In May 2016, forty-two-year-old Li Yuan gave a public lecture at a top university in China; her speech entitled “My Awakening and Redemption” immediately went viral on the internet. One of China’s best-known actresses, Yuan is also unabashedly a professing Protestant Christian. She converted in her late thirties, left acting at the height of her career, and has since advocated for poor migrant workers suffering from pneumoconiosis, an occupational lung disease caused by working in high-dust environments like construction and jewelry manufacturing.1 Li Yuan already had over 13.5 million followers on her Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, but this bold speech of Christian testimony has won her more popularity among the younger generation.
In this speech, Yuan confesses that her once-privileged life as a celebrity used to make her utterly indifferent to the suffering of the poor and marginalized in society. She also owned many pieces of expensive jewelry. But after her conversion into Protestant Christianity, Yuan began to care more about the misery of other people. Once startled at seeing an X-ray picture of a migrant worker with pneumoconiosis, she could not wave the images away. Her guilt and conscience awoke. She began to advocate for this marginalized group, connecting their plight to the twisted desires and greed of urban consumers, herself included. Since then, Yuan has visited rural families with members suffering from this occupational disease. She has donated large sums to help them, including sponsoring a few lung transplants. Yuan later started her own charity foundation to assist this population.
The dramatic change in actress Li Yuan’s life is among the many stories of China’s Protestant Christian women working in the country’s booming urban economy. Even in a media environment where Christianity has been one of the most censored themes, Yuan’s story gained wide publicity on China’s tightly controlled state media.2 However, most stories of how the Christian faith has changed Chinese women’s values, professional pursuits, family life, and social relationships fall into obscurity.
Historically, women have been crucial in the survivability of Protestant Christianity in China during years of religious persecution; today they are also active promoters of the faith in China’s urbanizing society. This book is one of the first to address contemporary Chinese women and their encounter with Protestant Christianity, drawing on the methodology of oral history.
Protestantism, Women, and China’s Urban Economy
There are two reasons why contemporary Chinese Christian women’s stories matter. Primarily, Protestant Christianity has been growing in China, and it has feminized disproportionately over the past few decades. In urban Chinese churches that are made up mainly of white-collar professionals, women have outnumbered men by a great majority.3 Despite the numerical growth of women within the Chinese church, in scholarly research, they have been ignored or presented largely faceless up until now. The result is that women often appear marginal to the remarkable main story of Protestant Christianity in China.
Even within the history of global Christianity, women have indeed been an understudied group. For example, in South Korea, when institutionalization of the church began, it entered a “masculinization” phase that ignored its original faithful Bible women who had toiled to start church groups.4 Christianity in China too is going through a similar stage. It is now time for the English-speaking world to hear the voices of women telling what it means to be a Christian woman in the twenty-first-century China. And the recovery of women’s stories should automatically lead to new, enriched narratives of Chinese history. So this book is an attempt to incorporate women as historical agents into traditional narratives of Protestant Christianity in China.
Second, in the kaleidoscope of social change in contemporary China, women as a social demographic group have experienced the most dramatic ups and downs. As historian Jessie G. Lutz says, it is important to understand “gender entanglements with politics, social structures and values, nation building, and even the economies of agricultural and industrial societies.”5 But information on the great majority of nameless Christian women in today’s China is scant. As some scholars of American religious history says, “if historians do not become more self-conscious about who is included in their stories and who is not, they will perpetuate the fiction that male leaders alone have made history.”6 How did gender influence their understanding of Christianity? How did the changing Chinese context alter their family relations and career choices? These are the main questions I seek to explore in this book.
Currently, Chinese women make up a significant proportion of the urban economy.7 The upward mobility of some individuals and families within the past four decades of China’s economic reform is truly impressive and unprecedented. First, from illiterate, feet-bound grandmothers and semi-literate mothers, women by the third generation in modern China might well be attending college, achieving postgraduate degrees, or even studying abroad. And second, unlike Christian pioneer women who received education at missionary schools and joined work associated with the church at the turn of the twentieth century, today’s Chinese Christian women found a wide range of professional opportunities that were made available as China’s urban economy boomed. Achieving success in their professional realms, many women steadfastly commit to belonging to church communities and to supporting church ministry. Third, in today’s China, women’s identity is defined not only simply by their familial roles of daughter, wife, and mother, but also as urban professionals and Christian believers. Their participation in churches and social life has reached extraordinary levels.
Since the late 1990s, many oral history titles have been published about women in Chinese history.8 But these works about earlier historical periods seldom include a religious dimension. Among books on contemporary Chinese women, most focus on the economic and political dimensions, leaving out the spiritual.9 Other books that include women in the history of Christianity deal with much earlier times, not the contemporary Chinese scene.10 This book fills in the gap by presenting a multidimensional picture of contemporary Chinese Christian women in China’s emerging and dynamic structures of opportunities in its political, cultural, religious, and economic realms. The religious and spiritual dimension plays a central role in their narratives as these biographical reflections present a new religious consciousness.
The spiritual transformation of contemporary Chinese women and its implications are intriguing. They converted to Christianity for a variety of reasons. For many, official atheism failed to answer the pressing questions about life’s purpose and other significant big questions about life. Some were so disillusioned by official ideology and censorship that exposure to another worldview became a revelation of truth. Sometimes such exposure happened when women pursued higher degrees overseas, most often in America. Still others experienced trauma in family relationships and later found healing in the Protestant Christian faith. There were also instances of women who moved from other religions, such as Buddhism, to Protestant Christianity. A significant proportion of women converts, being first-generation believers in their family genealogy, led their family members to the Protestant faith. Such influence was often accompanied by new layers of strain in family relationships due to the faith. They also actively witness the faith in workplace where social norms are quite challenging. These women became spiritual pioneers in both family and workplace. Their stories are worthy to be presented.
Access to this group of Chinese professional women in urban China was mainly through personal contacts during my continued research on Chinese Protestantism over the last decade. Since 2006, I have studied the emergence of urban churches in multiple cities within China. Over half of the hundreds of people I interviewed, either formally or informally, were women converts in the tradition of Protestant Christianity.11 I have long felt that a project about Christian women in urban China merited a full-length study. In fact, my own story echoes many of the voices I heard. As a doctoral student at Cornell University and later working as a university faculty in Shanghai, I myself, a newly converted returnee to China, was also a member of this group of urban professional women. So my understanding of the broader historical context is also informed by my own personal journey as well as more than two decades of sociological research in the area of China’s market transition and urbanization. Personal friendships, mentoring relationships, and trusted referrals have provided me with the opportunity to delve deeper into the spiritual world of these Chinese Christian women. Over the years, I have maintained ongoing friendships with many of them. For example, one life story of my longest contact unfolded in countless conversations over a period of twelve years. Others took place in the past three to eight years. My conversations with all of them have continued to this very day. These enduring contacts enabled me to document their more complete personal tapestries in this book.
The Mother-Daughter Relationship
Initially, in many of these informal conversations, the theme of mother-daughter relationship has been a re-occurring one. For many women, it has always played the most formative role. When I began to collect taped narratives for this project, I specifically asked these women to narrate their relationships with their mothers, including a biography of their mothers. As a result, in this volume, each woman’s life story contains an embedded narrative about her mother’s life story. Among the fourteen women that I interviewed, all but three are the only daughters of their families, mostly due to the one-child policy implementation after 1980.12 Being the only child and daughter of a Chinese family, the mother-daughter relationship often became a primary relationship. Through this mother-daughter lens, I was able to encourage them to engage in more reflective accounts of how this younger generation are influenced by their mothers and fare differently from their mothers’ generation, most of whom were born in the 1950s and 1960s. This intentionally designed research angle allows me to conduct a cross-generational comparison on two major themes: how social mobility between two generations of women reshaped their worldviews and attitudes toward social and spiritual reality, and how the Christian faith helped ameliorate or intensify the conflicting values held by these two generations of women.
Sociologists think that generational consciousness shapes individuals through shared experiences of historical events.13 The term “age cohort” is often used to capture a generational unit who have had a collective memory and response to events that are often political and traumatic, such as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) or the Tiananmen movement (1989) in China. A contrast of generational consciousness is also formed by China’s economic liberalization, which provided women wi...