Liberal Christianity and Chinese nationalism After the establishment of the Republic of China, Yui worked both in government and Christian posts. In 1916 he entered the leadership of the Chinese YMCA. He succeeded C.T. Wang as general secretary in 1918, making the Chinese National YMCA the first mission-founded organization to turn control over to Chinese citizens. In 1921, the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce commissioned Yui and Chiang Monlin to attend the Washington Conference, the post-war planning conference, as observers, where he went against the wishes of the Beijing government and negotiated for the redemption of the Shandong railroad from Japanese banks. Upon his return to China, he organized a drive to raise forty million Chinese dollars, which paid off the debt. Bays notes Yui was a leader in a group that included such men and women as Cheng Jingyi, James Yen, and missionaries such as Frank Rawlinson who took practical steps to produce a Christianity that was Chinese, not simply an extension of Western Christianity, and to make the Chinese church independent of foreign control, as the YMCA had done. Making Chinese Christianity relevant to Chinese nationalism was more difficult. The first decades of the twentieth century were what Bays calls the "golden years", during which many Chinese saw Christianity as a tool to strengthen the Chinese nation and a way to build a modern Chinese society. Under Yui's leadership, the Chinese National YMCA addressed the social issues central to building the nation, for which he invented the phrase "saving the nation through character". The Y created a Lecture Bureau that mounted national campaigns to spread knowledge of science to the common people, and created a National Mass Literacy Campaign headed by James Yen that extended literacy education to some five million people across the county. Yet, while membership in city chapters doubled, some Christians perceived that this caused a decline in spiritual values in favor of social improvement. The Western rejection of China's claims for equal treatment at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 undercut these favorable views and fostered populist nationalism in the early 1920s. The Anti-Christian Movement of 1923 denounced Christianity as imperialist. Liberal Protestants, on the one hand, had built schools, universities, churches, and service organizations that were the basis of a new middle class, but on the other hand liberal groups recognized that they could not create national political organizations to address social problems and