Audrey Donnithorne

Audrey Gladys Donnithorne (27 November 1922, Santai County, Sichuan, Republic of China – 9 June 2020, Hong Kong) was a British-Chinese political economist and missionary, prominent in her efforts to rebuild the Catholic Church in China—particularly the Catholic Church in Sichuan—after the Cultural Revolution.

Early life and education

The daughter of evangelical Anglican missionaries Vyvyan Donnithorne and Gladys Emma Ingram, born in 1922 at a Quaker mission hospital in Santai (formerly known as Tungchwan), Audrey grew up in Sichuan where she and her parents were kidnapped by bandits when she was two years old. 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. She converted to Catholicism in 1943, and was baptised at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Chengdu. She later travelled through Japanese-occupied Burma by plane in order to reach her home country. 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), meeting Margaret Thatcher who she succeeded as college secretary for the Conservative Party. 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. In 1997, the Chinese government expelled her from the mainland for her activities; she remained in contact with church leaders there. She worked with the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victimsestablishing a fund for the rebuilding of churches and Catholic facilities with the backing of Hong Kong cardinal Joseph Zen and with the Church in China. She also became an honorary member of the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her funeral Mass was celebrated by Cardinal John Tong Hon and Cardinal Emeritus Joseph Zen on 26 June at St. Joseph's Church, Hong Kong. A memorial Mass was held in Sacred Heart Cathedral of Sichuan's Nanchong Diocese on 10 June, the day after her death, conducted by Bishop . China's Economic System, Praeger Publishers, 1967; Reprint edition (2016): Taylor & Francis, (with George Cyril Allen) Western enterprise in Indonesia and Malaya: a study in economic development, 1957; Reprint edition (2021): Creative Media Partners, (with George Cyril Allen) Western enterprise in Far Eastern economic development: China and Japan, 1954; Reprint edition (2015): Routledge,