Elizabeth A. Littell-Lamb’s The YWCA in China narrates a sixty-year process of institution-building at an organization that began as a Western mission outpost and ended up firmly rooted and decisively Chinese. The author takes as her focus the “Sinification” of the Young Women’s Christian Association: the process by which the organization, national in scope, gradually “evolved to become Chinese in staff, policies, and programs” (3). This process took the YWCA through the Sino-Japanese and civil wars into the founding of the People’s Republic of China, where YWCA leaders proved themselves enthusiasts of Mao Zedong’s nation-building projects. Littell-Lamb narrates what can be termed the indigenization of foreign mission effort, a trajectory that serves as a shared theme across much contemporary literature regarding global Christian evangelization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, she is careful to distinguish indigenization from Sinification, arguing that the YWCA not only came under local control in terms of staffing, programming, and religious principles but that it became fully integrated into the “Chinese context” and “Chinese mindset” (5). Contending that the YWCA in China “was the leading Christian organization for women” (11) both before and after the revolution, this argument carries important implications for theorizing the position of the Chinese Christian minority vis-à-vis the nation-state.
The YWCA in China weaves together organizational and political histories, painting a portrait of institutional and religious resiliency in the face of wrenching social and regime changes. It offers biographical accounts of three pivotal Chinese secretaries (the YWCA term for executive staff) – Ding Shujing, Deng Yuzhi, and Cai Kui – whose religious journeys provide insight into more general questions of the development of Chinese Christian consciousness and organizational strategies alongside the emergence of a war-torn Marxist state. It proceeds primarily along chronology, closely examining the transfer of institutional control and staffing from the Western-led World YWCA, the missionary sending organization, to a well-developed native leadership and professional structure. An emergent theme is the Chinese leadership’s decisive articulation of an anticolonial consciousness, which stood it in good stead amid war and revolution. Still, this leadership for the most part maintained mutually cooperative relations with the World YWCA, which committed itself early in its history to an indigenizing strategy of evangelization and institutional growth. This proved successful in a wide variety of national contexts.
Chinese associations’ full-throated support of the Maoist revolution and reform efforts proves a high point of drama in the text. This narrative arc demonstrates the full implications of Sinification, showing the synthesis of Christian and communist commitments, while offering revealing anecdotes about the expulsion of Western staff and influences. Because of the limitations of sources, the account drops off during the tumultuous years of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, obscuring the degree to which the YWCA was caught in the crosshairs of purges and reeducation campaigns. This was the fate of Deng Yuzhi who was under house arrest for many years. Still, the YWCA in China survived and survives, remaining a cultural center and service provider in multiple communities.
The book belongs to a literature of global Christianity that takes as foundational two themes: the colonial project of Western mission was inevitably met with anticolonial resistance, and this tension opened the way to an adaptive Christianity, both in religious principles and organizational structures. It builds on, and complements, a robust English-language literature on Christianity in China, and, more specifically, on the YWCA in China. Readers seeking more granular accounts of the distinctive programming that arose in Chinese community YWCAs might supplement this national and international leadership-oriented volume with numerous article-length studies that have been published in recent years, which are documented in the author’s robust notes and bibliography.
The depth of research is a particular strength of this book. The author has excavated a multinational set of archives; examined numerous Chinese- and English-language periodicals; and contextualized her claims within a far-ranging set of secondary sources. Littell-Lamb is quick to acknowledge that her research largely neglects to include Chinese-language academic works and that most of the available primary sources are in English. These limitations in scope and perspective, which vex many scholars working in transnational and global contexts, do not undermine the value of this foundational project, which indeed creates “room for much future scholarship” (195), as the author concludes.
The YWCA in China is a rewarding read, amply documented and rendered in clear prose. It is a valuable contribution to histories of the globalization of Christianity, particularly for scholars of twentieth-century East Asia, and it is an indispensable addition to the rich literature on the global networks of Young Women’s and Young Men’s Christian Associations.
