Research on the Role of Missionaries in the Chinese Anti-footbinding Movement

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_435How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Footbinding; Anti-footbinding Movement; Missionaries; Domestic Human Rights Issues; Late Qing China

Abstract

The long-formed Chinese custom of footbinding first started to decline in the late Qing period, with western missionaries playing a part in it. However, exactly how important were the missionaries in this anti-footbinding movement, and what can be learnt from their role in the movement, remained insufficiently discussed. Through analyzing primary sources from and/or about missionary societies in late Qing China, this paper concludes that the missionaries were important in raising the footbinding issue to the Chinese public, but were unable to make any actual impacts on the abolition of the practice, because they failed to gain the support from the powerful Chinese elites. The paper then uses the partial failure of the missionaries to reflect the role of today’s NGOs in solving domestic human rights issues, and points out that the NGOs’ impacts in such issues would be limited unless they have the support from the domestic forces.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiaying Huang
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/29
TI  - Research on the Role of Missionaries in the Chinese Anti-footbinding Movement
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 6th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 3700
EP  - 3706
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_435
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-31-2_435
ID  - Huang2022
ER  -