'Wake up from your foolish peace-loving dreams!': Chinese Christian Women as International Thinkers and Actors in Early Twentieth Century China

Chinese Christian women were important international thinkers and actors in the early twentieth century. However, due to multiple exclusions based on their class, race and gender, their lives and thought has so far received little historical scrutiny. Much of our knowledge about women's international thought and activism has traditionally focused on Euro-American women's networks.[1] Although new studies uncovering the lives of non-western women international thinkers have proliferated in recent years, Chinese women's contributions are only just coming to light. New studies have highlighted the role of Chinese figures in South-South women's networks in the PRC period.[2] However, the international thought of Chinese women in the republican period still remains elusive. Despite William Kirby's characterization of this era as a period of 'stunning accomplishments' for Chinese diplomacy,[3] we know surprisingly little about the role of Chinese women in China's international affairs, with the exception of a few very high-profile women, who were wives of leading politicians, including Song Qingling 宋慶齡 (1893-1981) and Song Meiling 宋美齡 (1898-2002). Chinese Christian women's exclusion is perhaps not very surprising. As Wang Zheng points out, Chinese women who did not join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been dismissed as 'bourgeois' slavish followers of western feminism in the Chinese historiography since 1949.[4]

In my article entitled 'Christianity, Gender and Peace in Chinese Women's International thought' in this special issue, I attempt to uncover the international thought of Chinese Christian women, focusing on how they wrote and thought about peace from the beginning of the First World War to the Korean War Armistice (1914-1953). I focus on the thought and lives of two Chinese women: Zeng Baosun 曾寶蓀 (1893-1978) and Deng Yuzhi 鄧裕志(1900-1996). I identify four key phases in the development of Chinese Women's international thought on peace: (1) pacifism and utopianism (1914-1924); (2) advocating internal 'peace' to strengthen the nation to be able stand up to foreign powers (1919-1930); (3) disillusionment with and rejection of internationally-circulating peace discourses and formulation of a 'just peace' for China (1931-1949);(4) Communist-maternalist peace discourse (1949-1953).

Zeng and Deng's international thought on peace draws our attention to the international educational forums in which women's international thought was fostered and exchanged. The article also highlights the importance of Christianity as an intellectual, practical and discursive tool in the construction of Chinese women's international thought on peace. Deng and Zeng developed their thoughts on peace through their involvement in international Christian women's networks, through their studies abroad, and in their work for international women's Christian organisations such as the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). Chinese women selectively drew from a liberal protestant discourse on women's peace-making roles, including the language of 'maternalism' if and when it suited their aims. They argued that there could be no lasting international peace without Chinese women's participation in international politics.

Throughout the early twentieth century, Christian missionaries and YWCA workers in China consistently attempted to inculcate ideals of 'international mindedness' in their pupils. Foreign missionaries to China continued to be plagued by the fact that they had entered China on the back of foreign gunboats and unequal treaties. They were keen to instil ideas of international goodwill to tackle rising anti-foreign nationalism amongst their pupils. This was a particularly urgent task in the 1920s, a decade which saw the development of an increasingly violent Anti-Christian movement. For protestant women, this was also a deeply gendered vision of a liberal international world order, in which Christian women of all nationalities could bring about world peace based on their shared roles and responsibilities as sisters and mothers. Pageants of 'world sisterhood' in which girls dressed in the clothes of other countries, and plays entitled 'mothers to the world' written by missionary educators, were methods by which protestant missionaries attempted to inculcate a vision of gendered Christian internationalism amongst their pupils.[5]

Chinese women developed their international thought on peace in dialogue with and in opposition to this liberal protestant vision of an international world order. Zeng Baosun (see fig. 1) was studying for her BA degree in Biology at Westfield College, (later part of the University of London), when the First World War broke out in 1914. She was strongly influenced by Quaker pacifism during this period. Zeng believed that China could set an example to the so-called 'civilized' nations of the world, drawing on re-envisioned Confucian ideas about world harmony to suggest that China could become the leader of a future peaceful world order. In her writing during this period, she also stressed the need for Chinese women's education in order for them to take their rightful place as future leaders of this peaceful world order. She explained how Christianity would empower women to fulfil these roles as leaders.[6] Back in China, Zeng's utopian ideas were echoed by other Christian and non-Christian students during the early days of the May Fourth Movement. This was a heady period of social, cultural and intellectual change, during which there was brief widespread optimism about Woodrow Wilson's vision of a peaceful postcolonial future, and Chinese women's position in society was undergoing a dramatic transformation.

[Insert Fig. 1. Here].

The terms of the Versailles Treaty that handed former German possessions in Shandong province to Japan, dashed China's hopes for regaining its territorial sovereignty. Students and intellectuals' visions of internationalism quickly gave way to more pragmatic concerns of how to strengthen the country in order to stand-up to bullying foreign powers. 'Peace' became something desirable for China internally, to rid itself of warlords, but few Christian students seemed convinced by the pacifist cause. Instead, as Elizabeth Forster has highlighted, peace became a rather 'bellicose' term, a means of attacking China's external enemies.[7] After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Chinese Christian students rejected the Christian doctrine of peace that they were being taught at school as a kind of 'morphine,' and formulated their own vision of a 'Just peace' for China. Fang Yunxian 方雲仙, a student at a girls missionary school in Ningbo sarcastically derided Chinese people peace-loving reputation in this period as harming China and calls upon her compatriots to 'Wake up from your foolish dreams! Wake up from your foolish peace-loving dreams!' [8] By 1937 with the full-scale invasion of China by Japan, even committed pacifist Zeng Baosun changed her mind on whether a Christian should take up arms in self-defence. Many Chinese Christian women whole-heartedly threw themselves into the war effort to resist Japan in this period.

It was during the Second Sino-Japanese War that Deng Yuzhi stepped onto the international political stage. Similar to Zeng, Deng was also missionary school educated and a devout Christian. Unlike Zeng who became a Nationalist Party member, Deng was sympathetic to the CCP cause.  Although she never became a Communist Party member, Deng was strongly influenced by the social gospel, leading her to join the YWCA after graduation. She worked as a YWCA industrial secretary, helping the CCP to clandestinely contact women factory workers through her night-time literacy programme. Deng became head of the YWCA of China after 1949.[9] In 1939, Deng embarked on a mission to represent the plight of Chinese women at several international Christian women's conferences in the United States and Europe, including the meeting of the World YWCA in Geneva. According to a Communist-leaning newspaper report Deng was to be an 'Ambassador' for new Chinese women. She wanted to challenge her international Christian counterparts understanding of peace, and 'hear if their ideas about peace, are these based on justice? Do they understand that the war of resistance against Japan is actually for peace and is not for starting a war?'[10] Interestingly, there was little mention of her Christianity as a qualification to represent Chinese women at international Christian women's conferences at this point in her career.

Surprisingly however, Deng highlighted her Christian credentials a few years later during the Korean War, when she attended the meeting of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Copenhagen in 1953. As one of thirty Chinese delegates, Deng believed she had been sent to represent her country because of her 'rich experience in the international women's movement' and her 'beliefs in peace and Christianity.'[11] It was at this stage in her international diplomacy when she also began to deploy a maternalist-feminist discourse on peace: 'What mother does not love her children! Because of the suffering of children, women must continue to stop the evil of war.'[12] Deng would have been familiar with this rhetoric from her long experience in international Christian women's networks. It also aligned with the strategy of the new Communist government who deployed a rhetoric of peace to try to convince the world of the PRC's friendly intentions. Deng also knew how to dress and act in such settings, [13] and crucially, she could talk to her international counterparts, through her advanced training in English gained from her foreign missionary education. Deng was now a useful propaganda tool for the CCP, showcasing that Christians were well-treated in China after many of the missionaries had left.

Meanwhile, Zeng Baosun who had fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist Party after 1949, was also engaged in a rhetorical battle about the meaning of 'peace', representing the Republic of China at the United National Commission on the Status of Women in 1952. In her memoir, Zeng dismissed the CCP's use of a 'peace' discourse as 'dishonourable', 'dangerous' and 'frightening', 'propaganda'.[14] Zeng and Deng shared many commonalities: both were devout Christians, educated at missionary schools in China, and studied abroad at Western universities. They both engaged in a rhetorical battle over the meaning of 'peace', to opposite ends, during the Korean War.

Today, China continues to use the rhetoric of its 'peaceful rise' to describe its international ambitions. Chinese Christian women's nationalization of a peace discourse in the early twentieth century underlines the fact the use of 'peace' in China is intimately connected to its history of resisting imperialism and the various competing political projects for national strengthening that emerged in the early twentieth century. Like black postcolonial international thinkers such as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Chinese women's international thought on peace both 'mirrored' and 'subverted' a liberal Protestant international vision of western-centred world order.[15] Chinese women's pragmatic use of certain rhetorical tactics, such as a materialist discourse on peace, also prompts us to rethink our traditional Eurocentric chronologies of the international women's movement. While the use of a materialist-feminist discourse on peace peaked in the aftermath of the First World War in Europe and America, for Chinese women this rhetoric became most useful and salient after the Second-World War, particularly as the PRC sought to build its international relations after 1949.