs of the two great German Hebrew lexicons of the nineteenth century—the first by the master, the second by his pupil—carried it from cautious philological speculation into the bloodstream of Anglo-American Protestantism.

The channels of transmission were remarkably efficient. Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, published his Notes on the Bible beginning in 1832. Barnes’s commentary was not a work of original scholarship; it was a synthesis designed for lay readers, and it was spectacularly popular. For decades, it sat in the studies of American ministers and on the parlor shelves of Protestant families alongside the Bible itself. Barnes had not always identified Sinim with China; in his first edition he had given “a different view,” and his Isaiah commentary recorded the change with rare candor. He had reconsidered, he wrote, because if the China reading was correct, “then the passage furnishes an interesting prediction respecting the future conversion of the largest kingdom of the world.” There was, he added, “some plausibility in the supposition that while so many other nations, far inferior in numbers and importance, are mentioned by name, one so vast as this would not wholly be omitted by the Spirit of Inspiration.”⁴ The argument was theological, not philological. The references that followed were not unanimous: James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1890) listed Sinim warily as “an otherwise unknown name,” a “distant Oriental region,”⁵ while Robert Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible gave it plainly as “the Chinese.”⁶ The pulpit and the Sunday school lesson followed Young. The interpretation moved from the lexicon to the commentary to the concordance to the pew, shedding caveats at every transmission, until by the time it reached the ears of the congregation in Ohio it had acquired the weight of established fact.

The Chinese themselves, or rather the Chinese Christian translators who produced the Chinese Union Version of the Bible—the Héhéběn (和合本), completed in 1919 and still the most widely used Chinese Protestant Bible today—translated סִינִים as 秦國: Qín Guó, the State of Qin⁷. That is to say: China. The translators, working under the supervision of Western missionaries, adopted Gesenius’s identification and embedded it in the text that Chinese Christians would read for the next century. The interpretation thus became self-confirming: the Chinese Bible said China was in the Bible.

The identification has sunk so deep that the Hebrew language itself has absorbed it. In modern Hebrew, סִינִים—Sinim—is simply the word for “Chinese people,” the plural of סִינִי, Sini. The ancient hapax legomenon, whose meaning scholars debated for centuries, has been resolved not by philology but by popular usage. Whatever Isaiah meant, Hebrew speakers today take “China” from the verse—whether they read it at home or hear it chanted at a synagogue. The ambiguity⁸ has been paved over by assumption.

The irony is considerable. A German professor’s educated guess, advanced tentatively in a reference work, was adopted by an American commentator, propagated through the machinery of popular biblical education, carried across the Pacific by missionaries, and finally inscribed into the scripture of the very people it claimed to describe. By the time the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that Isaiah had meant Egypt and not China, the interpretation had already done its work. It had helped to build a movement, fund an enterprise, and shape the assumptions of a nation.

The Transformation Thesis

This book is about the consequences of that assumption—not the narrow textual question of what Isaiah meant, but the far larger question of what happened when millions of Americans believed that China occupied a special place in God’s plan for the world, and acted on that belief for more than a century.

The argument is simple to state, though its implications are not. America’s relationship with China has been shaped, from its earliest days to the present, by a conviction, remarkably persistent, that China is destined for transformation along American lines. This conviction originated in the Protestant missionary movement of the nineteenth century, was institutionalized through an extraordinary infrastructure of hospitals, universities, and religious organizations, survived the trauma of Communist revolution and the cynicism of Nixonian realpolitik, was secularized into the bipartisan “engagement” consensus of the post–Cold War era, and persists today even amid its apparent collapse. The current era of hostility—tariff wars, technology restrictions, military posturing, and bipartisan rhetoric about a “new Cold War”—burns as hot as it does precisely because it represents not a rational adjustment of strategic calculations but the shattering of what was, at bottom, a quasi-religious faith.

I call this persistent conviction the transformation thesis: the assumption, shared across generations and political orientations, that sufficient contact with American institutions, values, and commerce will transform China into something more closely resembling America. In its original form, the thesis was explicitly theological: China would be Christianized. In its twentieth-century form, it was developmental: China would be modernized and democratized. In its late-twentieth-century form, it was economic: China would be liberalized through trade. The vocabulary changed; the underlying structure did not. At every stage, the assumption was that China was a project—an object of American effort that would, given enough time and investment, yield to American expectations.

This is not how nations typically relate to one another. The United States does not expect India to become more American. It does not feel betrayed when Brazil fails to adopt American political norms. It competed with the Soviet Union for decades without the peculiar emotional register—the sense of personal disappointment, of promises broken, of love unrequited—that characterizes American discourse about China. The intensity is specific to this relationship, and its origins are specific as well. They lie in the missionary movement that sent more than twenty-five hundred young Americans to China in the decades before the First World War, that built half the hospitals in China by 1931, that established thirteen universities, and that created an institutional network linking churches in Ohio to clinics in Fujian to policy offices in Washington. That network has been secularized, but its assumptions have not been fully examined.

To understand why America’s current hostility toward China carries such emotional force—why it sounds less like strategic competition and more like the rage of a rejected suitor—we need to understand the faith that preceded it. We need to trace the pipeline that ran from seminary to mission field to diplomatic post to think tank. We need to see how the vocabulary of salvation became the vocabulary of modernization, how the vocabulary of modernization became the vocabulary of democratization, how the vocabulary of democratization became the vocabulary of liberalization, and how each translation preserved the essential structure while disguising the origin. We need to understand why, even now, when no one in Washington frames the relationship in religious terms, the emotional architecture of the relationship remains that of a missionary enterprise confronting the apostasy of its most important convert.

I write this from a particular vantage point. I grew up in a Three-Self Patriotic Movement church in China—the very institution the Communist Party created in the 1950s to replace foreign missionary Christianity. My mother is a retired evangelist who preached in registered and unregistered churches alike during the relatively open years of the early 2000s, before the constraints later closed in. I now live in Japan, where I have seen aging Japanese congregations struggling to attend services, Mandarin sermons in Chinese-speaking churches delivered by Korean pastors, and the growth of American-led international churches in Tokyo’s expatriate neighborhoods. The three outcomes of the missionary impulse that this book traces—the Korean success, the Japanese resistance, the Chinese persistence—are not abstractions to me. They are the landscape of my Sundays. This proximity is a liability as well as a responsibility, and I have tried throughout to let the evidence advance the argument rather than the other way around.

The Arc of This Book

The book proceeds in six parts, tracing this arc from faith to disillusionment and the question of what comes after.

Part I recovers the missionary foundations: Robert Morrison’s solitary arrival in Canton in 1807 and the dictionary that consumed a quarter-century of his life, Peter Parker’s hospital on Hog Lane where the lancet opened doors the Bible could not, Josiah Strong’s Our Country and its theological charter for an empire that would annex Hawaii, seize the Philippines, and pry open China’s door, and the Student Volunteer Movement that sent the best of a generation to the field under the watchword “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”

Part II follows the era of blood and redemption: the Boxer Summer of 1900 and the uses the mission boards made of their dead, Arthur Henderson Smith’s audience with Roosevelt and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship that turned punitive silver into the founding of Tsinghua, the anti-Christian movements in which Chinese intellectuals reframed the missionary enterprise as cultural aggression and Japanese pan-Asianists enlisted the same critique for an imperial project of their own, the Soong dynasty’s fusion of Methodist faith and Nationalist power in the figure of the Christian generalissimo, and the sentimental infrastructure that Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, and Walter Judd built in the American imagination—an emotional attachment that would make the “loss” of China, when it came, feel less like a strategic reversal than a death in the family.

Part III traces the trauma of loss: Mao’s devastating “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!” essay and the expulsion of missionaries, the “Who Lost China?” poignancy and hysteria, the McCarthyist purge that destroyed a generation of expertise, the preservation of the missionary dream in Taiwan and its unexpected fulfillment in Korea, and the brief realist interlude under Nixon and Kissinger when America engaged China without expecting its transformation.

Part IV examines the second conversion: the secularization of the missionary thesis into the engagement consensus, John King Fairbank’s creation of an academic pipeline that preserved institutional continuity from mission compound to policy office, the forgiveness extended to China after Tiananmen, the triumphant passage of WTO accession, and the question of why China received treatment so different from that of Cuba, Iran, or any other authoritarian state.

Part V confronts the second apostasy: Xi Jinping’s consolidation of personal rule and his campaign to sinicize Christianity, the collapse of the elite consensus as engagement’s own architects declared it a failure, the hardening of public opinion and the bipartisan turn toward confrontation, and the contemporary state of missionary Christianity across East Asia—the Korean success, the Japanese resistance, and the Chinese persistence.

Part VI asks what the missionary legacy explains that other frameworks cannot, and whether America is capable of engaging China without expecting its transformation—whether, that is, the paradigm is escapable at all.

The scholarly consensus is that Isaiah meant Syene, not Sinim—Aswan, not China. A misreading that shaped history, built on something deeper than any text. The error was corrected long ago. The hope it authorized has proven more durable.

In the church in Ohio, if it still stands, the congregation has thinned. The missionary map on the wall has faded. But China remains—unconverted, unconquered, itself. And the dream of Sinim persists, transformed, redirected, but not yet discarded.

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1. A notable dissent: Raanan Eichler of Bar-Ilan University argues, on phonetic, contextual, and text-critical grounds, that Gesenius was right and the modern consensus wrong. See Eichler, “China Is in the Bible”, Vetus Testamentum 74, no. 1 (2024), pp. 60–77, doi:10.1163/15685330-bja10124.

2. Gesenius (1812), Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, p. 788. The German original: “im Osten Sina, welches wenigstens nicht so unpassend ist, als mehrere Ausleger annehmen.”

3. Fürst (1861), Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, vol. 2, p. 79. The German original: “man gew. richtig Sina od. China versteht, aber die jüd. Tradition hat darunter das Südland Aegyptens, Pelusium, verstanden, was weniger für den Zusammenhang passt.”

4. Albert Barnes, Notes, Critical, Explanatory, and Practical, on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, on Isaiah 49:12. Barnes’s revised view appeared in the editions issued from the 1840s onward.

5. “Plural of an otherwise unknown name; Sinim, a distant Oriental region”

6. “A people in the far east; the Chinese”

7. The CUV text carries a marginal note on 秦: “the original text reads ‘Sinim’”.

8. The two traditions read the same verse with different subjects. In the Judaic tradition, Isaiah 49:12 prophesies the ingathering of the diaspora—Jewish exiles returning to Israel from distant lands, including, to the modern Hebrew ear, those scattered as far as China. In the Protestant missionary tradition, the verse became a prophecy of the conversion of the Chinese people.