基督教在中國的崛起

Rise of Christ in China

AD 635: Tang dynasty emperor Taizong allowed Nestorian monk Aluoben to build a monastery and translate the Old and New Testaments into Chinese.

AD 900: Christianity was all but wiped out by persecution.

14th century: The Yuan dynasty court welcomed Christian missionaries as well as Italian merchants of the Catholic faith, including Marco Polo.

16th century: Jesuit missionaries came to China, setting up schools and hospitals. Among them was Matteo Ricci, the first Westerner invited into the Forbidden City.

19th century: Christianity’s spread accelerated as hundreds of Christian missionaries, including noted evangelists like Hudson Taylor, fanned out across almost 30 Chinese provinces.

1850-1864: A charismatic believer Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, started the Taiping Rebellion that almost toppled the Qing government.

1911: Sun Yat Sen, perhaps China’s most famous Christian, led the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the country’s last imperial dynasty.

1937-1945: During World War II, many Christian missionaries stayed behind to help with relief efforts. Among them was Minnie Vautrin, who turned a school into an asylum for thousands of women and children during the Rape of Nanking.

1945-1949: Chiang Kai-shek, who was publicly baptised in 1930, led the ruling Kuomintang until he fled to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war.

1949: Some Christian churches went underground amid oppression, refusing to comply with the new communist government’s requirement for all churches to register with the party’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

1966-1976: The crackdown on churches intensified during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. Overseas Christian organisations launched Operation Rainbow and Operation Pearl to smuggle more than a million Bibles, many of which had red covers and were the same size as The Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong, into China.

1983: The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign by the Communist Party led to imprisonment of hundreds of believers.

1987: Under international pressure, an officially sanctioned Amity Press was set up in Nanjing to print Bibles freely.

1996: Representatives of house churches in Henan and Anhui provinces issued a confession of faith. They pledged not to register as official Three-Self churches and also rejected many false teachings, including claims that Christ had already reincarnated as a ‘Ms Deng’.

June 2005: Nearly 600 house-church leaders were arrested in Jilin province, but most were released soon after.

February 2009: Mrs Hillary Clinton attended the Haidian Three-Self Church in Beijing during her first visit to China as US Secretary of State. There are estimated to be 70 million Christians across China, compared to about 70,000 in 1949.

(Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)

Jesus in the house

Despite pressure from the authorities, this house church has not registered and worships from temporary abodes

By Grace Ng

BEIJING: Even before the pale winter sunlight seeps through the tattered yellowed blinds of Sister Xi Le’s apartment, the hymn leader of the putaoyuan (vineyard) church is busy setting out 40 stools in the sparsely furnished living room for worshippers. Her flat is the latest temporary abode for the house church, which cannot rent public premises as it has steadfastly refused to register as a Three-Self Church despite pressure from the authorities since it was founded some 10 years ago. As Sister Xi Le sets up a Casio digital piano donated by a church member, two ruddy-faced men in their 20s burst into the room, barely bigger than the average bedroom in a Housing Board flat. They bear a big bag of groceries and 20 well-worn hymnals and Bibles printed in Hong Kong and hand-carried to Beijing. ‘Praise God, we have green bean soup after lunch today!’ says one of the two later, beaming as he bustles in the kitchen. The 26-year-old, surnamed Li, is still clad in his grey Adidas down jacket as he flits between a huge simmering pot and a chopping board where apples are being cut for the Sunday schoolchildren. As the grandfather clock strikes 9am, a young girl, whose English baptism name is Dove, stands on duty at the door to open it for the house church members and their guests. She hands them coverings for their snow-dusted shoes, before shutting the door tightly behind them. Everyone speaks in hushed tones. ‘The neighbours complain to the local police if we sing or pray too loudly,’ Dove says. A middle-aged church pastor stands up in front of the TV set in a corner of the room and reads from Psalm 46 in the Bible: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ ‘Pray for the brothers and sisters who risk their lives for the Good News,’ she tells the congregation of wizened folk in Mandarin-collar shirts who sit shoulder-to-shoulder with leather-clad youth. A murmur rises in the room as those gathered lift their hands in prayer. The heat in the room rises, too, as more worshippers arrive, squeezing into the living room. Space soon runs out and some move to the hard wooden floor in the adjoining bedroom and kitchen. At 9.30am, the church service proper starts on the dot. Sister Xi Le opens with a popular hymn China Morning 5am composed by Xiaomin, an uneducated Hunan village girl, whose compositions have become popular across the mainland and Taiwan over the past 15 years. The congregation sings – softly but with gusto – to the off-tune Casio played by a nervous amateur. Some worshippers share songbooks, while others squint at blurred PowerPoint slides of lyrics Sister Xi Le projects onto a small part of a wall. Then the pastor stands up to preach from the book of Joshua – an Israelite leader who brought God’s people into the ‘Promised Land’ – reminding the congregation to ‘be strong and courageous’ in the face of adversity. ‘I have been in prison three times, I have faced opposition even from good Christian brothers… But I know the true God triumphs,’ she says in a voice shaky with emotion and memories. The congregation responds to the sermon with nods and calls of ‘Amen’, interspersed with the shrill voices of four little children reciting Sunday school lessons – or sometimes fighting over toys. Then it is time to welcome newcomers. A young girl from Inner Mongolia, accompanied by her colleague to a house church for the first time, introduces herself. ‘Thanks for showing so much care and warmth to me,’ she says shyly. ‘Welcome, we have green bean soup for you!’ calls out Mr Li, as the congregation laughs and applauds. (Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)

04Sep10

Jesus in the office

Office churches draw young white-collar Chinese in major cities

By Grace Ng

BEIJING: The stock market has closed for the day but trader Peter Zhang lingers in the office as his colleagues head out noisily to the bars for happy hour and a raucous karaoke session. His dinner is KFC chicken, his companion the Bible. At 7pm, he leaves for another office building in the heart of the city. This is where his underground church meets. As China steamrolls ahead in its urbanisation, Christianity is finding congregations in the archetypal city space – the office. These so-called office churches have sprouted across major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and are fast becoming the choice worship venues of young white-collar Chinese in their 20s and 30s. They come dressed smartly in shirts, some carrying Starbucks coffee in one hand and the latest smartphone in the other. They use electronic Bibles. The sermon that evening, as befitting the urban crowd, focuses on the temptations of modernity and the excesses of consumerism. ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. May we not be dragged into the pursuit of riches, big houses and power like the rest of modern Chinese society,’ says Pastor Moses, who declines to disclose his real name in the interests of protecting the anonymity of the church. Unlike the songs in the official churches or even the home churches, the hymns in the office outfits are more cosmopolitan, such as tunes from the popular American-Chinese worship group Streams Of Praise, delivered on an electric guitar. The concerns of the church members are office-related too. A woman who is dressed in a Burberry power suit shares her experience navigating her life as an employee of a state-owned enterprise and as a member of an unsanctioned office church. She says she is under pressure to join the officially approved church after her human resources manager found out recently that she is a Christian. ‘I pray Su Ge will protect me from being demoted,’ she adds, referring to a popular nickname young Chinese Christians use for ‘Big Brother Jesus’. The office church is also praying for protection – from its landlord. While home churches face direct pressure from the authorities, the office congregations are squeezed by their landlords who are usually pressed by the police to stop renting their premises to the religious groups. As Pastor Moses says, the present landlord is wary about renewing the lease after he was questioned by the local police. On hearing this, Mr Zhang, suddenly filled with confidence, turns to his prayer-mates: ‘So what? Even so, we will still grow – we started as five believers and we are now 50. We have answers that modern Chinese society is craving.’ (Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)

04Sep10

Jesus in the rice fields

Many rural Chinese turn to Christianity seeking salvation from poor health

By Sim Chi Yin

NANYANG AND JIAOZUO (HENAN PROVINCE): A rousing chorus pierces the pitch darkness of night: ‘God is here, God is here (Shang di zai zhe li, shang di zai zhe li).’ In the bowels of a shanty town, a roomful of middle-aged men and women sing at the top of their voices, holding crudely printed hymn books and sitting on four-legged stools or child-size rubber mats laid out before a bright green pulpit bearing a red cross. Meeting in China’s heartland, these are the leaders of underground ‘house’ churches dotted across the vast countryside. They come from varied walks of life. Some are farmers, others truck drivers and carpenters, while some run their own small businesses. Their gathering in a scruffy town in south-west Henan once every three months is testament to the following Christianity has in rural China. In recent years, it is the cities that have seen a rapid sprouting of house churches, pushing Christianity’s spread in China. But it was in the countryside that the seeds first took root, flourishing in the 30 years since China loosened control over its economy and society. Most of the rural Christians are older women – worshipping either in officially approved churches or in house churches, where groups of a handful to hundreds meet in private homes for Bible study and prayer. While the spiritual void which drives many to God is common in both urban and rural parts of China, in the countryside there is an additional – somewhat more practical – dimension to putting faith in what some still see as a Western import: illness and inadequate health care. A common refrain out in the villages goes like this: ‘Kan bing nan, kan bing gui (It’s difficult to see a doctor, it’s expensive to see a doctor).’ Where the government has failed, God will provide. Or so believers hope. With the dismantling of Maoist-era rural collectives by the late 1970s, villagers lost the barefoot doctors and rural clinics which were their sole source of affordable health care. That left many rural Chinese turning to prayer for salvation from disease. Today, the government has gone a ways in improving access to doctors and medicine for most. Still, the hope for a miracle cure is key in pushing many towards Christianity. ‘Ninety-five per cent of China’s village believers come to Jesus because of an illness,’ says Mr Liu Maoling, pastor of a village house church in central Anhui province. ‘It’s quite normal,’ he adds. ‘It doesn’t matter that they come to Jesus out of practical need. Once they believe, they believe.’ That health-driven motivation is borne out by story after story one hears among the grassroots in Henan, the province which is thought to have the largest number of house churches. ‘When people are sick, they come to pray to Jesus. But sometimes when they recover, they stop praying,’ corn farmer Sun Baolai, 61, of Xi Changwei village in northern Henan, says, sighing. He was among the first to convert to Christianity in his village, where most are Buddhists. Mr Sun was baptised in secret 34 years ago. He too was initially drawn to the faith because of illness. A newlywed then, he was at his wits’ end trying to find help for his wife who suffered from hallucinations and complained of seeing ‘ghosts’. Eventually, he turned to an 80-year-old Christian woman in a nearby village. ‘At the time, we didn’t know the term Christianity (Ji du jiao), only Jesus (Ye su). She told me we should believe in Ye su and taught me how to pray. ‘Then after I started believing in Jesus, my wife’s ‘ghosts’ and all the strange (luan qi ba zao) things were gone. So both of us became Christians,’ he explains. Slowly, he spread the faith among his neighbours and friends. About 70 in his village of 1,000 people are now Christians – a small but visible minority. Pooling cash among local believers, Mr Sun and others built a church last year where an elderly woman had willed her home to them upon her death. With his rugged hands, Mr Sun hammered together the 30 rough-hewn wooden pews which now fill the classroom-size church. A keyboard with lopsided legs and posters marked with a cross and ai (the Chinese character for love) hang on the walls. After years of gathering in tiny living rooms, local Christians now meet here on Sunday mornings and weekday nights. Even as Mr Sun bemoans the fact that some local believers are fickle, there are those who stayed true. Madam Dong Xiumei, 49, who converted 20 years ago, is one of them. Although she did not get the miracle she prayed for, she says her faith has kept her going. The mother of four girls peppers her sentences with ‘Thanks be to God (Gan xie zhu)’ as she recounts how she first turned to Christianity in the hopes that her mentally disabled second daughter, now 20, would get better. She says: ‘When I first started to believe in Jesus, some of the other villagers laughed at me, saying that I pray but my daughter was still mentally disabled. ‘But now, they envy me because I’ve struggled with taking care of her for life but I’m still so happy and peaceful.’ That spiritual steeling and the social support from other Christians are attractive to many villagers. With so many able-bodied Chinese emptying out of their villages to work in more prosperous cities and towns, it is often hard on those left behind – elderly parents and young children. When local Christians chip in to help harvest crops or take care of the sick, their efforts are noticed. That moves others, including staunch non-Christians like village doctor Meng Qingfu, 59, who says with a smile that he ‘believes only in the Chinese Communist Party’. He tells The Straits Times: ‘In the winter, in the heaviest snow, everyone stays indoors. Only the Christians would go out with brooms and shovels, sweep the frost and snow off the main roads. They even take special care to clear that road leading to the school, so the children won’t miss classes.’ Scholars estimate that between 65 per cent and 80 per cent of China’s 70 million to 100 million Christians attend house churches or jiating jiaohui (literally translated as family church). These churches are believed to account for most of China’s growing number of Christians. Once banned, they exist in a ‘twilight zone’, lacking legal sanction but are left alone by the authorities most of the time. But every now and then, crackdowns do occur. Pastor Zhang Mingxuan, head of the unregistered Chinese House Church Alliance, says he was booted out of Beijing around the time of the 2008 Olympics amid heightened political sensitivity. Among the house church leaders he regularly gathers in Nanyang city are several who say they have been arrested several times over. Despite his many brushes with the law, Pastor Zhang observes that there has been a greater official tolerance towards house churches. Its leaders say up until recent years, services – already held in secret – were often shut down and pastors arrested. These days, the government ‘closes one eye’ but will periodically act to underscore its authority. They are also agreed that house churches will continue to grow. Ironically, when the head of a house church is arrested, the congregation splits into more groups, forming five, six or even more new ones. Above all, as China goes through the pains of rapid growth, the insecurity, inequities and upheavals will likely push more people in search of spiritual meaning. For some, that search will lead them to the growing band of Christians. Says Pastor Cheng Hongzhang, who oversees six house churches in Luoyang, Henan: ‘Many people these days feel an emptiness in their lives, so we hand out leaflets and explain to them that if they have Jesus in their lives they will find spiritual support.’ (Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)

04Sep10

The sickle & the cross

In rapidly changing China, Christianity finds itself filling a void – for spiritual meaning or simple health care – for millions of Chinese. But its rapid growth also means an uneasy coming to terms with the ruling communist party

By Peh Shing Huei

BEIJING: On the day the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played God, a group of Chinese Christians played politics. Fed up with a persistent drought, the government fired 186 doses of silver iodide into the clouds on Nov 1 last year, commanding a snowstorm which turned Beijing white in autumn. The snowflakes fell on more than 500 members of Shouwang Church shivering by Haidian Park. It was the first outdoor Sunday congregation for the underground church and it came after their landlord succumbed to official pressure, forcing them out of their two-year-old home in an office building. ‘It got so cold my feet went numb. But it was more important to me that we were defending the church’s right to worship freely,’ recalls a member surnamed He, who attended the service. Shouwang’s public defiance was a rare challenge to the CCP. While all religions are enjoying a revival in China after being suppressed as ‘spiritual pollution’ during Mao Zedong’s reign, Christianity seems most likely to cross swords with the communist sickle for influence and adherents. The religion is not new to China, arriving from Persia as early as the seventh century. But since China embarked on its economic reforms in 1978, centuries of slow growth have given way to a staggering jump. There are now 70 million Christians in China, according to the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, compared to just 2.5 million 30 years ago. This brings the number of parishioners to just eight million shy of the CCP’s 78 million membership. The rate of growth in the number of Christians during this period has been 2,700 per cent, compared to 110 per cent by the party. More troubling for the party, an estimated 75 per cent of these new believers – Protestant and Catholic – are not to be found in state-blessed chapels but ‘house churches’, so named because they started in the homes of members. As illegal institutions, these churches can be closed and their leaders detained. However, despite periodic official sweeps, Pastor Zhang Mingxuan, head of the unregistered Chinese House Church Alliance, declares: ‘The more they repress us, the more Christians there will be.’ Contributing to the growing numbers is a surge in urban believers in the past decade, which has shifted the centre of Christianity from the villages of Henan and Anhui to the apartments of Beijing and Shanghai. This burgeoning white-collar crowd is more aware of its rights and assertive in its demands to worship freely, publicly and legally. The growing numbers worry the atheist regime, long wary of the potent mix of politics and religion. The last imperial Qing dynasty was brought to its knees by the Taiping and Boxer rebellions in the 19th century, the former led by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus and the latter by pugilists calling on ‘spirit soldiers’ from heaven. When the CCP first came to power in 1949, it quickly set up the Three-Self Patriotic Movement – ‘self-governance, self-support and self-propagation’ – to ensure all Christian churches fell in line and conformed to the new government’s political objectives. Those who baulked ended up in jail, sometimes for decades. Although less extensive and harsh now, crackdowns on those who prefer to worship outside the legal margins continue to this day. Pastor Zhang, who says he has been arrested 37 times over the years, observes: ‘The government thinks that if we have lots of people with us, we will challenge their political power. And they worry that we have links to churches overseas or bring in foreign funds or political movements. ‘Some fear us like they used to fear the Falungong. But we’re not the same. We never challenge the government. But they still fear us, because we’re all over at the grassroots.’ The Falungong movement, whose members practise a mix of Buddhist and Taoist beliefs and breathing exercises, staged a protest outside Zhongnanhai, the CCP leaders’ compound, in 1999. It was the last faith-based group to launch an open and public challenge to the CCP – until Shouwang Church. While the authorities came down hard on Falungong, their approach to Christians has been more uneven and nuanced. The CCP sees Christianity as tame compared to Falungong, says University of California, Los Angeles’ Professor James Tong, who in June presented a statement on China’s religious affairs to the US Congressional Executive Commission on China. Prof Tong notes that the Supreme Procurator delivers an annual report to the National People’s Congress each year, in which he lists the major law enforcement issues in China. ‘Falungong, Xinjiang Muslims and Tibetans have made that list in some years, along with murder, kidnapping, organised crime and drug trafficking. No Christian group has made that list in the reform period,’ he says. But rough tactics have not entirely disappeared. Last year, hundreds of policemen raided the mega Golden Lamp Church in Linfen, north-western Shanxi province. Bibles were seized, the church compound was smashed and pastors were jailed. But more subtle methods were used in the Shouwang case. No one was arrested or beaten but parishioners working in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were threatened. A church member in an SOE was told to choose between her job and Shouwang. She resigned. Yet a month later she received a call from her boss offering her her old job back. She took it. Such inconsistency in the CCP’s response is reflective of a regime still grappling with how best to assert control over this burgeoning faith. It no longer enjoys the totalitarian power it had in Mao’s time, but remains determined to manage any mass movement. Instead, in recent years the CCP has been trying to promote Confucianism as a belief system, aware that post-Mao China has been searching for a new faith to help it come to grips with a rapidly changing society. ‘After the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the CCP lost its devotees,’ observes Mr Fan Yafeng, who was dismissed from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for religious activism. However, the Confucianism project has had limited success so far, partly because it is not so much a religion as a system of moral principles. Some analysts point to the lukewarm box office support for the state-backed Confucius movie, shown earlier this year, as an indication that such top-down efforts find little traction among young people. Religious scholar Liu Peng from the Pushi Institute of Social Science observes that the ability to choose one’s religion is a key factor in the popularity of the house churches. ‘They elect their own pastors, so the members feel a firmer commitment to the community,’ he told state-run daily Global Times in May. The house churches also prefer liturgical independence and a more passionate, evangelical outlook, attributes which bring them into conflict with the authorities. That house churches, especially those in the cities, have taken an independent bent, is unsurprising. A sizeable number of their founders, such as those in Shouwang, were university students during the Tiananmen protests of 1989. ’1989 was a key turning point. It turned mainstream intellectuals from the CCP. Many turned to Christianity for answers,’ says Mr Fan. The answers have taken on an evangelical tone. While some Christians still go for the guerilla tactics of yore, retreating into homes and ceding public space to the government, others like Shouwang have elected to step out and make themselves heard. The CCP’s response to Shouwang is instructive on how the party may go about managing the challenge. Initially, though it had bought an office, the house church was not allowed to move in as the Beijing government viewed ownership of properties as yet another step forward for the Christians. However, instead of throwing its leaders into jail after the Nov 1 open-air protest, and an even larger outdoor gathering a week later, the authorities offered Shouwang’s leaders a deal: Go back indoors and we will leave you alone. Alas, the church could not find a suitable venue on short notice, prompting the government to play the unlikely role of housing agent. Eventually it found a theatre operated by the People’s Liberation Army for Shouwang’s Sunday service. ‘It is a hopeful sign of how the government will deal with unregistered churches,’ says analyst Carsten Vala, who is writing a book on the politics of Protestantism in China. As long as the house churches do not threaten the CCP’s grip on power, there are reasons to be optimistic that tensions on the road ahead will be adroitly defused. But if that line is crossed, the sharp end of the sickle is likely to come down swiftly. This, after all, is a party that believes there is no God and not one to take kindly to political challenges to its secular authority. (Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)