Through reading Zhao’s memoir, I will excavate a unique prison theology that questioned the dialectic of modernity from a perspective where the Protestant tradition met Confucian literati culture. Most interestingly, modern prison in East Asia, both a cultural palimpsest and a crystallization of modern predicament, lent itself as a privileged site for such synthesis and confrontation.
Confined within a prison cell and under constant surveillance, Zhao found himself pushed into spiritual exercise, which, in a most ironic twist, was perfectly in tune with the Protestant emphasis on individual, interiorized piety. However, Zhao spent most of his time imitating cultural practices of imprisoned Confucian literati in late imperial China. For instance, he composed classical poems addressed to his extended family (into which his Christian community was incorporated). What Zhao sought in his Protestant spirituality turned out to be an effort to situate the modernized human-divine relationship within a context marked by the return of community and tradition. What’s more, it is on the premise of this synthesis as well as Zhao’s view of prison as a dubious, to say the very least, product of modernity that we shall consider his theological transition from liberalism to the critique of the liberal discourses of modernity.