While the state-religion relationship is a popular topic in the previous scholarship on religion in China, its treatment has, to a large extent, revolved around what is called the “control-resistance paradigm”—that is, the Chinese state and religions used to be, and still are, “antagonistic towards each other, with little room for cooperation” (7). Diana Junio joins this still growing scholarship in shifting the focus from the conventional view to a more cooperative (instead of antagonistic) relationship between the Chinese state and religion. In her Patriotic Cooperation: The Border Services of the Church of Christ in China and Chinese Church-State Relations, 1920s–1950s, which originates from her PhD dissertation, Junio seeks to “complicate the conventional picture of the state-religion relations in Republican China” (19) by looking in particular at a cooperative venture, beginning from 1939 during the Sino-Japanese War, between the Nationalist government and the Church of Christ in China (CCC)—the largest Protestant body since its inception in 1927. The organization known as the “Border Service Department” (BSD), which took charge of this cooperative venture, was set up directly under the General Assembly of the CCC while receiving all of its funding initially from the Nationalist central government. By mainly drawing from the archival materials of the BSD, the author is able to examine this “patriotic cooperation” (as the title of the book announces) by considering the various motives for its establishment in the late 1930s during the wartime period and its educational, medical, livelihood, and evangelistic work in the shifting time from the wartime period to the postwar period in China's southwestern region including mainly Chuanxi (Western Sichuan) and Xikang (a Republican-era province located between Sichuan and Tibet), as well as (to a limited extent) Guizhou and Yunnan—in short, the Sichuan-Tibet border areas. The book also narrates the termination process of the BSD in the early period of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

In addition to a standard introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into seven chapters following a roughly chronological order. After an introduction situating the BSD within the existing scholarships of not only Chinese state-religion relations in general but also Republican-era church-state relations specifically, the author then spends two chapters setting the stage for the emergence of the BSD. In chapter 1, the author discusses the establishment of the CCC, the largest Republican-era Protestant body that later housed the BSD. The fact that the CCC was “the only legally registered Christian church by the Nationalist government” until the outbreak of the war in 1937 made it stand out among all Christian churches in China (30). Chapter 2 focuses on the period between the CCC's establishment and the beginning of the Nationalist government, both in 1927, and the early stage of the Resistance War against Japan in the late 1930s, exploring how this decade witnessed the ameliorating of the previously strained relations between the state and the Protestant churches.

Chapters 3–6 constitute the core of the study. In chapter 3, contrary to the earlier interpretation that attributed the launch of the BSD to the CCC's initiative, the author demonstrates that it was the Nationalist government—through the agency of H. H. Kung, then vice-president of the Executive Yuan and a Christian himself—who initiated the BSD to meet the following needs of the wartime political agenda: “to construct a solid anti-Japanese rear area; to improve the border peoples’ livelihood; and to integrate them into the nation politically, socially and culturally so as to prevent these ethnic groups from becoming a threat to national unity” (4). Concurrently, the BSD became possible as a cooperation venture through the amelioration of church-state relations in the 1930s, the distinctive status of the CCC as the only legally registered church at that time, and the desire for the CCC leaders to both prove their patriotism and conduct evangelistic work. Throughout the history of this then-largest Chinese Protestant body, the author claims, “the BSD was the most significant work that the CCC had done” (224).

In the two chapters that follow, the author delves into the ways the BSD's educational, medical, livelihood, and other work was carried out predominantly in Chuanxi and Xikang among the Tibetan, Qiang, and Yi peoples, up until the Communist takeover. Chapter 4 lays out the border services the BSD had done during the Sino-Japanese War, highlighting their goal of “trying to bring what the Nationalist government labeled as ‘the border peoples’ closer to the central state” (205). Chapter 5 then turns to the postwar period, illustrating the challenges—financial and other—that the BSD faced and how it shifted to a new focus (the strong emphasis on service work in Xikang, for instance).

While these two chapters examine the social services work the BSD had done, they leave its religious work untouched. Chapter 6 brings the wartime and postwar periods together by presenting how the BSD embedded evangelism within the border service programs. The author argues that “the nature of the BSD can therefore not be fully appreciated unless the importance placed on evangelism as an essential part of its mission is also understood” (290).

The final substantial chapter recounts how both the political and financial pressures in the atheistic and Cold War atmospheres of the early PRC period brought the BSD to a close in 1955. The author concludes the book by suggesting the potential of the cooperative model of church-state relations, exemplified in the case of the BSD, to refute the prevailing claim that “conflict between the Chinese state and Christianity is the only possibility” (354).

Overall, the book contributes to a yet underexplored topic, locating it within the scholarship on state-religion relations in China. It also adds to the discussions on religion in Southwest China (alongside the recent treatments by, among others, Aminta Arrington's Songs of the Lisu Hills [Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020] and Megan Bryson's Goddess on the Frontier [Stanford University Press, 2016]) and Christianity during the Sino-Japanese War (alongside the contribution made by, for example, Timothy Brook's “Toward Independence: Christianity in China under Japanese Occupation, ” in Christianity in China, ed. Daniel H. Bays [Stanford University Press, 1996])—both of which have not yet received enough scholarly attention.

There are, however, three areas which I think require more attention. To begin with, the book would have been more relevant had it offered a comparison with other cases when church-state relations in China were also more cooperative than antagonistic, such as the first two decades of the twentieth century or postwar Taiwan. Secondly, the argument in chapter 7 that the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was originated by the Protestant leaders instead of imposed by the government requires further consideration in light of the recent full-length Chinese-language treatments of this topic in Song Jun's Making Choices in the Midst of Change (Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 2017), Liu Jianping's The Cross under the Red Flag (Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture, 2012), and Ying Fuk-tsang's Christianity's Failure in China? (Logos and Pneuma, 2012). Finally, biographical studies of the leading BSD figures such as Zhang Bohuai could have been investigated in more detail to balance the institutional-historical nature of the book. Despite these quibbles, this valuable study may be of interest to scholars working on the history of the CCC itself, the history of Chinese Christianity, church-state relations, as well as the relationship between ethnicity and religion in China.