Audrey Donnithorne described herself as an Overseas Brit and a Sichuan country girl, but she was also a world-class scholar of the Chinese economy, with a talent for languages and connections, courageously fulfilling her vocation to improve the lives of others, and a heroine of the Catholic faith.
Audrey Gladys Donnithorne was born on November 27th, 1922 to Vyvyan and Gladys Donnithorne, evangelical Anglican missionaries in Sichuan Province, China, and she spent her first four years there.
In 1927 the family was forced to leave China as Kuomintang forces pushed northwards. From the age of 5, Audrey was educated in England, though she chose to rejoin her parents, by then back in China, in 1940 during the Second World War.
There she endured the rigours of war until returning to Britain in 1943. For the next two years she worked in the Pacific Department of the War Office. It was also at this time that she embraced the Catholic Church, to the horror of her parents.
In October 1945 she went up to Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Somerville College. She did not think much of the syllabus, she thought economic theory was pointless and ‘social science’ an oxymoron. On her first day at the university, she joined the Conservative Society, where she met Margaret Thatcher, and the two became lifelong friends.
In 1948 she became research assistant at University College London and it was here over the next 20 years that she built her academic reputation, which climaxed in 1967 in the publishing of China’s Economic System, the authoritative account of China’s economy under Mao.
In 1968 she applied for a professorial fellowship at the Australian National University, and got the job. After some intensive research in Hong Kong and tying up her affairs in the UK, she returned to Canberra to take up her new position at the beginning of 1969, where she remained until her retirement in 1985. Given her new proximity to China, she began to visit the People’s Republic of China from 1973, making contact with substantial numbers of Chinese Christians.
By late 1982, she felt she was becoming intellectually stale and in need of a change of scene. That scene was to be Hong Kong, where both her parents were buried, and she felt very much at home. Ease of access to China was a further strong attraction.
Moving to Hong Kong in 1985, at the age of 63, she continued to follow events in China closely and worked to promote reconciliation between the Church in China and the Holy See, building bridges of understanding and cooperation between China’s deeply and permanently divided “underground Catholics” and “patriotic Catholics”. For this she was awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Medal by the Vatican in 1993, but banned from mainland China by the Chinese authorities in 1997.
Audrey continued to work tirelessly for the Church in China, her Hong Kong flat becoming the hub of a network of people ranging from cardinals to her many godchildren.
She continued to support the Chinese Church for the rest of her life, carrying on an extensive correspondence with Church leaders, priests and missionaries from her home in Hong Kong, and continuing to give her advice and expert help to the Hong Kong Diocese.
She was honoured by the University of Hong Kong being appointed an honorary member of the Centre for Asian Studies.
Her autobiography, China in Life’s Foreground, was published in 2019.
She died in 2020 at the age of 97 in Hong Kong, her last wish was for her ashes to be buried in Sichuan, at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes.
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