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Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman
Beijing's leading think tanks believe that China will begin rivalling the United States as the world's pre-eminent economic and military power sometime between 2020-2030. Many argue with the inevitability of that conclusion, anticipating some intervening social, economic or military cataclysm, others only with the timetable. What is even less certain, but as important, is what kind of world power China will be.
That Christianity might be its guiding ideology -- allying China with the United States and Israel in opposing radical Islam -- is not a conclusion many observers of the Chinese scene are likely to have reached. But that is indeed the startling thesis of DAVID AIKMAN in JESUS IN BEIJING: HOW CHRISTIANITY IS TRANSFORMING CHINA AND CHANGING THE GLOBAL BALANCE OF POWER.
Aikman argues that China's remarkable economic transformation over the past quarter century has been accompanied by an unreported story that is potentially as revolutionary. Fleeing first the moral bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism and then the spiritual ills of a particularly brutal form of market capitalism, up to 80 million Chinese may now have embraced Christianity (from less than 4 million at the time of the Communist victory in 1949). At current growth rates, another 300 million may be added to the Christian fold over the next three decades, making China one of the largest Christian countries in the world. Moreover, many of these believers, some convinced of the essentiality of Christianity to the rise of the West, may already be holding influential positions in the political, cultural and military establishment, with profound implications for the nation's domestic and foreign affairs.
The operative word here is "may". Aikman, a former Beijing bureau chief for TIME, displays impressive reporting skills in attempting to discern the shape of the largely underground Christian elephant behind the Chinese curtain. And his comprehensive account of Chinese Christianity past and present, with an emphasis on the Communist era, provides convincing evidence that Christianity of all kinds -- but particularly the charismatic-evangelical brand of prophetic visions, faith healing, and tongue speaking -- is indeed on the rise.
But Aikman's own Protestant evangelical faith (which provided his unusual access to the underground "house churches") peeks clearly through the narrative, despite his obvious efforts to provide a balanced journalistic view. The book's Washington-based publisher, moreover, is a well-known promoter of conservative and Christian causes. This raises doubts that Jesus in Beijing is just the latest variation on a theme explored by Sinologist Jonathan Spence in his book The Chan's Great Continent -- the tendency of Western observers to project their own dreams onto Chinese reality.
Nowhere, for example, does the author make clear why the roots of 21st century Chinese Christianity should prove any more durable than those of previous attempts to plant the religion in China. An early chapter describes how the Nestorians, Franciscans, Jesuits and Protestants all enjoyed considerable success before seeing their efforts nearly extinguished by one of China's periodic inward turns and bouts of xenophobia. Their expectations of a Christianised China were at various times as sanguine as those of many evangelicals today. From Mongol to Manchu to Marx, Chinese culture has proven stubbornly resistant to enduring foreign influence (Buddhism being a notable exception).
Indeed, Aikman suggests that what may make this latest burst of conversions different is that it is fundamentally a "native Chinese phenomenon", despite the admittedly catalystic role played in recent years by underground missionaries from the United States and elsewhere. But can the centuries-old association of Christianity with imperialism (and opium) that Aikman also describes be so easily broken?
Globalisation, freedom of information and rising levels of income and education are also cited as fertile developments, but in other parts of the world, haven't these as often been associated with weakened religious belief? That China's estimated 70 million Protestants are overwhelmingly young, female (80%) and very informally organised and instructed also raises largely unaddressed questions about Christianity's continued growth.
As a work of reportage, however, Jesus in Beijing remains first-rate and up-to-date, rich in history, personalities and anecdote. Readers interested in more closely following the complex and evolving religious scene in China and making up their own minds about its future will find much to fascinate them.
Aikman excels in explaining the awkward origins and history of the official "state" churches (the Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement and its Catholic counterpart). These were established during the Korean War to isolate and eventually "consign Christianity to the museum," and have a tangled relationship with the much larger underground networks. The ongoing dilemma of a Communist Party struggling to balance the perceived social (and perhaps economic) benefits of Christianity with its threat to political control is also well handled.
And of course there are remarkably moving stories of persecution and suffering -- some individuals crushed, many lured into a painful moral compromise, others prepared to endure decades of imprisonment and torture for their faith. The familiar Hobson's choice of totalitarian life.
The "Back to Jerusalem" movement is one of the more startling revelations in the book. Inspired by prophetic visions beginning in the 1920s and continuing today, "an overwhelming majority" of Chinese Protestants now believe that God has entrusted them with the task of converting the populations of the Silk Road and Middle East and hurrying the Millennium. Sentiments such as "the Muslim religion is the biggest obstacle on the road back to Jerusalem" are one reason Aikman argues that the possibility of an evangelical Christian China bears watching.
As fascinating is the Taiping-like "Eastern Lightning" sect and its belief that a middle-aged woman in Henan province surnamed Deng is the latest incarnation of Jesus. A thorn in the side of Protestant leaders, the group has used a combination of kidnapping, bribery, sexual enticement and possibly murder to co-opt a large number of underground house churches. Nor have their antics been a great help in continuing efforts to regularise underground worship and convince the Chinese authorities that house churches are neither "mutinous cults" (xie jiao) nor another Falun Gong.
In the end Jesus in Beijing succeeds in raising the intriguing possibility of a Christian China, if not necessarily its certainty or even likelihood. This particular doubting Thomas remains sceptical -- but of course all worldly argument goes out the window if it turns out to be part of the divine plan.
Tim O'Connell
19/04/2004
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Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981. |
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