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to justify any kind of violence against that "other" as a form of cultural and social self-preservation. "Foreign demons" were constructs of a political discourse which played on the common people's fears, even to the point of instituting extensive studies in teratology (the study of monstrous forms of animals and plants) as a way of explaining the foreign "things."
39 In taking a "China-centred approach" to studying the implications of Ch'ea's Christian conversion, these factors should be explored in two areas: the teratologisation of Jesus and the whiplash of an earlier imperial racism expressed in Manchurian campaigns against any intellectuals who strongly supported Hàn cultural motifs.
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In a rare picture of the transmogrification of "foreign teachings" in order to mark them out for vilification and destruction, Paul Cohen has illustrated how one Qing scholar, Tián Xingshu (1837-1877), produced a blistering lampoon of Christianity in publicly displayed placards during the 1860s. The "Lord Jesus" (Zhu Yésu) was depicted in cartoon-like caricatures as the "Pig Jesus" (Ju Yésu), worshipped by "foreign devils" in bizarre and salacious rites. Christian "devils" are depicted as cannibalizing unsuspecting children and religious seekers, using their religious rites as a cover-up for the most immoral and inhumane forms of treatment that a Chinese person could imagine. Near the end of his book, Bixié jìshí (The Truth about Records of Exorcising Evil Spirits12), Tián depicts a righteous mandarin ordering the "shooting of Pig [Jesus] and the beheading of the Goats [foreigners]." But this is not the end. Following long traditions found in many Chinese Buddhist or Daoist temple reliefs, Tián capsulizes the defamation by illustrating the terrible purgatorial punishments deserved by the "Pig Incarnate" (jujing) in some lower level of Chinese hells. Any partially literate and sensitive Chinese citizen would obviously want to be rid of such a terrible menace to their own society. How could any Chinese person, convinced that these claims were false and purposefully misleading derisions, seek to redirect mobs angered by these putative evils of "foreign torturers"743
Yet an even deeper level of antagonism and racism had been instigated from the highest imperial offices during the 17th and