Gu Changsheng

Gu Changsheng (simplified Chinese: 顾长声; traditional Chinese: 顧長聲; pinyin: Gù Chángshēng, born July 19, 1919 in Wuxi, Jiangsu, China) is a Chinese scholar of the history of Christianity in China.

Gu grew up in a Chinese Christian family. His parents worked for American missionaries of the Adventist Church. He was educated at a number of private schools run by the Adventist missionaries in mainland China and Hong Kong. During World War II, he served as an English-Chinese interpreter for the Nationalist Army.

After the Communist Part took power in China, the government launched an accusation campaign against the foreign missionaries in the early 1950s. Gu took part in this campaign and accused the foreign missionaries of doing evils in China. Later in the 1950s He attended Peking University. However, he suffered in the hands of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. After then he devoted his time, energy and expertise to the history of Christianity in China.

Gu was a history professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. His most influential work is Missionaries and pre-1949 China (《传教士与近代中国》), written in Chinese, which went through four editions (1981, 1991, 2004, 2013). With the book's publication Gu "took the lead" on research into Chinese Protestantism in the 1980s. Gu gave a negative description of the missionaries in this book, and most of the missionaries were bad in his evaluation. Gu thought missionaries did good things, like famine relief, out of bad motives. He accused William Alexander Parsons Martin of being a robber during the boxer rebellion, and Hudson Taylor of collecting intelligence for the British imperialists. He also criticized the missionaries for their anti-communism remarks in this book.

In the mid-1980s Gu was a visiting scholar in America for a couple of years, and he returned to the United States again in 1989 upon the invitation of the United States Congress to attend the 1989 National Prayer Breakfast. Soon after he arrived in America, he married (his 2nd marriage) an American citizen. Gu has lived in Massachusetts since the late 1980s.

His memoir, entitled Awaken: Memoirs of a Chinese Historian, was published by AuthorHouse in 2009. The work was his first book written in English. In this book Gu admitted that the majority of the missionaries were good. He also criticizes the Communist Party, and asserts the Communism does not work in China in this book.