Nation, culture, and identity in transnational child welfare practices: Reflection on history to understand the present

Abstract

This paper examines two sets of transnational child welfare practices connecting Canada and China: Christian missionaries’ work with children in China and contemporary transnational adoptions, highlighting the problematizations of culture and identity in each situation. The purpose is to bring critical consciousness to issues related to transnational child welfare practices that have been obscured or taken as self-evident. I draw on historical research to discuss three ways in which ideas and practices related to culture and identity in contemporary transnational adoptions reveal the making of the Canadian nation and its racialized and Eurocentric order. Social work responding to transnational challenges and possibilities cannot be separated from hegemonic social and political projects of nation-building. However, we may be able to rework assumptions about the nation and its order, to repurpose its programs, and to contest its subjectivizing power.

Keywords:

• Missionaries
• child welfare
• transnational adoption
• nation
• culture
• identity

Acknowledgement

My sincere thanks to Elizabeth Paradis for her thoughtful help with an earlier draft. I would like to also thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1. A key area of theorization in transnational feminist scholarship is the conceptualization of Third World women under Western eyes (Jagger, 1998; Mohanty et al., 1991; Shih, 2002), which is critical of the positioning, by the West (Western feminists included), of Third World and racialized women as homogeneous, ignorant, passive, victimized, and downtrodden and white Western women as the civilized, educated, active, and sexually and economically independent saviors of Third World women.

2. The analytical focus of this paper is on Canada’s nation-building politics around culture and identity. Similar analyses concerning China are beyond the scope of this article but will be developed in my future work.

3. Although Canadian Catholic missionaries set foot in China prior to their Protestant counterparts, Canadian mission history argues that because these missionaries belonged to various orders, they did not constitute a Canadian Catholic mission as such. Similarly, the interdenominational Toronto China Inland Mission (led by James Hudson Taylor) as an autonomous branch of the China Inland Mission, but nevertheless a branch (Austin, 1986), was not always viewed as a Canadian Mission. This narrow definition of Canadian missions in China only includes the United Church West China Mission, the United Church North China Mission, the United Church South China mission, and the Canadian Anglican mission.

4. The Presbyterian mission (led by Jonathan Goforth) arrived in China in 1888, but only started operations in North Henan in the early 1890s. The Methodist and the Presbyterian missions later became known as the United Church West China Mission and United Church North China Mission, respectively. In addition, there were other, smaller, United Church South China Missions in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. The Canadian Anglican mission (Bishop William White) was located in Henan and was started in 1910.