CHAPTER FOUR Protestant Reactions to the Nationalism Agenda in Contemporary China Carsten T. Vala The Chinese Communist Party-state seeks continued domination over society. 1 Like other elite groups trying to impose hegemony, it promotes an ideology of its own legitimacy to lessen the costs of governance, as David Laitin puts it (Kindopp 2004; Laitin 1986). According to the regime, this ideology succeeds among Protestants to the extent that they view all political issues through the lens of sovereignty and see defending Chinese sovereignty as the most important political issue of all (Kindopp 2004: 19; Laitin 1986: 29; Metzger 1977: 14). Among Protestants, sovereignty ranks such a high value because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views Protestants in China with political suspicion. Protestants have historic (and ongoing) ties to foreign organizations and countries that in the official historiography have been labeled as “foreign imperialist” (Wu 1963). In fact, in the eyes of the Communist regime, Protestants only became “fully Chinese” after 1949 when they proclaimed support for the regime-backed Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) association and cast off links with foreign missionaries and churches (Vala 2009a). As China has opened to the world in the reform era, Protestants outside the official churches that are under TSPM authority continue to be under suspicion, because they remain outside regime