Saving the Nation

Thomas Reilly’s book argues that Chinese Protestant elites in institutions such as the National Christian Council, YMCA and YWCA had a disproportionate influence within the class of intellectuals and reformers trying to renew China as a nation. He suggests that Chinese Protestants, though making up only a quarter of 1 per cent of the Chinese population, made significant contributions to Chinese civil society through their institutional efforts in education, social reform, resistance to the Japanese invasion and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, support for communism. In the introduction, Reilly sets out his argument: ‘More than preaching a message, the Protestant elite also played a social role, through their institutions, in Republican China that was far out of proportion to their numbers. In exercising this role, the Protestant elite often contributed a sense of legitimacy to social movements that might have been suppressed by the regime absent their participation’ (p. 2). He makes a distinction between the Social Gospel in China and the theology of the modernist movement, pointing out that the two are sometimes conflated but that in China the Social Gospel was embraced by many theological conservatives or fundamentalists. He also pointed to the international system of imperialism with which would-be reformers in China constantly contended. The introduction also includes a capsule history of Republican China (p. 5–6) and ends by narrating the fall of the Nationalists and the ascent of the Communists in 1949

Argument (complex analysis · China · Communism · Economic history · Elite · Legitimacy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Protestantism · Social Gospel · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies