A crucial paradox lies at the heart of China's persecution dynamics. Over the
past 30 years, conditions have improved for Christians in China. But during the
past five years, they have deteriorated markedly.
More confusing still is that the long-term factors that have improved the
situation of believers are still in place and will continue their positive
influence. Yet negative short-term factors will intensify to produce more
persecution in the next five years.
In short, China's Christians will continue to become more free while at the
same time experiencing more persecution!
THE LONG TERM
The good news is in the long term. The retreat from ideology and a
determination to open Chinese society to world markets are the two primary
factors still firmly in place. The commitment to join the World Trade
Organization is ample proof of that. Gone is the ideological white heat of the
Cultural Revolution. Gone is the presumption that religion is automatically
harmful to society, and no longer are the thousands of Christian leaders and
pastors being internally exiled in a bleak gulag.
Take the case of the Reverend Ji Tai. Once a confidant of Bishop Ding and head
of research at Nanjing Theological Seminary, he dared to disagree with his
mentor's theology and wrote openly against it in 1999. Two years after he
published his first critical article, he was stripped of his post.
Yet he still receives a minimal salary from the official Protestant structure
in China, the Three Self Patriotic Movement, and thus far his wife continues
unhindered as a teacher at the seminary. If this were the fearful 1950s or the
sullen 1960s, Ji Tai would be shoveling sand in a work gang and his entire
family sharing his disgrace.
In the new China, hundreds may end up in jail for their faith, but most are
released after serving a number of days or weeks. The number of sentenced
Christians may amount to less than 100. A new official church is opened every
two days.
Of course, this improvement is no cause for complacency. Ideological arrogance
has merely been replaced with totalitarian pragmatism. It's easy to make
improvements on Chairman Mao's mayhem of the 1960s, when all churches were
closed.
Thirty years later, only 18 million Protestants and Catholics out of
60-million-plus feel able to worship in a state-controlled church -- the
majority are still determined to keep their distance from the intrusive
monitoring that entails belonging to the official churches.
It's far too many to have a hundred or more Christian leaders in jail for merely
exercising their religious rights. Despite a legal printing press, as many as
45 million Chinese Protestant Christians still await the pleasure of reading a
Bible they own. So the benefits of the long term can come as cruel comfort to
many believers today. As Keynes famously remarked, "In the long term, we
are all dead." Literally millions of China's Christians will not live to
enjoy anything approaching basic religious freedom.
But millions more probably will! Says 82-year-old house church leader Moses
Hsieh, "I am absolutely convinced that in the future we will be more free
-- Chinese society is being restructured for personal prosperity, and increased
freedom is the unintentional harvest." He also warns, "But the path
will not be smooth." Hseih is shrewd to say freedom is an unintentional
harvest of the modernization campaign followed since 1978.
The Chinese government has not set any goal to improve religious freedom. All
benefits in this area were merely residuals from economic policies, and still
the state has no such goal.
According to a high ranking government source, "The current leadership is
genuinely confused about what to do with religion in China. Christians,
Buddhists and others have all revived in number, and they are anxious to cool down
religious fervor."
A November conference of the Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB) is reportedly
planned to discuss how to deal with the growth of religion. Jiang Zemin and Zhu
Rongji are both slated to make speeches -- a sure sign of the importance the
top leaders now accord to the role of religion.
SHORT TERM
There are fears that the November RAB conference members will consider
extending the hard-line tactics used against Falun Gong to Christians in the
house churches. The campaign against the heterodox meditation sect has seen a
revival of Maoist methods, including widespread propaganda, brainwashing and
torture.
But whatever the decision -- if any -- there are four other short-term crises
converging to bring government and house churches into greater conflict,
probably resulting in greater persecution.
The first two have nothing to do with the churches, but are located in the
society at large. They are what we might call the "political legitimacy
crisis" and the "social instability crisis."
The legitimacy crisis affects the government itself. At some point it is going
to look absurd to everyone (if it does not already) that a government
consisting of a Communist Party whose ideology requires a planned economy is
directing an economic revolution towards a market, capitalist economy. The
cliches of ideology that are still in place will wear increasingly thin, and
the government must reinvent itself to stay in power.
The upshot is that the Communist Party as an institution will become increasingly
insecure, and that is dangerous to anyone who falls outside government control.
Paranoia will increase, and Protestant house church believers must be major
targets since they constitute the largest underground group in the country.
As a Shanghai pastor explains, "We are the objects of great suspicion by
the government simply because we keep our distance from them -- to stay clear
is to show dissent in this country, and so they come after you. The only way to
be left alone is to join them and pretend to go along with them. But we will
not play such games."
Feeding this insecurity will be a social instability crisis. When China joins
the World Trade Organization (WTO), the social ramifications will be enormous.
At least 50 million people are expected to be immediately unemployed from heavy
industry, and the 100 million peasants currently on the land will lose their
incomes, joining the 150 million migrant workers already on the move from
village to town.
In other words, China may have an internally displaced population of over 300
million in the next five years. The potential for social chaos is high.
Managing the fastest and largest industrialization in human history is bound to
stretch the resources of the Communist Party. We can expect the now annual
"strike hard" anti-corruption police campaigns to get ever more
sweeping. Even now the threat of urban terrorism from disaffected workers is
high, with bombings of factories on the rise.
Another distinct possibility is that the government will stoke up nationalism
to distract the population from the idea of blaming their leaders for domestic
woes, creating outside enemies as a steam valve to relieve the pressure within
the social system. But it is a high-risk strategy -- one that could lead to war
with another country if the Chinese government gets desperate enough.
Into these twin crises comes the reaction of the house church movements to
them. Many house church leaders anticipate a new "discipleship
crisis," which will come as a result of the social instability crisis.
Urban and rural house church movements are consciously targeting the migrant
population, and although evangelization efforts are just beginning, they are
finding the migrants a receptive group. Some leaders now talk of a "second
convert boom," where the numbers of Christians explode again like they did
in the 1980s.
Certainly there seems little doubt that refugee populations are more
susceptible to embracing new religious beliefs, especially as they are insecure
in a new environment, and newly able to differentiate themselves from the
beliefs of their old environment.
But this "boom" in convert numbers will cause a discipleship crisis,
which was defined by a leader of the Fancheng house church network in Henan
province as "when people become Christians at such rate that it overwhelms
the ability of the church to disciple them adequately in the faith."
The persecution implications are these. If the house church booms again, then
its profile rises higher and higher, threatening the government by the sheer
scale of its numbers.
Furthermore, in order to cope with the need to disciple the new converts, house
church movements will seek greater assistance from the Western churches,
especially in requesting more teachers to come and help. And since the
government criminalizes the offering of outside help to the house churches,
much of this assistance will have to be illegal.
Thus we can expect more training seminars to be broken up by police, more
deportations of foreign teachers and more arrests of local leaders.
Finally, there is always the abiding problem that if you cannot ground new
Christians quickly in the faith, you run the risk of them believing a heterodox
mish-mash of doctrines and leaving themselves open to joining a cult -- an
increasingly serious charge in today's China.
The fourth crisis is called the "social involvement crisis." As
Chinese society gets more unstable and as social needs become more glaring, we
will begin to see the house church millions develop a social conscienceness.
Already there are indications from the leaders of the six largest network house
church movements that they wish more theological input in the area of how to
get involved in meeting society's needs. Traditionally house churches have kept
clear of any social work, since the government has claimed a monopoly on such
action. But as the potential for social chaos grows, and a larger and larger
underclass emerges from the fifth-gear capitalism, house churches will feel
increasingly responsible to get involved.
In Lanzhou, there is a house church of 32 individuals who became concerned
about the number of AIDS sufferers in their city. At first they welcomed a
couple and cared for their needs, but about a year ago the leader of the group
said, "We have to tackle the roots of this problem -- there are hundreds
of AIDS sufferers here, and we cannot help them unless we build up some
expertise in caring, and assist at a policy level."
Three of the house church members were doctors, and they offered their services
free to a government agency. The official who received them was grateful but
cautious. He said, "If you are all Christians, then we need a clear
understanding of what you are allowed to do and what you are not." The
negotiations are still continuing a year later.
These Christians are not finding it easy to suddenly deal with government
agencies after years of keeping clear, nor are they sure how their faith allows
them to care at this macro level. For example, should they sanction the dispensing
of condoms?
A sharper edge to this scenario may come from the more intellectual house
churches in the big cities. Already one group in Beijing is talking of
organizing workers' unions. This would bring a swift clash with government
forces. Also as the WTO reforms take effect, new professional castes will
emerge, creating new identities. For example, some will see themselves as
"a Christian lawyer," or "a Christian economist," and
entirely new networks of influence could be created.
At the moment, however, it would be wrong to say the house churches are all
anxiously discussing ways to get more socially involved. But the trickle of
concern in this area may become a flood, especially if Chinese society at the
grassroots level starts to unravel.
It will lead to a clash with the government. Says a high-ranking leader with
the Little Flock house church movement in Fuchou, "There are two things
the government fears with the house churches: one, that they unite and become a
solid bloc of influence; two, that they become politically active and begin to
affect the social system."
These four crises can be viewed as four corners of a box pulling in towards the
center, shrinking the space and bringing an insecure government, an unraveling
social system, an expanded house church, and a socially awakened house church
into what may be a deadly proximity.
It does not have to happen this way. Government policy could relax. The house
churches may not experience this expected surge in convert numbers. But it does
constitute a more than likely scenario on present evidence.
ETERNAL TERM
It would be remiss to pretend that all persecution comes from the state and can
be eliminated. In the New Testament, the state is only one of five distinct
sources of persecution, the others being family, priests, mobs and merchants.
In other words, it was the culture itself that was the primary persecutor.
This is still true in China. A Chinese Christian is far more likely to
experience persecution from a family member or a bigoted folk religious priest
than from a state official. Indeed in a recent trip, I counted hearing of five
arrests and no less than 36 instances of Christian women being badly beaten by
non-Christian husbands on hearing of their conversion.
Chinese Christians are quick to point out the biblical basis of such an
experience. One makes much of Christ's teaching to His disciples in John
chapter 15, where He warns His followers, "If people persecuted me, they
will persecute you too." Others quote Paul's exhortation to Timothy that,
"Everyone who wants to live a godly life in union with Christ Jesus will
be persecuted."
At any rate, even if government policy becomes more tolerant, persecution will
remain as a phenomenon, since there is an "eternal term" in view, according
to many of China's Bible teachers, where the "world" is opposed to
Christ -- an antagonism that will never recede.
Thus persecution will recede, intensify, and always remain! Another puzzle
worthy of the world's most complicated culture!