A 1915 Message From The Young Women S Christian Associations Of China

The YWCA arrived in China as a cultural interloper in 1899. How did activist Christian Chinese women maintain their identity and social relevance through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century? The YWCA in China explores how the Young Women’s Christian Association responded to the needs of Chinese women and society both before and after the 1949 revolution ushered in a communist state. Western secretaries originally defined the Chinese YWCA movement, but successive generations of Chinese leadership localized its Western-defined organizational ethos. Over time, "the Y" became class conscious and progressive as Chinese women transformed it from a vehicle for moral and material uplift to an instrument for social action and an organizational citizen of China. And after 1949, national YWCA leaders supported the Maoist regime because they believed the social goals of the YWCA aligned with Mao’s revolutionary aims. The YWCA in China is a fascinating investigation of the lives, thinking, and action of women whose varied forms of Christian and Chinese identity were buffeted by historical events that moulded their social philosophies.

Now revised and updated to incorporate numerous new materials, this is the major source for researching American Christian activity in China, especially that of missions and missionaries. It provides a thorough introduction and guide to primary and secondary sources on Christian enterprises and individuals in China that are preserved in hundreds of libraries, archives, historical societies, headquarters of religious orders, and other repositories in the United States. It includes data from the beginnings of Christianity in China in the early eighth century through 1952, when American missionary activity in China virtually ceased. For this new edition, the institutional base has shifted from the Princeton Theological Seminary (Protestant) to the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural Relations at the University of San Francisco (Jesuit), reflecting the ecumenical nature of this monumental undertaking.

A bibliographical guide to the works in American libraries concerning the Christian missionary experience in China.

Chinese theologian Kwok Pui-lan draws on a wide variety of archival material to reconstruct the life of Chinese women in the church. She analyzes their participation in social reform, and looks at their relationship to the feminist movement in China. Compared to their Chinese sisters, Christian women had more prolonged exposure to Western civilization through the Christian Church, mission schools, and Christian benevolence. Their responses, shows Kwok, provide rare information on how Chinese women reacted to foreign influences and religion in particular. At the same time, Kwok'sstudy broadens our understanding of how Christianity adapts to and functions in a totally new cultural context.

Includes sections "Book reviews" and "Public documents".

By exploring the interplay among gender, religion, and modernity, this book exposes the part Chinese Christian women played in China’s quest for a strong nation in general and in Republican Beijing’s modern transformation in particular. Focusing on the Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the author examines how the Association, guided by the Christian tenet “to serve, not to be served,” tailored its Western models and devised new programs to meet the city’s demands. Its enterprises ranged from providing women- and child-oriented facilities to promoting constructive recreational activities and from reforming home and family to improving public health. Through an analysis of these endeavors, the author argues that the Chinese YW women's contribution to the city's modernity was a creative embodiment of the then socially targeted missionary movement known as the Social Gospel. In the process, they demonstrated their distinctive new ideals of womanhood featuring practicality, social service, and broad cooperation. These qualities set them apart from both traditional women and other brands of the New Woman. While criticized as trivial, their efforts, however, pioneered modern social service in China and complemented what municipal authorities and other progressive groups undertook to modernize the city.