The treaty clauses, in fact, wrote the ultimate doom of Christian activity in China. To have believed that a religion which grew up under the protection of foreign Powers, especially under humiliating conditions following defeat, would be tolerated when the nation recovered its authority shows extreme short-sightedness. The real position was that missionaries, like other Europeans, felt convinced in the nineteenth century that their political supremacy was permanent, and never imagined that China would regain a position when the history of the past might be brought up against the missionaries and their converts. 'The Church,' as Latourette has pointed out, 'had become a partner in Western imperialism.'
from K. M. Panikkar's Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History. Because I know Nina loves this kind of shit.
