Audrey Donnithorne

Audrey Gladys Donnithorne (1922 – 2020) was a British-Chinese political economist and missionary, prominent in her efforts to rebuild the Catholic Church in China after the Cultural Revolution.

Audrey Donnithorne
Born27 November 1922
Sichuan, China
Died9 June 2020
Hong Kong
NationalityBritish-Chinese
Alma materSomerville College, Oxford
Occupationpolitical economist, missionary
Parents

Early life and education

The daughter of evangelical missionaries Vyvyan Donnithorne and Gladys Inram, born in 1922, Audrey grew up in Sichuan where she and her parents were kidnapped by bandits when she was two years old.[1] They and six others were led into the mountains with their necks in a halter. In 1927, the family was forced to leave China as Kuomintang forces pushed northwards.[2][3]

When World War II broke out, she headed from the UK, where she received education, to France and sailed to China to her family. However, when Japanese forces advanced on Sichuan, she went to India by plane. Back in the UK, Donnithorne worked for the War Office. She then moved to Somerville College, Oxford where she studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), where she babysat for G. E. M. Anscombe and was a contemporary of Margaret Thatcher. Donnithorne had converted to Catholicism during World War II.[1][3]

Career

Donnithorne then became a successful academic at University College London and in 1969 she moved to Australia to work at the Australian National University where she was head of the Contemporary China Center.[2][4] Her magnum opus was China's Economic System. She was in Israel when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. In Australia she received Vietnamese boat people in her house. After her retirement in 1985 she moved to Hong Kong and worked with the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victims and with the Church in China. She also became an honorary member of the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong.[4] She later wrote a memoirs, called China: In Life's Foreground.[1]

The Vatican awarded her the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice medal in 1993, and in 1995, she became an honorary member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP). She died in Hong Kong on 9 June 2020.[3]

Selected works
  • China: In Life's Foreground, 2019
  • China's Economic System, 1967
  • (with George Cyril Allen) Western enterprise in Indonesia and Malaya: a study in economic development, 1957
  • (with George Cyril Allen) Western enterprise in Far Eastern economic development: China and Japan, 1954

References
  1. Roy Peachey (9 June 2020). "Audrey Donnithorne RIP". Retrieved 31 October 2020.
  2. Roy Peachey (10 July 2020). "Obituary: Audrey Donnithorne, convert who helped China's Catholics". Catholic Herald. Retrieved 31 October 2020.
  3. Madoc Cairns (26 June 2020). "Obituary: Audrey Donnithorne". The Tablet. Retrieved 31 October 2020.
  4. Michel Chambon (12 June 2020). "Audrey G. Donnithorne, a great lady of China". Union of Catholic Asian News. Retrieved 31 October 2020.
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