FUSHUN, diocese of. - In south-eastern Manchuria, on the border with Korea. It was erected as an apostolic prefecture on 4 February 1932, with territory detached from the mission of Mukden, and entrusted to the Society for the Foreign Missions of the United States of America (Maryknoll); on 13 February 1940 it was raised to an apostolic vicariate and, on 11 April 1946, with the establishment of the episcopal hierarchy in China, to a diocese suffragan to Mukden.
It has an area of 80,914 sq. km. On 30 June 1947, out of a total population of approximately 5,500,000 inhabitants, there were 11,000 Catholics; 37 priests, of whom 5 belonged to the Chinese secular clergy; 2 foreign lay religious and 28 foreign nuns. The Sino-Japanese war, then the world war, and still more the civil war, also claimed victims among the priests and paralysed missionary activity; at the aforesaid date no statistical data were available concerning auxiliary personnel (catechists, teachers, baptizers, doctors, nurses), or concerning the seminary and the other works, which had previously been fairly flourishing.
Christian origins date back more than a century and are due to Catholic families who had emigrated here from the Peking area, where persecution was raging. Most of the territory of F. was once a hunting reserve of the Chinese emperors, ceded for cultivation only after 1870.