Becoming Faithful: Christianity, Literacy, and Female Consciousness in Northeast China, 1830-1930.

Abstract

This dissertation presents a study about dialogue between contradictions: Christians and pagans, missionaries and converts, foreign and native, male and female, and above all the sacred and the profane. I explore how specific actors such as French Catholic missionaries of the Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) translated and disseminated the universality of the Christian message into the particular context of northeast China from the 1830s to the 1930s, and how Chinese Catholic converts, especially, female converts, interpreted and transformed the Catholic faith as a language to articulate an awareness of self. Focusing on the M.E.P Manchuria Mission, I analyze the Catechism and Regulations of the mission, as well as missionary statistical parish reports and private letters by both missionaries and Chinese converts. Understanding how Christianity took root in an Asian context requires that we not only study the universality of the Christian message and the inclusiveness of the missionary effort, but also the mechanisms, institutions, actors, and processes that interpreted the Christian faith through specific language, behavior, and belief. I discuss how the MEP translated the catechism to introduce the concepts and rituals of Christian faith to the rural Chinese; how they designed the Regulation of the Mission to teach the Catechism and to enforce Church discipline on missionaries, catechumens, and converts; and how they required systematic parish reports to measure and assess the success of local religious experience. The dissemination of Christian faith included translations of literal languages of French and Chinese as well as numerical language that observed and measured the “faith” of local converts; it also included the widespread establishment of religious educational system in rural society, which provided much of the educational opportunities for rural men and women and established the first extensive educational system for women in rural China. The Church’s religious education produced a new female literacy, which created a new space for rural Christian women, regardless of their family background, to articulate awareness of self and to form/transform a new subjectivity.