The War for China’s Soul

Extracts from an article published in Time magazine, August 28, 2006

Several weeks after the attack the witness is still trembling. He was a volunteer working on a half-completed church in a suburb of Hangzhou. Financed by local Christians the church was to serve a community of 5,000 parishioners. Hundreds of them gathered at the site on the afternoon of July 29. Others, many of them elderly parishioners, sat on plastic chairs surrounding the church singing hymns.

Witnesses told Time that at about 2:30 pm thousands of uniformed police and plainclothes security officers appeared at the construction site. The authorities then demolished the church. Witnesses say police bludgeoned people indiscriminately with nightsticks. “They were picking up women—some of them old ladies—by their hair and swinging them around like dolls, then letting them crash to the ground,” says a man who watched the clash from across the street. A statement faxed to Time by the information office of the Xiaoshan district government describes the scene differently, claiming that about 100 Christians “attacked and injured government officials” and that although the police detained a few protesters, none were injured. But the volunteer interviewed by Time produced receipts from the local hospital attesting to his treatment for broken ribs which he says many others suffered as well. “They treated us like dead dogs. Some of them scoffed as we lay there saying, ‘Where is your God now? If you want to go to heaven, we’ll help you get there right now.’”

But the Hangzhou episode is also unmistakable evidence that Christianity is transforming Chinese society. After four failed attempts over a millennium and a half by foreign missionaries to gain a foothold, Christianity is finally taking root and evolving into a truly Chinese religion. Estimates vary but some experts say Christians make up five percent of China’s population or 65 million believers. And thousands more are converting every day, the vast majority through unofficial house churches like the one that sparked the clash in Hangzhou.

The flowering of Chinese Christianity reflects a wider religious awakening. The growth of spirituality poses a challenge to China’s ruling class, which plays little more than lip-service to communist ideology but still strives to control its restive populace. Faced with a social phenomenon that would use up huge amounts of time, manpower and international goodwill to curb, Beijing’s cadres have decided to tolerate the new churches so long as they keep a low profile. The more outspoken and organized such groups become, the greater the threat they pose to the authority of the Communist Party. For the moment that influence is confined to local issues such as church building and education. But observers say the challenge could grow as churches continue to spread out from the countryside and into the cities where they draw from the ranks of the rapidly growing middle class. “If you look at China’s history, all the rebellions that led to change of dynasties had some religious connotations,” says an expert in the history of Christianity in China who teaches at Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics. “The authorities don’t like that.”

There may not be much they can do about it. Across the country Christians are worshipping with a fervor once unimaginable in a communist society. Take the service held at 10 o’clock on a recent Sunday morning in China’s booming southern city of Shenzhen. Some 40 people are crowded into the living room of a small two-bedroom apartment. A plump, middle-aged preacher in a tight grey suit stands at a small lectern. Behind him is a large wooden cross draped with a white cotton cloth. Several pictures of Jesus hang on the walls.

Because of fears that the Public Security Bureau might disrupt the proceedings, which are illegal, services in house churches are often low-key. Not here. The congregation starts by belting out a series of hymns to an accompanying soundtrack booming out of several loudspeakers. The preacher launches into a sermon extolling the growth of Christianity in China.

So far the government hasn’t done much to halt the spread of such hothouses of faith. But that may be changing as evidenced by the assault on the Hangzhou church. The mandarins in Beijing have already reserved special venom for groups they label xiejiao, or evil cults. The most famous is the brutally suppressed Falun Gong movement, but the authorities may be tempted to extend that label to the Christian sects that are growing the fastest—those practicing fervent forms of worship that stress miracles and personal inspiration through prayer. A number of cultlike, pseudo-Christian offshoots have sprung up in the countryside in recent years. Often spawned by the personal ambition of their leaders these highly secretive groups usually espouse millenarian views that make the authorities profoundly nervous. Members of a sect called the Three Grades of Servants were convicted earlier this year in Heilongjiang province on 20 murder charges, involving attacks on its main rival, Eastern Lightning, a sect that relies on kidnapping and beating to make converts.

Although Christians tend not to see themselves as revolutionaries, house churches have become one of China’s few bulwarks against government power. In Wenzhou, known among Chinese Christians as “China’s Jerusalem,” 15-20 percent of the population is Christian (an optimistic estimate), a fact that gives the church leaders much greater authority in confronting local Party officials. In 2002 a campaign of protests and appeals to Beijing led to a reversal of a city government decision to ban Sunday school teaching.

Chinese authorities insist they are not hostile to religion as long as it is practiced according to their rules. In the long run, though, government attempts to circumscribe how people practice their faith seem unlikely to succeed—and could well spark more unrest. It’s telling that even in the face of such crackdowns some Chinese Christians say they are confident they will eventually win the freedom to practice their faith as they choose. Brother Chow (not his real name) is every inch the model of the modern Chinese Christian, a preacher who doubles as a businessman. Despite his pressed jeans, polo shirt and fancy mobile phone, he professes to believe in a deep, ancient faith, one that he says has carried many a Christian through persecution. “Why don’t I think it will be a problem? Because as time goes on, the government will get to know the Christian spirit and realize that God exists.” He smiles with the secret knowledge of a true believer. “And then they will become Christians too.”

EDITORIAL

It is interesting that major international magazines such as Time and The Economist are now publishing long articles on the continuing explosive growth of Christianity in China. This year is the 30th anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao. He died on September 9, 1976. Only thirty years ago no churches were open anywhere in China (apart from a couple strictly limited to foreign residents). Academics and the media laughed to scorn the idea that the Christian church could survive, let alone flourish in China. Only a very few overseas Christians such as Leslie Lyall and David Adeney had the faith to believe the Chinese church would survive the torrent of persecution of the Mao years, meeting quietly in ordinary believers’ homes. In spirit, they linked in faith through prayer with the remnant inside China who cried out: “O Lord, how long?” Prayer groups and research were started back in the days when most people (even Christians) thought the gospel was a lost cause in China.

The Scriptures clearly teach us that God’s ways are not our ways.
“For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength…. But God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before Him.” (I Cor. 1:25-29 )

The spiritual lessons from China are valuable encouragement to all Christians. For a decade or more Mao’s “Little Red Book” sold in hundreds of millions, even, it was claimed, outselling the Bible. But today those copies of Mao’s Thoughts which have not been pulped lie on bric-a-brac stalls, discarded and unread. In contrast, the Word of God is treasured, studied and obeyed across China.

Although Mao’s portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square—a reminder that one-Party dictatorship is still the major feature of the political landscape—in other fields China has moved on, and light-years from his narrow ideology. In Shanghai a newly published high-school history text book barely mentions him. Ironically, his most popular legacy is as a good luck charm for taxi drivers and peasants who have deified him.

History has shown that the prayers of God’s people formed an invincible chain stretching from earth to heaven which could not be broken. Ultimately there was more power in the prayers and tears of the despised remnant than in the massed millions of Red Guards screaming their idolatrous adulation of the “Great Helmsman.”

That is a lesson we need to take to heart in the West as the Christian faith is increasingly marginalized by the combined forces of materialism, secularism and political correctness.

Copyright 2006 OMF International