Background
Gu grew up in a Chinese Christian family.
顾长声, 顧長聲
Gu grew up in a Chinese Christian family.
Later in the 1950s He attended Peking University.
During World World War II, he served as an English-Chinese interpreter for the Nationalist Army. After the Communist Participant took power in China, the government launched an accusation campaign against the foreign missionaries in the early 1950s. Gu took part in this campaign and accused the foreign missionaries of doing evils in China.
However, he suffered in the hands of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Gu was a history professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. His most influential work is Missionaries and pre-1949 China (《传教士与近代中国》), written in Chinese, which went through four editions (1981, 1991, 2004, 2013).
Gu gave a negative description of the missionaries in this book, and most of the missionaries were bad in his evaluation. Gu thought missionaries did good things, like famine relief, out of bad motives.
He accused William Alexander Parsons Martin of being a robber during the boxer rebellion, and Hudson Taylor of collecting intelligence for the British imperialists.
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. Gu has lived in Massachusetts since the late 1980s. His memoir, entitled Awaken: Memoirs of a Chinese Historian, was published by AuthorHouse in 2009.
The work was his first book written in English.
In this book Gu admitted that the majority of the missionaries were good.
He also criticized the missionaries for their anti-communism remarks in this book He also criticizes the Communist Party, and asserts the Communism does not work in China in this book