Christian Values in Communist China
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Christian Values in Communist China

Gerda Wielander

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eBook - ePub

Christian Values in Communist China

Gerda Wielander

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About This Book

This book argues that as new political and social values are formed in post-socialist China, Christian values are becoming increasingly embedded in the new post-socialist Chinese outlook. It shows how although Christianity is viewed in China as a foreign religion, promoted by Christian missionaries and as such at odds with the official position of the state, Christianity as a source of social and political values - rather than a faith requiring adherence to a church is in fact having a huge impact. The book shows how these values inform both official and dissident ideology and provide a key underpinning of morality and ethics in the post-socialist moral landscape. Adopting a variety of different angles, the book investigates the role Christian thought plays in the official discourse on morality and love and what contribution Chinese Christians make to charitable projects. It analyses key Christian publications and dedicates two chapters to Christian intellectuals and their impact on political liberal thinking in China. The concluding chapter highlights gender roles, the role of the Chinese diaspora, and the overlap of the government and Christian agenda in China today. The book challenges commonly held views on contemporary Chinese Christianity as a movement in opposition to the state by showing the diversity and complexity of Christian thinking and the many factors influencing it.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781317976035

1 An introduction to Chinese Christianity today

Key questions and issues
For a number of years in the early 2000s I taught a course called ‘Democracy and Human Rights in Contemporary China’. Due to topicality of the subject matter, teaching preparation included the close monitoring of human rights publications and reports. In this context, one particular phenomenon started to catch my eye, namely that an increasing number of those involved in the struggles for human rights and democracy were lawyers (rather than writers or intellectuals, as characteristic of earlier chapters of China’s democracy movement), and that among these lawyers, a fair few seemed to be Christians. This led me to wonder whether there was a correlation between political activism and Christian faith among this new generation of Chinese ‘democracy activists’. As I was engaged in these preliminary musings, David Aikman’s book Jesus in Beijing was published. Its impact on the study of Christianity as well as on Chinese Christians was substantial. The book, which was well researched, constituted the first non-academic and eminently readable account on the state of Christianity in China. It remains one of the most quoted sources in academic and non-academic writings on the subject, despite its sensationalist subtitle, which reads ‘How Christianity is transforming China and changing the global balance of power’. The impact of the book was far reaching. It put the spotlight on a social and potentially political phenomenon in China which up until then had received very little attention from the West. It led to an increased academic study of contemporary Chinese Christianity which greatly aided our more nuanced understanding of its growth and impact. The consequences were also far reaching for some of the individuals featured in Aikman’s account, who were subsequently visited by China’s Public Security Bureau. My own study, which began in earnest in 2006, can be understood as a somewhat incredulous ‘really?’ in response to Aikman’s subtitle. Once religious zeal (a regular feature in studies on contemporary Chinese Christianity, and not always well disguised) and headline grabbing language are stripped away, what really is the social and political impact of Christianity in China today?

Number of Christians in China

The PRC is officially an atheist state well known for its persecution and destruction of religion and its material manifestations during the Cultural Revolution. Since the beginning of the reform era, China has seen the rapid revival and growth of all religions. According to the most detailed and comprehensive survey carried out into the number of religious believers in China so far, conducted in 2007 by the Beijing Horizon Research Consultancy group, of Chinese people over 16, 85 per cent believe in a certain supernatural existence or engage in certain types of religious activities. Real atheists, namely those who do not believe in anything supernatural or engage in any religious activity, therefore only seem to account for 15 per cent of the population (Yang F. 2012b).
As far as Christianity is concerned, until recently – and certainly in the West – the entrenched paradigm was that Christianity was considered a foreign religion which was tightly controlled by the government; that the majority of Christians worshipped in ‘house churches’, which uniformly stood in opposition to the official churches and the government; and that Christians were persecuted by an atheistic party, which considers religion the opium of the people and a potential tool for foreign interference in Chinese affairs. In recent years, some academics have started to question this entrenched paradigm. Ashiwa and Wank (2009) reject the state-control frameworks which view the state—religion interaction as inherently antagonistic in favour of seeing multiple processes, including competition, adaptation, and cooperation, as well as conflict, carried out through interaction by multiple actors in the state and religions. Ryan Dunch (2008) also maps out the developments regarding the mutual adaptation of religion and socialist society in reform era China. While the state has clearly shaped the parameters within which religious believers operate, Dunch says that the metaphor of ‘conversation’ between the state and religious organizations is far more apt than the domination/response paradigm. Where Christianity in particular is concerned, Nanlai Cao (2007) warns that it is problematic to juxtapose Christianity and China as two mutually distinguishable moral universes. It is after all mainly local Chinese believers who have revived the faith, and an upwardly mobile stratum of society is beginning to join the urban churches in ever greater numbers. Daniel Bays (2012) and Lian Xi (2010) vividly portray the rich and diverse history of Chinese Christianity in its many orientations. Both authors present a clear case of a Chinese Christianity, that may have been influenced by missionaries from outside China, but whose most popular and rapidly growing groups are built on indigenous Chinese Christian leaders’ work.
The significant efforts since the reform era of Chinese Protestant leaders within the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and of academic theologians, who have worked at the development of a Chinese Christian theology and at making Christianity not just acceptable, but respectable in the eyes of the leaders, also cannot be ignored, although they are often viewed critically and derided as ‘non-believers’ by some Christian groups outside the official church. On the other hand, the fact that some of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese government today are Christians, has done little to quell the government’s suspicion of Christianity, nor has the coverage of the resulting harassment and imprisonment of some individuals outside China contributed much to arrive at a more balanced picture of the role of Christianity in China today.
It appears that the polarized view has also led to an inflated estimated figure of the actual number of Christians in China today; foreign estimates and estimates coming from within the ‘house churches’ tend to be particularly high and speak of up to 100 million Christians in China today. Of the 23.2 per cent who identified themselves as believers in a religion in the above mentioned survey, only 3.2 per cent identified themselves as Christian (as compared to 18 per cent as Buddhist); after extrapolation this leads to a figure of about 32 million Christians in China today, of whom only 3.5 million are Catholic.1 In addition, there are another 43 million people, who said they believed in the existence of Jesus Christ or had attended Christian meetings in the past years but did not identify themselves as Christians. Regardless of the actual number of Chinese Christians, which may well never be ascertained, more attention seems to be paid to the growth and potential influence of Christianity in China today than to the growth of other religions. Even a Southern Weekly’s 2009 issue listed the fact that ‘more and more people are becoming Christians’ as one of the ten most surprising social changes of the first decade of the twenty-first century (Yang F. 2012b).

The foreign factor

There is little dispute about the fact that Christianity was first introduced to China by foreigners, although in order to better understand the situation today, this statement may require slight refinement. Christianity in the form of different denominations has been introduced to China by different foreign missionaries since the Nestorians in the seventh century, and more forcefully so since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the Protestant missionaries who benefited from the terms of the unjust treaties following the Opium Wars, who were associated with ‘foreign aggression and imperialism’ by official historiography after 1949, but who also had a long established track record of advocacy and competence, in particular in areas such as education and health care. Most Christians in the early twentieth century lived away from the big urban centres, but with the missionary schools also came a degree of upward mobility. Christians were also active in social and political reform activities, leading anti-foot binding or opium suppression societies and holding office in provincial legislatures. In the early twentieth century, the American mission in China was dominated by groups promoting the ‘social gospel’ whose work in China seemed to go hand in hand with other efforts in China’s modernization. It led to ground-breaking projects by the Chinese YMCA and YWCA, an aspect that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.
Discussions over the role of the foreign mission in China and movements towards more independence of the Chinese churches date back to the early twentieth century when the Chinese Christian Union was formed to encourage more self-support and autonomy. The Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910 in turn led to the establishment of ‘The Church of Christ in China’, whose participants did not want to create a ‘federation’, implying different denominations, but who wanted to create a new church organization which would be a non-denominational, single Chinese church. Instrumental in the debates over Chinese or foreign leadership of the churches was a group which Daniel Bays (2012: 100–2) calls the ‘Sino-Foreign Protestant Establishment’, which consisted of a group of men who constituted an elite policy-making and decision-making ‘establishment’ among the great variety of missionaries and missionary organizations in China at the time. Despite its name, this group was initially entirely foreign, but Chinese leaders started to be incorporated from 1910 onwards and included a number of YMCA veterans as well as leading theologian Zhao Zichen (T.C. Chao) and intellectuals from Yanjing University.
The foreign missionary scene however went far beyond this group of well-educated and well-connected intellectuals. There was a great influx of missionaries of a variety of different creeds and denominations, often not part of any wider missionary organization but driven by their own personal vision and zeal. Historical studies show that by the 1920s one must broadly distinguish between ‘liberal’ elements on the one hand who tended to accept the higher criticism of the Bible and the importance of social action over preaching, and conservative groups on the other, usually referred to as ‘fundamentalists’. China’s own edition of the worldwide controversy between modernism and fundamentalism started in the 1920s, too, and in some form continues to this day. Into this mix one needs to add the ‘Pentecostal’ groups, which proved (and continue to prove) very attractive in China and which embody the ‘irrational’ and ‘non-intellectual’ spectrum of Chinese Christianity with a strong emphasis on the bodily experience of Christ. In Diarmaid MacCulloch’s words, equally appropriate for the Chinese context
liberal Protestantism was inclined to find the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit rather unnerving [
] as so often in the history of Christianity, at first the mainstream Churches scarcely noticed what was happening beyond them, or if they did notice, they hardly took seriously what they saw among what seemed liked small groups of eccentrics.
(MacCulloch 2009: 989)
The 1920s also saw the first beginnings of indigenous Christian groups which grew out of orthodox Christian belief and Chinese popular religion. It is quite difficult to keep track of these groups and movements with their varied and colourful names. Bays reckons that by 1929 as many as a quarter of all Chinese Christians fell into these independent groups (Bays 2012: 115). Finally, the 1920s also saw the creation of the National Christian Council and the Church of Christ in China, a further attempt at establishing a Chinese organization across denominations, but it was criticized for being ‘shot through with modernist theology and to be avoided at all cost’ (Bays 2012: 111) and many mission groups never joined.
Therefore, early attempts at establishing a non-denominational Chinese church were unsuccessful for much the same reasons as the official church project in China today seems beset with troubles, that is, the existence of multiple denominations and sub-denominations, which did not agree to or could not relate to the intellectual efforts at establishing an overarching church organization based on liberal theology. Efforts by the National Christian Council and the Church of Christ in China to contribute to the improvement of working and living conditions of peasants and workers were also hampered by a lack of funds resulting from the Great Depression (which impacted on the YMCAs) and the resistance of the local elites, who saw their positions threatened by the social activism as embodied in a number of projects. While these two organizations grew very little during the 1930s, independent evangelical Chinese leaders like Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee managed to attract big numbers (see Lian 2010). In the view of contemporary critics, they all emphasized the spiritual salvation of the individual, downplayed the importance of church structure and did not consider the role and responsibility of the church in relation to society (Liu and Wang 2012: 342). During the war years, for example, independent churches called people not to works of mercy but to repent their sins and be regenerated before God in preparation for the second coming (Bays 2012:144), quite possibly a more comforting and more pragmatic approach considering the scale of suffering witnessed in those years.
After the end of the Second World War, the ‘Chinese Christian Movement’ was set up by the National Christian Council, which constituted a link between university centres and the YMCAs and YWCAs. Members were students, who were liberal and sympathetic to the Communists and who loosely identified themselves as Christians; one of the movement’s main proponents was Wu Yaozong. It was this group, which became the launching pad for the so called ‘Three Self Patriotic Movement’ (TSPM), which was created in the summer of 1950. At its core was a ‘Christian Manifesto’, drafted by Wu Yaozong with input from Zhou Enlai, which signalled the end of the foreign mission in China and articulated the link between the foreign mission and imperialism. The National Christian Council ceased to exist once the TSPM was formed, but had voted to support the TSPM and signed the manifesto. However, the differences in outlook between the great variety of Protestant groups and leaders had not diminished and many refused to sign the manifesto, most famously Wang Mingdao, although Watchman Nee did, whose ‘Little Flock’ constituted a large proportion of the final number of signatures.
Like the NCC, the TSPM was (and is) not a church. It was placed under the direct supervision of the Religious Affairs Bureau (a state agency under the State Council), which in turn came under the authority of the United Front Work Department, which supervised and directed all relations with non-party groups. This structure exists until today (RAB has been renamed State Administration of Religious Affairs, SARA), but was interrupted (dissolved) during the Cultural Revolution. ‘Three self’ refers to ‘self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating’, a concept first mooted as early as the nineteenth century and not a Communist invention;2 but from 1950 ‘three self’ signalled a clear stand in relation to the ‘foreign element’ in the Chinese church and resulted in the expulsion of all foreign missionaries still in China. As a result of the various political campaigns, which affected China’s Christian population and leadership much in the same way as it did the rest of the population, no constructive thinking (and certainly no writing or publishing) went into what this Chinese church, free from ‘foreign elements’, should really constitute, beyond a somewhat vague notion of an all-encompassing, non-denominational structure. At the same time, many Chinese, who had received theological training in the decades before 1949 and who could therefore have contributed to the formation of a Chinese theology, were lost together with millions of other Chinese in the political struggles during the years from 1958–1976.
Chinese theological thinking and publishing only started again in the 1980s (see next section); the same decade also saw the resumption of foreign missionary endeavours in China, much of it through the teaching of English on campus. Almost every single one of the intellectuals I interviewed for this study encountered Christianity through their English teacher, who would also run Bible study classes. But following 1989 a new and arguably much more influential type of ‘foreign element’ than the English teacher has emerged. A number of democracy activists who fled China after the crackdown converted to Christianity in exile; the best known among them are Yuan Zhiming, Han Dongfang and Chai Ling. Many academics followed in the early 1990s, not motivated by political reasons or necessity but taking advantage of opportunities to study abroad. They converted to Christianity while studying in places like Yale or Princeton and stayed on to study theology and to devote their life to the church and the mission. A number of them regularly return to China, sometimes in the guise of business ventures. They form networks with Chinese Christians in Taiwan and Southeast Asia and in my view can be considered a contemporary incarnation of the ‘Sino-Foreign Protestant Elite’, to appropriate Bays’ term: a male elite of Chinese ethnic origin – and often originally from mainland China – who play a significant part in the direction of the Chinese mission through publications, theological training and the provision of funds. They are closely connected to the two most influential ‘sub-cultures’ in Chinese Christianity today, urban intellectual ‘house churches’ and Wenzhou churches, through publication and training projects and through strong personal ties. The question of theological orientation, denominations and church building are central to their endeavours.
This new Protestant elite, who trained overseas, were among the first to take advantage of opportunities to study abroad. Since then the number of Chinese students abroad has risen exponentially, mostly in English speaking countries like the United States and the UK. They constitute another important ‘foreign element’ in Chinese Christianity today. Many young Chinese will encounter Christianity as part of these studies abroad, where the desire to learn about western culture and the search for companionship and a social life often leads them to Chinese churches. Mission work on campus overseas specifically targeted at Chinese students is well structured and its organization based on Chinese cultural understanding (Rawso...

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