‘His Dominion’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859 – 1967 (review)

Reviewed by: ‘His Dominion’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859 – 1967 Johanna Selles (bio) Jiwu Wang. ‘His Dominion’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859 – 1967. Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2006. x, 194. $65.00 Wang’s insightful study of Protestant missions to Chinese-Canadians fits within the modern historiographical attempt to recover the whole story of missionary activity. Wang’s narrative describes not only missionary actions but also responses by the missionized. In addition, he includes social, economic, and cultural history, assuming that missionary strategies were formed and influenced by the dominant culture. This study begins with a historical review of Chinese immigration explaining the push factors that led many to leave their homes and families and the pull factors that provided work on the railroads and resource industries in Canada. Despite the economic and social marginalization that met them in Canada, Chinese immigrants had many reasons to stay in the new country and to make a living in any way possible. Missionary strategies were initially directed towards what were considered temporary residents of the country. Assumptions that the Chinese, who had left families behind, were sojourners created some hostility against the immigrants. The first missions were largely unorganized [End Page 292] and underfunded individual efforts that met with minimal success. Lack of resources was only one cause of the failure of individual missions; the strong prejudice against the Chinese was the other. By the 1880s, Protestant churches realized that the Chinese planned to stay, and that the solution to the Chinese ‘problem’ relied on the churches’ ability to Christianize them. In the interest of making good citizens, the Chinese, according to the Protestant churches, needed to be converted and to learn English. With new resolve, the Protestant impulse to organize the Chinese led to initiatives by the Methodists in 1885, followed by the Presbyterians in 1892, and by the Anglican Church in 1917. Although such enthusiasm seemed to run counter to the public prejudice against the Chinese, in fact the goal of Protestant missions was to build a Christian dominion – an attitude built on racial superiority. Such discrimination against the Chinese expressed in assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority or through silence in the face of campaigns against the ‘Yellow Peril’ undermined attempts at evangelization. Wang documents the methods used by missionaries and describes the response of the Chinese community to these missionary strategies. Part of their response, he argues, resulted from their complete isolation from both the dominant culture and from other immigrant groups. Chinese immigrants viewed missionary programs pragmatically, engaging in language learning, educational opportunities, and social services as they desired. One beneficiary of missionary sponsored education was Victoria Cheung, daughter of a Methodist church official, who graduated from the University of Toronto as the first female Chinese-Canadian doctor in the early 1920s. Cheung served as a missionary doctor until her death in 1962. In order to understand the resistance of Chinese immigrants to missionary colonization, Wang examines aspects of Chinese religious beliefs and practices that conflicted with Protestant beliefs. Immigrants either opposed Christianity, integrated parts of it with their old traditions, or became active converts to Protestant faith. Strategies to maintain ethnic identity in the Chinese community also fuelled resistance to missionary outreach. Part of this resistance fuelled a greater involvement in Confucianism among immigrants. Even for those who did convert, membership in the larger society was not part of the package, and so new converts were doubly disenfranchised and alienated from being either real Canadians or acceptable to their ethnic community. This volume successfully situates Chinese immigrant and Protestant missionary activity within the social, economic, and political history of Canada. Despite the inhospitable welcome, Chinese immigrants persisted through acts of resistance and retrenchment and built a home of their own in their adopted ‘home and native land,’ sometimes with the help of missionaries and sometimes in spite of it. [End Page 293] Johanna Selles Johanna Selles, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto Copyright © 2009 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

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