Female Paragon:The Multiple Identities Of Zeng Baosun And Its Practices In Modern China (1893-1952)

Zeng Baosun is the great-granddaughter of Zeng Guofan and the outstanding representatives of Zeng’s descendants. To some extent, her family background, educational experiences, religious experiences and social activities, have reflected the real situation and multiple identities of the women christian elite in the Republic of China.This paper tries to get rid of the traditional identity mode ("Chinese" and "Christian") and national identity.The author takes the clan, occupation, religion and gender as the reference, and elucidates the multiple changes of women christian from the tradition to modern, ignorance to knowledge and boudoir to public space.This paper is divided into five parts. The Chapter One describes the personal life of Zeng Baosun.The Chapter Two narrates the tendency of Christianization of Zeng Guofan Clan due to the cultural encounters between the East and West, researches the number of christian member of Zeng Clan and their faith, reveals the interaction and accommodation between Confucianism and Christianity in Zeng Clan.The Chapter Third focuses on Changsha Yifang Girls’ School which is complete self-support and don’t rely on any mission.It’s character has made a new comment on indeginization of christian education.However, in the early stage of the People’s Republic of China, the government has transformed it into a new-democratic school because of its’ christian feature and the connection with "British imperialism".The Chapter Four emphasizes the contributions to church and influences on the Chinese Christians of Zeng Baosun.This Chapter selects mainly Experiments In Personal Religion and the Youth and Religion Movement in 1935 to ferret out the sprout of Chinese women’s theology and demonstrate the speech skills and preach methods of Zeng Baosun.The Chapter Five describes how to elaborate women’s view of female with the key point of female identity,especially for women’s rights, gender and marital problems.What’s more,the Changsha Yifang Girls’ School is a model of combination of christian and women liberation.All in all,Zeng Baosun’s four-in-one identity feature,which is the overlap of clan, religious, national and gender identities,will make a contribution to discussing the diversified of identities feature in modern China.