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“China would not be China without Christianity”
So says Professor Tao Feiya1, the internationally respected head of Shanghai University’s Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese life. However, in the light of recent negative developments and reports, not least those covered in Benedict Rogers’ powerful blog for UnHerd – ‘The world cannot ignore China’s worsening abuse of basic human rights‘ – further (and better) particulars are needed about both the plight and the potential of the Christian scene in today’s China.
Two megatrends that describe the Church in China today
As a regular visitor to Beijing and as Honorary President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), I take a serious interest in this huge subject. The problem in writing a column about Chinese Christianity is that it is… er… inscrutable. Trying to improve on this cliché, the religious scene in today’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) is multi-layered, opaque, nuanced and complex. Westerners often fail to ask the right questions. Volatility, secrecy and regional differences obscure a clear view. Yet despite the confusing clouds of conflicting evidence, two trends have been emerging.
- The first is that state harassment and human rights violations against Christians have increased under President Xi Jinping.
- The second is the paradox that the greater the pressures imposed by the state upon some Christian groups, the greater is the growth of Christian churches and the numbers of Christian believers.
This paradox deserves to be explored from at least five angles – historical, numerical, cultural, political and spiritual.
(1) Historical – Chinese Christians have been around for nine centuries. Christianity in China is not a new phenomenon:
- Franciscans arrived in Beijing in 1295…
- Jesuits and Dominicans have been fulfilling their teaching and preaching vocations to a growing flock of Catholics since the early 17th century…
- Protestant missions in China began in 1807 reaching their peak in the 1920s….
For all its Maoism, Marxism and atheism, the founding of the PRC in 1949 never came close to extinguishing Christianity. Instead the PRC struggled to regulate Christian activities by a system of church registrations operated by the State Administration for Religions Affairs (SARA).
Churches were closed by SARA during the decade-long Cultural Revolution (or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as it was initially called) – but they went “underground”. After that Revolution ended in the later part of the 1970s “official” churches were allowed but “unregistered” “family” or “house” churches proliferated above ground. Today they are reckoned by many observers to account for over 60% of China’s Christians2.
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