Championed China’s Catholic minority
DESCRIBED HERSELF AS AN OVERSEAS BRIT AND A SICHUAN COUNTRY GIRL
Audrey Donnithorne, who has died aged 97, was an economist whose later years were dedicated to the support of the beleaguered Catholic Church in China, the country of her birth.
A daughter of Anglican missionaries, Donnithorne converted to Catholicism in her twenties and made an academic career as a respected China-watcher in London and Canberra before retiring to Hong Kong in 1985.
From there she did everything in her power to nurture the reflourishing, after the repression of the Maoist era, of a Catholic community that numbered more than 10 million souls, and the reconciliation of its “underground” elements — including priests who had been imprisoned — with the “patriotic” who had accepted full subservience to Beijing.
Working alongside the Catholic relief agency Caritas, and making regular visits to the mainland dioceses of Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, she helped to fund and organize the education of seminarians and the distribution of religious materials, and applied her economic skills to development schemes to support poor parishes.
After the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 — with the support of her close ally, Hong Kong’s Cardinal Joseph Zen, a longtime thorn in the side of the Beijing authorities — she launched a fund for the rebuilding of the region’s churches. Most important, she very discreetly worked to advance the reconciliation with Rome of Chinese bishops who had been ordained without Vatican approval — a number of whom were eventually released from excommunication by Pope Francis.
For her work toward unity, she was awarded the Papal medal Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice in 1993, but in 1997 she was refused any further visas for visits to mainland China. When she asked officials for an explanation, the reply was “You know why” — to which she retorted good- humouredly that among her many sins, she could not tell which ones they were referring to.
The American Catholic scholar George Weigel called her “one of the most remarkable Catholics of modern times and a genuine heroine of the faith.”
Born in a Quaker mission hospital at Santai in Sichuan province on Nov. 27, 1922, Audrey Gladys Donnithorne ( known in China as Dong Yude) described herself in the opening passage of her autobiography as “an Overseas Brit and a Sichuan country girl.” Her parents were Vyvyan Donnithorne and his wife, Gladys, who had been sent to China by the Church Missionary Society.
Her grandparents “were born in four different countries on three different continents, but all were intensely British, especially, perhaps, the duskier of them.” Vyvyan, an engineer and decorated wartime officer before finding his religious calling, was the son of a lieutenant- colonel of the Scots Greys, whose wife was Irish.
Gladys was the daughter of Lewis Ingram, a barrister born in The Gambia (where his father was governor) who had married Victoria Skinner, a descendant of the Anglo- Indian military adventurer James Skinner — founder of the cavalry regiment Skinner’s Horse — and the inheritor of his vast estates near Delhi.
The Donnithornes’ mission was based at Anxian, “where the Chengdu plain meets the foothills of Central Asia,” she wrote, in a region “riven by conflicts between warlords and by the ravages of bandits.” In August 1925 the family was staying in a hill bungalow to escape summer heat when they and six other foreigners were abducted by a gang of Red Lamp bandits, led by an evil-looking chieftain, naked to the waist and armed with two automatic pistols.
Audrey grew up with no memory of the episode, but her father left a vivid account of her mother picking the two- year- old out of her cot and saying “Don’t be afraid, little girl, we are going for a walk now” — and of Audrey calling the bandits “naughty men” after one of them stole her father’s pillow.
The bandits’ ransom demand was for 200 firearms, which the missionaries had no means to procure. The “walk” — over precipitous mountain paths and log bridges, with the adults initially roped together by neck halters — endured for 24 days until their release was negotiated by local officials, with the payment of a modest sum for “board and lodgings” to allow their captors to save face.
By 1927 the situation in Sichuan had become altogether too dangerous. The Donnithornes returned to England, Vyvyan serving briefly as chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge. When he and Gladys returned to China in 1929, seven- yearold Audrey was left with a guardian family in Norfolk.
She did not see her parents again until they returned on home leave in the mid-1930s, but after leaving school she rejoined them in Sichuan, where she studied Chinese, taught English and became drawn to the Catholic faith.
Returning to England in 1943, she was recruited into Military Intelligence to put her knowledge of China to use for the duration of the war; in 1944 she was formally received into the Catholic Church.
In 1945, Donnithorne went to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics — and succeeded Margaret Roberts ( later Thatcher) as college secretary of the university Conservative association. It was, she wrote,
“the least happy time of my life,” and was not initially drawn to an academic career.
But after graduating in 1948 she took a job as a research assistant in the department of political economy at University College London, where she stayed for 20 years to become the equivalent of an associate professor in Chinese Economic Studies and to achieve recognition for China’s Economic System, her authoritative 1967 account of the catastrophic impacts of Maoism.
Next she moved to Canberra to be a professorial fellow at Australia National University, and from 1970 to 1977, Foundation Head of its Contemporary China Centre — a post that gave ample reason for her to travel extensively in China and develop her networks there. In the final phase of her career she was an honorary research fellow of the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She published a number of academic works on the Chinese and other Asian economies and, in 2019, a memoir, China in Life’s Foreground.
In its concluding chapter she warned that “perhaps the greatest danger to the Church in China may come not from government oppression but from government patronage,” which would be facilitated “by any concession made by the Holy See to allow the Chinese government a say in the appointment of bishops.” A second volume in preparation promised to reveal more of her behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
“I admit to reticence in matters of personal relationships,” Donnithorne wrote. “At various times, I certainly felt a strong attachment to some of my male friends … ( and) I would have loved a home filled with lively children ... However, as the years went by, it became apparent that this was not the way I was being led.”
Her final paragraph spoke of “Sichuan and the rest of southwest China where my heart still lies” — and where her ashes will be buried.
IN 1997 SHE WAS REFUSED ANY FURTHER VISAS FOR MAINLAND CHINA. WHEN SHE ASKED FOR AN EXPLANATION, THE REPLY WAS ‘ YOU KNOW WHY’ — TO WHICH SHE RETORTED THAT AMONG HER MANY SINS, SHE COULD NOT TELL WHICH ONES THEY WERE REFERRING TO.