China and the Christian Impact

China and the Christian Impact was published in 1985 as the English translation of Jacques Gernet's Chine et christianisme of 1982. It received considerable attention from academic circles dealing with China and the Jesuit mission, mainly because of its approach to the subject from an almost exclusively Chinese point of view. In this Gernet differs much from previous studies on the China mission, the most famous up to that point perhaps being the Jesuit George Dunne's Generation of Giants (1962), which analyzes the Jesuit China mission from a decidedly eurocentric perspective. In spite of the wide range of source material consulted by its author, Gernet's book has been criticized on account of its apparent anachronisms, and lack of explanatory background information when dealing with historically related events.