Li Ma: Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China
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Li Ma: Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019 Zhixi Wang1 Received: 10 April 2020 / Accepted: 25 April 2020 © Religious Research Association, Inc. 2020
In recent years, much scholarly attention has been devoted to both women in Chinese history and Christianity in contemporary China, but until now there has been no full-length treatment of female Christians in contemporary China. Hence, Li Ma’s Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China is a timely and welcome contribution. It documents rich and vivid accounts of fourteen Chinese Christian women who were born between the years 1974 to 1988. Through Ma’s indepth interviews and subsequent translations, readers hear first-person stories about what it is like to be a daughter in post-Mao China and what it means to be a female Christian in a time of socio-economic transformation. Those women (all in pseudonym) whose stories form the basis of this book share some common features, according to the author: most of them are white-collar professionals and well-educated; all of them converted to Christianity in the early 2000s and belong to “house churches”; six out of fourteen are married, and among those who are single, one is divorced and one widowed (p. 11); most come from singlechild families; and most of their mothers were born in the 1950s and 1960s (p. 5). In terms of occupation, two are stay-at-home mothers and two are editors, and there are a pastor’s wife, a journalist, a forest certification specialist, a founding owner of a private daycare center, an NGO worker, a translator, a university professor, a lawyer, a foreign firm manager, and a university administrator. They were born or grew up in Shanghai municipality or the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, Jilin, Sichuan, and Xinjiang. If all the informants’ basic information above—scattered throughout the book in its present form—were compiled by the author in the front or back matter, the book would have been more readable and friendlier. Chapter 1 sets the course for the chapters that follow. It opens by reflecting on the ecclesiastical and socio-economic reasons undergirding the significance of the stories of these contemporary Chinese Christian women and then turns readers’ * Zhixi Wang [email protected] 1
College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University, Shantou, China
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attention to a recurring theme in the interviews—i.e., the mother–daughter relationship—and four interpretive motifs that anchor these biographical narratives, i.e., “socialization in Chinese families, politicized culture, Christian conversion, and worldview conflicts” (p. 7). The author concludes this chapter by considering the justifications for the use of oral history to approach this project. Besides, the author outlines the four basic questions she asked in interviews: “What events and people shaped your outlook on life during your growing up experience? How did you become a Christian? What is your
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