Canadian West China Missions’ Personnel Trends
Item
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Title
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Canadian West China Missions’ Personnel Trends
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Identifier
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DS0019
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Description
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Two bar charts showing the total numbers of Canadian Methodist and United Church of Canada missionaries in China between 1917 and 1940, and the same numbers broken down by gender.
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Commentary
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These bar charts represent the personnel of the West China Canadian Methodist Mission (1892-1925) and the United Church of Canada Mission (1926-1951), which is the same organization before and after unification of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in Canada in 1926.
One chart shows the total number of CMM/UCCM missionaries in the field, and the other shows the gender breakdown of the personnel. Data was taken from the directories of Protestant missionaries in China for 1917, 1936 and 1940, and the West China Missionary News’s 1926 supplement containing a directory of West China missionaries. Gender counts include both single and married missionaries, of which there were a lot more single women than men.
The total number of personnel shows that the CMM had moderate growth between 1917 and 1926, followed by a significant drop in 1936, and sustained numbers into 1940. The gender breakdown of personnel shows that the growth from 1917 to 1926 was almost exclusively female, while the UCCM lost proportionally more men than women between 1926 and 1936. The rise in male personnel between 1936 and 1940 explains why the total number of personnel remained almost the same.
After the first three decades, Canadian missions began favoring married couples in the field. Because their Women’s Missionary Society (WMS) was separate from the general boards of foreign missions, and the WMS trained their missionaries for a year or more before entering the field, it was a great loss to them when their women married single men once they were in the field. In contrast, since wives were not paid for the work they conducted, it was expedient for CMM/UCCM to support only the married men.
This explains why there are twice as many women as men only in 1936 when many of the first generation of married couples had retired after the 1927 evacuation. Then there was a new infusion of married couples through the late 1930s into the 1940s, which brought the gap closer while the total number remained the same. The UCCM was still sending out new missionaries in 1948 just before the communists won the revolution in 1948.
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Creator
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Cory Willmott
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Date Created
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2026-05-05
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Location
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Sichuan
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Provenance
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Original research.
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Publisher
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SIUE
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Record Date
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2026-05-13
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Contributor
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Cory Willmott
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Type
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Dataset
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References
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Boynton, Charles L. ed. Directory of Protestant Missions in China, 1917 (The China Continuation Committee). Christian Literature Society Depot, 1917.
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The West China Missions Advisory Board’s Directory 1926, According to Missions
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Directory of Protestant Missions in China, 1936. Shanghai: The North China Daily News.
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Directory of Protestant Missions in China, 1940. Shanghai: The North China Daily News.
