This excellent study offers the first major English-language analysis of the Border Services Department (BSD) in wartime China, a cooperative venture between the national Church of Christ in China and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek. Junio assesses the motivations of each side in cooperating to provide charitable services in the borderlands of the southwest; analyses the range of programmes offered and their effectiveness; and asks how this venture could reshape conventional views of the paradigm of “control, resistance and conflict” (p. 14) between religion and the state in China. In doing so, the book contributes to new debates on the place of religion in society that Ashiwa and Wank, Mayfair Yang and others have generated, and to the unpicking of dominant PRC narratives on Nationalist-era Christianity.
The Border Services Department was set up in 1939, and operated out of headquarters in Chengdu until 1955 when its last services and assets were turned over to the government. During the fifteen years of its existence, the Department ran a number of educational, medical and social programmes among the Jiarong, Qiang and Yi peoples, with notable successes in animal husbandry and crop disease control, in goitre reduction and healthcare, as well as in primary education and training local nurses. As Junio explores, however, complex political and evangelical motivations underpinned the shared social work. The church undertook BSD work as part of its contribution to the war effort, and it was the wartime agenda that set the goals of the organization: to rally the border peoples to support the war, to promote cohesion among people groups and national unity, to improve the social and economic conditions of the people groups in the border areas. The church maintained a clear line between its (state-funded) social work and its (self-funded) evangelical work among the border peoples, but the line between fostering national unity and subjugating minorities is fine – a single valid point in the torrid PRC-era criticism of the BSD.
Patriotic Cooperation is extensively researched and well-structured. It begins with the establishment of a united Church of Christ in China out of denominational amalgams in the early twentieth century, and goes on to describe strained relations between the state and religions in the Republic and their improvement as churches and organizations worked for the good of the nation under Japanese occupation. A helpful facet of Junio's introduction is in re-visiting the scholarship of the 1950s and 60s, when the work of James Thomson and Arne Sovik presented more positive accounts of church–state relations and reconciliation in the Republic. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the creation of the BSD as a joint venture between the Guomingdang and the church, and the reach of its programmes within the wartime agenda. One of Junio's targets here is Yang Tianhong's contention that the Church of Christ in China set up the Border Services Department to pursue evangelism in the southwest, given the occupation of the eastern seaboard. Junio points rather to the role of H.H. Kung, and argues that the BSD was in fact a government initiative, supported and run by the church. Chapter 5 charts the post-war challenges as funding for the service is cut and agendas shift, while Chapter 6 considers the difficulties and limited successes of Chinese–Chinese evangelism sponsored by the BSD. Chapter 7 sets the BSD in the context of wider church attempts to work with the new Communist government, before the benign relationship unravels as the Korean War sounds the death-knell for religious work and denunciation campaigns intensify. The Conclusion provides a constructive coda, which considers briefly what insight the model of accommodation between church and state in the BSD could offer for the present.
Patriotic Cooperation is an important read for anyone interested in Republican-era politics, rural development or Christianity. My criticisms of the book are mainly peripheral: firstly, that Brill does not employ copyeditors, which detracts from all of our scholarship, especially where the author is not a native English speaker. The second relates to a certain naivety, and suppositional quality in dealing with Christianity, in which Junio is far from alone among historians. Junio is not a mission historian or a theologian, yet it is a shame that she does not explore further the theological writings of (Rev.) Cheng Jingyi and the other subjects of her study, which would have provided more explanatory context for the BSD. There is no mention of the Social Gospel movement, or the theological precedents and understandings of Republican-era moderates like Cheng. This allows Junio to posit “patriotism” as a motivating force throughout, and to see, for example, medical or educational work as subordinate to the “real” goal of evangelism, rather than part of a more integrated vision of kingdom-building among Christians of that era. As in many secular histories, the motivation for conversion is also a supposed one, and does not evidence the voices of converts themselves, as when Junio writes, for example, “Catholic missions would convert 11,023 local people by 1936, primarily Han settlers, probably because of the practical medical and other social services done by the Catholic missionaries” (p. 123). Such detractions are, however, outweighed by the detailed and convincing scholarship on a fascinating topic with implications for the ongoing historiographical recalibration of Chinese Christianity and for richer church–state understandings.
