SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article aims to give insight into personal and institutional resilience in the work of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Hangzhou in the period from 1945 to 1952. The focus will be on their work in the Guangji hospital. It contributes to debates in missionary historiography in the final years of British mission work in China by examining this under researched locality and institution. It begins with the return of these missionaries from internment camps to an almost wholly looted hospital in 1945. It explores their efforts to try and restore this hospital. Obstacles included the initial poor state of health of some of these missionaries after internment and later escalating economic crisis and hyperinflation. Yet they stayed and continued their work. It also explores how they responded to the abrupt change of political control in favour of the Communists in 1949. None of them attempted to flee before Communist forces arrived. I show that the missionaries managed to adjust to the demands of the authorities. It ends with the departure of the Hangzhou missionaries from China in 1951 and 1952. The principal sources I use are correspondence and periodicals from the CMS archive housed at the University of Birmingham’s Special Collections