Gu Changsheng

Who is Gu Changsheng?

Gu Changsheng 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. He attended Peking University in the 1950s. 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 Modern China, written in Chinese, which went through three editions. With the book's publication Gu "took the lead" on research into Chinese Protestantism in the 1980s.

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 an American citizen. Gu has lived in Massachusetts since the late 1980s.