Christianity in Chinese Public Life: Religion, Society, and the Rule of Law

Religion, Society, and the Rule of Law

J. Carpenter, K. den Dulk, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kevin R. den Dulk

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137427878
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137410184
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyzes the interaction of religion, society, and governance in China - suggesting it is much more subtle and complex than common convention suggests. The edited work addresses civic engagement, religion, Christianity, and the rule of law in contemporary Chinese society.

1

Remaking the Civic Space: The Rise of Unregistered Protestantism and Civic Engagement in Urban China

Li Ma and Jin Li

Abstract: Two waves of social change converge in contemporary China: the growth of an educated upper middle class in urban areas, and the growth of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity. Among Chinese Protestants, the great majority appear to be in unregistered “house churches.” Since the mid-2000s, this religious movement has been attracting urban professionals, technicians, and intellectuals. And this change, in turn, has redirected the house church movement more into the public sphere. This study examines the views and actions of urban, house church Protestants and explores how their faith shapes their engagement in public life. The authors find that unlike the quiet, privatized faith of earlier house church people, the new urban house churches encourage public assertiveness and may help build civil society in China.

Keywords: Chinese Protestants; civil society; house church; public life

Joel A. Carpenter, and Kevin R. den Dulk. Christianity in Chinese Public Life: Religion, Society, and the Rule of Law. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137410184.0006.

Unregistered Protestantism: numbers surging but still illegitimate

Since the mid-1990s, Protestantism in mainland China has become a prominent part of religious revival in this post-communist country.¹ The majority of these Chinese Protestants attend the non-state unregistered churches (also known as “house churches”), which have outnumbered the state-sponsored Three-Self Patriotic Church by an estimated ratio of ten to one.² To explain the growth of unregistered Protestantism, sociologists of religion have proposed a few causes: search for purpose after the ideological bankruptcy of communism since the 1989 crisis; rampant moral decay during marketization; mass conversion in rural China through healing miracles; and reliance on high-trust, closely knit social networks in recruiting.³

Following the waves of “rural revivals” since the mid-1990s, the rise of urban unregistered Protestantism since the mid-2000s has become a new phenomenon and awaits further explanation. In urban China since 2004, two recent macro-institutional changes have facilitated this development: the passing of private property rights legislation in 2004 and the real estate market boom since 2005. With these structural possibilities and with the number of believers dramatically increasing in cities, more and more unregistered churches began to move out of private housing units and to lease commercial apartments or office buildings, which led to more social visibility and in turn to an even larger scale of conversion. We observe a regular pattern for these church groups: an increase from roughly a dozen home-gathering believers to over a hundred attendees in just two–three years. The inclusion of newly converted urban elites, including professionals, technicians, and intellectuals, also marks a significant demographic change in the membership in the unregistered churches, a change with socio-political significance.

With increasing numbers of educated, upper middle class people in metropolitan areas converting to Protestant Christianity, it is more likely that personal faith will become integrated with social and political affairs, because this social and economic group is more actively engaged with the public sphere. Their active presence in public space and their more explicit expressions of faith are helping to diffuse Christian values into civic discourse and to provide an alternative to the official ideology. These elite-led Protestant groups have also reoriented the unregistered churches on an organizational level toward more openness and more active social engagement. This change marks an interesting shift in Christianity’s role among elites. In the late 1980s it was more of a mere “cultural phenomenon” that piqued interest among Chinese intellectuals. More recently, we observe, these urban religious groups are putting more emphasis on social engagement and are becoming more adept in applying their theology to societal concerns.

Another interesting factor in the growth of these groups is internet use. Internet communications have accelerated the rate of spread of religious basics and testimonies, even including church contacts and program information. Since the early 2000s, despite internet censorship, such internet-mediated outlets as personal blogs, online forum networks, and public figures’ conversion testimonials have powerfully facilitated the spread of the Protestant faith to the more general public. Now in urban China, if someone becomes interested in Christianity, it is easy for him or her to find a group of believers through online resources, which is a situation unimaginable even a decade ago when close personal referrals were required. Furthermore, the popularity of anti-censorship software has also reshaped young people’s perceptions of the official ideology delivered through state-controlled media. A huge gap now exists between the internet-savvy and those who mainly access information through state-controlled media. The more informed younger generation tends to use Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail accounts with the help of anti-censorship software to access outside information. Even the most popular Sina Weibo site (micro-blogs on Sina.com, China’s equivalent to Twitter) has become a convening venue for internet activism.⁴ Many of these cyber spaces have become sites of evangelism.

Comparatively speaking, the emerging urban Protestant groups have becomes agents of change in all walks of life amid an otherwise stagnant political scene. For example, a newly converted Protestant journalist Shen Ying wrote a news story titled “Little Does Anyone Expect That More People Are Becoming Christians” on Southern Weekend, the newspaper with the largest readership and popularity in China, with a picture of the later evicted Shouwang Church, one of the largest unregistered churches in Beijing. News stories like this have not been seen since 1949. Like Shen, many educated believing journalists, actors, lawyers, and businessmen are making their religious convictions known in all areas of public life. Their faith compels them to do things differently than what the post-communist state requires, and their independent actions are attracting increasing attention from the public.

Our fieldwork discovers that the general public now has a better awareness of Christianity compared to a decade ago. Before the 1980s, the communist state had deliberately erased traces of Christianity from people’s daily life, so an average Chinese may not have had the faintest idea of what a church is, or where to buy a Bible⁵; but today many Chinese hear about the presence of house churches, once an invisible population. Most urban residential communities host a few hymn-singing groups on Sundays. But unregistered Protestants are still perceived as having a kind of alien identity. Culturally speaking, to the modern Chinese, Christianity has always been an alien culture, a representation of Western-ness. So to convert to Christianity means turning away from one’s Chinese roots. Chinese Protestants are viewed as converts to a foreign religion. Politically, this sentiment is due to decades of atheist education and political indoctrination by the state.

During the recent rise of urban Protestantism, state restrictions that discourage the forming of independent associations, either religious or non-religious, have remained in place. The word “unregistered” reflects the fact that this part of Protestantism remains beyond the acceptable boundary drawn by the state. Although many of these groups do not gather in private houses to be properly named “house churches” anymore, they still remain illegitimate in legal status. However, these religious groups no longer experience the same level of persecution that their predecessors endured in earlier decades, including both harsh imprisonment and even some no-trial executions. We observe that reported conflicts between the unregistered congregations and government officials now mainly involve the use of worship space. Police harassment or evictions from worshippers’ leased facilities are very common experiences. A number of these ousted congregations then engaged in outdoor worship, a forbidden activity, as a form of disobedience. The events took place in various regions, from rural Shanxi to major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu, and they gained local and global publicity, with the unintended effect of promoting the visibility of Protestant groups among urbanites. Given the heritage of secrecy or at least discretion among house church people, such activity is a remarkable departure. So what does all this mean for religion and public life in China?

In this chapter we examine these actions by unregistered Protestants in urban China and ask how their engagements with the civic space are motivated by their faith. It is the result of a three-year ethnographic study (from 2010 to 2013) that was designed to focus on how religious belief relates to identity formation and action motivation in the context of China’s current dynamic transformation. Over the course of the study, we examined how new institutions come into being and become involved in collective action. We seek to understand the relationship among individual spirituality, collective action, and social change.

Our analysis is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews in a few Chinese cities. The hidden nature of these religious networks makes it difficult to get a random sample for quantitative analysis, so we adopted a qualitative approach by trying to get a diversified group of believers from all walks of life and age groups. We believe that in-depth interviews can better reveal these micro processes of social change, as our individual case studies will later show. Over 90 in-depth life-history interviews were conducted in two cities (one highly marketized coastal metropolitan area and one less-developed inland city) and among over 40 unregistered church groups. These interviews were taped and ranged from one to four hours. We used a semi-structured interview outline, including life history, conversion and spirituality, and church and civic involvement. In theorizing, we draw on prior research, institutional theories, and sociology of religion to develop an explanatory framework in understanding how religion motivates other-oriented social action and collective action, which would potentially accumulate to foster macro-level social change. What we have found is that the religious activities undertaken and values transmitted by Christian individuals, congregations, and faith-based associations have reshaped the local civil space in significant ways. Our analysis here uses data from interview transcripts translated from Chinese into English. To ensure anonymity, we use pseudonyms for all our interviewees.

The life and death of civil society in China

Before 1949, both governmental and social organizations coexisted in Chinese society along with a primitive civil society. Local governments in the Republic of China had a relaxed policy toward social organizations (commercial guilds, churches, and even gangs in cities, and the rural gentry class, etc.). For example, in the cities, urban residents enjoyed some political and religious freedom because the Republican government was not very hostile to religion. Individual memoirs show that many of their military and other officials were baptized Christians.⁶ Despite the Anti-Christianity Movement in 1920s, the nationalist government had less hostility toward Christianity than the succeeding regime. Evangelism and church-planting were allowed, and it was a time of missionary expansion. In the countryside, the rural gentry class historically acted as governing entities in coordinating local affairs, in providing for the public good, and governing either through local customs or moral norms within their own religious traditions. Thus there was an active civil society before the 1950s.

After 1949, the civil space was compressed to a minimum through a wave of violent communist revolution. The communists sought to destroy the “old China” and rebuilt a new social order through the nationalization of key resources, such as land, capital, and labor allocation. The hukou (household registration) system was installed to forbid residential mobility even during famine years. The new regime also eradicated free market enterprises such as commercial guilds and private businesses. In the countryside, the gentry class, a pillar force of the civil society there, was completely wiped out through violent executions. The communist rule directly penetrated into rural villages by staffing the most politically loyal cadres as watchdogs for any social activity outside of their direct control. From the 1950s to the 1970s, self-governance in urban and rural communities was not allowed. Most importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Remaking the Civic Space: The Rise of Unregistered Protestantism and Civic Engagement in Urban China
• 2  Belief, Ethnicity, and State: Christianity of Koreans in Northeastern China and Their Ethnic and National Identities
• 3  The Rise of a Human Rights Studies and Education Movement in China
• 4  The Importance of Gathering Together: Religious Land Use in the United States and China
• 5  Political Constitution and the Protection of Religious Freedom: A Jurisprudential Reading of Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution
• 6  Religion and Rights Development in China: A Cross-National Perspective
• Index