In this and the next issue of the church magazine I want to sketch in something of the church in China. It’s not easy since there are today both official and unofficial Christian movements.
We will start with the official church
Mao saw Christianity as a threat to communist absolutism, criminalised it and brought it under systematic elimination. The effect of this was to make surviving Chinese Christians deadly serious about their faith – people do not die or spend 20 years in a labour camp in defence of a hobby! Somehow a clandestine few, ringed by fear and introversion, bravely survived.
With Mao’s death came the hesitant opening up of China to capitalism. Recognising the national spiritual hunger, Deng Xiaoping restored a measure of multi-faith religious freedoms but under strict state control. Today’s state-approved Christian church carries the name The Three-Self Patriotic Movement’ or TSPM. Besides Patriotism the three-self’ principles laid down by the State are that it must be: A truly Chinese church – self-governing, self supporting and self-propagating.
Its charter, as explained by Luo Guanzhong, its chairman, begins “Since 1840 until the establishment of the New China, imperialism has all along used Christianity and missionaries to serve aggression, and they have never stopped. In the 1950s Chinese Christians for the first time stood up and unmasked the connection between the missionary movement in China and the imperialist aggression against China. [Note: no Chinese Christians could possibly have stood up’ in the 1950s save that s/he was recanting on their faith; but we must recognise that the Western inspired opium wars and, worse, the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, certainly involved aggression and, by association, greatly tarnished the work, image and safety of Christian missionaries and their churches.]
The TSPM church started out at every level stifled by direct party control, local branches of the TSPM reporting to local branches of the Party, regional branches to regional branches and so on. The atheistic party thus had intimate knowledge of, and veto over, all TSPM actions, controlling them even to the level of prayer and sermon content, severely restricting activity, forbidding much, licensing the rest and then being stingy with the licences. The few who adhered to the church had to watch their step and those who overstepped the mark were arrested, beaten and imprisoned.
Against this background it is not surprising that the Christian movement fractured to create many underground unregistered churches [of which more next month]. Even so, especially since president Jiang Zemin conceded in 2001 that the communist party had failed to eradicate Christianity, the TSPM has year by year become less of a state puppet more of a true church of Christ. Its leadership is liberal but at grass roots its character has become overwhelmingly evangelical. How big is it? The answer can only be a guess [some say 17 million practising protestants, 8 million catholics]. Undeniably China now has a substantial, thriving, public, richly varied church. What would a visitor make of the TSPM today? Three stories:
Story One: Notwithstanding the cold face of the state approval, millions of evangelicals worship within the TSPM. Half a million are baptised every year. New meeting points open every Sunday. It trains leaders. It prints Bibles. It has a growing ministry of social action reaching out into deprived, truly needy villages and city ghettos. Its theologians have begun to attend foreign seminaries. It is like established state Protestant churches the world over: only obviously flawed insomuch as its leaders remain privileged, drawing perks that come from cosy association and compliance with the state.
Story Two: The TSPM as a corrupt church – part of the plague of corruption that is sweeping acros China. A typical example: church officials collected six million yuan in Kumming for a new church building. The old church was demolished, its site sold and accommodation built for the pastors – but no church was built. Another frequent facet of corruption, contrived through the Central Religious Affairs Bureau, are the appointments of non-Christians to head up the TSPM’s well paid hierarchy.
Story Three: The TSPM as enemy of the unofficial churches. Regrettably there are informers who work to suppress and vilify the unofficial churches, lending their support to those who work at the violent, repressive end of state police activity and engaging help from like-minded bullying officials
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More positively Christianity is now part of mainstream Chinese life. Churches are open and publicly available for all to join. Christians have been named as model citizens for their hard work and care for destitute people. Through millions of acts of faithfulness TSPM Christians have removed the stigma that Christianity had throughout the missionary era, of being foreign and marginal with a culture alien to all Chinese people.
But there are still barriers. It remains illegal to hold Sunday Schools or youth fellowships. Sometimes local officials send in the Public Security Bureau to snap crayons, tip orange juice on the floor and frog- march Sunday School teachers to short term labour camps. But TSPM leaders still break these rules and it is becoming more common that officials quietly look the other way. In a very Chinese way Chinese Christians are subverting the system which had been set up to subvert the Church.
In the next issue we will look briefly at the Unofficial Chinese Churches – a bigger and far more complex picture to portray.
The Persecuted Church
Anthony Hutton