The situation regarding religious freedom in China is complex. While the
phenomenal growth experienced in China's state-sanctioned, registered (i.e.
legal) churches is encouraging and truly inspiring, the
regulations
imposed on these churches are for many, simply unacceptable and
prohibitive.
Rather than submit to what they regard as unacceptable
levels of regulation, the overwhelming majority of Chinese Christians risk
serious
persecution in order to worship
freely. Christians who meet and worship in unregistered (i.e. illegal) house
churches -- without Chinese Communist Party (CCP) permission, without CCP
supervision, defying CCP restrictions on movement and evangelism etc -- risk
fines and "administrative detentions" (no charge or trial required) of up to15
days in prison or up to three years in
Mao's laogai (a "gulag" of nearly
1000 state-owned, CCP-administered slave labour camps. Of course this is one
reason why "Made in China" is so cheap.)
Propaganda Alert!
The Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) is presently engaged in a strategic global propaganda
campaign. The CCP wants everyone to know that it is today a party of suits, not
fatigues; advancing prosperity, security and Chinese culture, not
revolution.
The CCP's aim is doubtless to bolster nationalistic zeal,
deligitimise both domestic and international criticism, and obscure the fact
that China remains a totalitarian state.
See:
The (propaganda) empire
strikes in China
By Kent Ewing, Asia Times on Line, 24 Aug
2010
Included in this propaganda campaign are efforts to present China as
a land of great religious liberty where Christianity flourishes, despite
regulations.
Chinese authorities recently gave the BBC "unprecedented
access" to China's state-sanctioned churches and religious institutions,
including Amity House where some 12 million Bibles are published each year (at
least 40 percent for export).
Of course the BBC subsequently released a
glowing report on the Chinese Communist Party's "commitment to supporting the
development of Christianity".
See:
China invests in
confident Christians
By Christopher Landau BBC News, China, 23 August
2010
"Three decades ago, China's
Cultural Revolution saw some of the most dramatic restrictions on the practice
of religion ever seen in the modern world.
"But today's communist rulers have radically altered
their views about religion and have granted substantial freedom to Christians
prepared to worship within state-sanctioned churches.
"Within these boundaries, Christianity is growing in
China as never before - and doing so supported by millions of dollars of
government funding. . . "
ALSO:
HEART & SOUL, on BBC radio.
Christianity in China
•
Episode 1
•
Episode 2
The BBC
report was of course picked up by others and quickly multiplied -- its message
echoing many times over across the globe.
As exciting as church growth in
state-sanctioned churches is, this is not the whole story, indeed, it may be
little more than a facade used to hide totalitarian repression.
In March
2010,
I
a highlighted an important lecture by Richard Madsen who comments on the
fact that while CCP methods of control have evolved, the CCP still demands the
church accept the "government master, religion follower" formula of Imperial
China's sacral hegemony.
This is indeed the sense we get from listening
to the BBC radio programs. The CCP is openly very keen to have the church exists
as a "servant" to the state, filling in gaps in social services, helping to keep
the masses satiated and pacified. However, the CCP is definitely not willing to
have the church to act as "prophet".
Meanwhile, along with its interest
in exploiting Christian service, the money-idolising CCP is also seriously
interested in seeing if it can exploit the link between Protestant Christianity
and economic prosperity. Maybe they are gambling that a carefully measured and
closely supervised dose of medicinal Christianity will make CCP-ruled China
rich. The most important element of this formula is doubtless the "carefully
measured" and "closely supervised" bit.
In August, the state-funded
Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences (CASS) released its Annual Report on China's
Religions.
See:
Academy
releases report on religion
Source: Global Times, 13 August
2010
According to the CASS report, China currently has 23.05 million
Protestant Christians, of which almost one-third converted since 2003.
Furthermore, 60 percent said they turned to Christianity after they or family
members suffered from illness, while more the half of Chinese Protestants have
not received secondary schooling.
Of course many would dispute those
statistics. Fan Yafeng (41) a researcher with the Zhongfu Shengshan Institute
and ex-CASS researcher flatly rejects CASS's findings as "ridiculous". A house
church member for 13 years, Fan asserts that there are at least 500,000
Protestants in Beijing alone -- five times the figure asserted by the CASS --
and that a lot of them are well-educated professionals and
intellectuals.
The aim of the CASS report is doubtless to elevate the
role of the CCP in the alleged recent explosion of Christianity -- thereby
establishing the church's debt to the regime -- while diminishing the Christians
themselves as needy and under-educated, i.e. weak and vulnerable, i.e. not the
sort of crowd with which any strong, intelligent and influential individual
might wish to identify.
Preserving the
CCP
Jamestown's China Brief has published a hugely significant
study (in two parts) by Arthur Waldron, in which Waldron analyses an eight-part
television series in which Chinese social scientists analyse the fall of the
Soviet regime. The series is called "Preparing for Danger in Times of Safety --
Historic Lessons Learned from the Demise of Soviet Communism".
Waldron
reports that that the series attributes the demise of the Soviet regime, not to
openness or restructuring, but to very specific failures of the Soviet Union
Communist Party (SUCP). Decade-long research has determined that the Soviet
regime failed "because," reports Waldron, "it gave up the dictatorship of the
proletariat, ceased to practice democratic centralism, criticized Stalin, was
beguiled by western concepts such as democracy, and also tripped up by Western
propaganda and other operations."
The series adulates Lenin and Stalin,
while demonising Khrushchev and Gorbachev. Waldron quotes Chinese social
scientists Zhou Xincheng and Guan Xueliang who maintain: "The disorders of the
1980s and 1990s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe all have a conspicuous
characteristic, which is that they were all set in motion by negation of and
attacks on 'the Stalin model'." They regard Khrushchev's "secret speech" of 14
February 1956 -- "On Personal Worship and its Consequences", in which he
denounced Stalin before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union -- as the beginning of the end. Waldron notes that even today, no
criticism of either Stalin or Mao is permitted in China, although Mao is the
subject of considerable public criticism regardless.
The Chinese analysts
firmly believe that the situation in the Soviet Union could have been salvaged
had the Soviets adopted the path subsequently followed by China: adhered to
Marxist-Leninist theory and paths while correctly solving its problems and
conflicts, correcting mistakes with courage. They conclude that the Soviet
regime fell because, in its attempts to make the system more "humane", it failed
to maintain a comprehensive dictatorship. "The consensus is," writes Waldron,
"that Gorbachev was beguiled by the siren song of 'humanitarian
socialism'."
"Such" writes Waldron," is the Chinese official -- it must
be stressed official -- diagnosis of the Soviet failure, and from the diagnosis
will flow the policy solution. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that party
discipline and unity are at the top of the list of issues being stressed
publicly in China today, and simple repression is regularly employed as a means
of dealing with tensions, while relatively less emphasis is placed on how to
cope with the vast challenges posed to any authoritarian government by a
dynamic, growing, and ever-differentiating society."
Waldron regards
China's "concealed history" as a ticking time bomb. "It is a good bet," he
reckons, "that someone in [the next] generation of leadership will make a
Chinese 'secret speech' and turn to the ideas of humanity in socialism, even
though they are today officially excoriated in analyses of the disintegration of
the Soviet Union."
Chinese
Analyses of Soviet Failure: The Party
Publication: China Brief Volume: 9
Issue: 23
November 19, 2009 By: Arthur Waldron for Jamestown
Chinese
Analyses of Soviet Failure: Humanitarian Socialism
Publication: China
Brief Volume: 10 Issue: 11
May 27, 2010, By: Arthur Waldron
No matter what happens, the CCP does not have the last
word on Christianity in China.
Antonio
Weiss writes in the Guardian:"With the state now actively financing
Christianity, China could well become the largest Christian country in the
world."
Weiss is only partly correct.
For
"Yes", China is set to emerge as the world's
largest Christian country. Indeed, China is destined to become the greatest
missionary-sending nation ever seen.
But
"No", it will not be on account of the Chinese
Communist Party.
For all the glory will be God's.
He alone is
sovereign.
And
HE is doing a great
work in China.
--
Posted By E.N. Kendal. Religious Liberty Monitoring
to
Religious
Liberty Monitoring at 9/29/2010 05:32:00 PM