Tony Lambert gives his assessment of what is going on in the world’s most populous nation
Since the death of Mao in 1976, the church in China has enjoyed remarkable growth and revival.
I was in Shanghai when Mao died and there was not one church open in the entire country which Chinese Christians could attend for worship.
Churches were allowed to re-open in 1979 and there are now over 60,000 registered congregations. Unregistered house-churches which probably number in the hundreds of thousands have also flourished. The government now admits that there are over 50 million Protestant Christians (there were only 1 million when the Communist Party seized power in 1949). However, the true figure is probably closer to 70-80 million and could even be as high as 100 million.
Over the last 40 years, Christians have generally enjoyed increasing freedom to worship and evangelise. Restrictions have been lifted or ignored and Sunday Schools and Christian bookshops which were rare in the 1980s are now commonplace. There has been sporadic persecution. China is vast and in some areas hard-line cadres have continued to implement repressive policies. But, in general, there has been slow improvement, with Christians quietly pushing the boundaries. For instance, many city house-churches openly rent office premises, with pastors and elders, for children’s work, outreach and effective social work to the many migrant workers from the countryside.
Much improvement – until now.
On a visit to east China this April, I discovered first-hand how much this freedom is increasingly in jeopardy. House-church leaders were much more cautious than previously. Although one invited me to preach for half-an-hour in Chinese, another politely declined to take us to his worship service. He explained that half a dozen foreigners were too many.
Another young leader explained that things began to tighten up since the major Party Congress last October, and particularly since the new Religious Law was implemented this February. The new law abolishes the old Religious Affairs Bureau and brings all religious affairs under the direct control of the United Front Work Department, a much more powerful and ideologically-driven organ of the central government in Beijing. It also calls for the registration of all house-churches and punishment including draconian fines for those who disobey.
Tighter control of sales of the Bible have also been implemented, banning state and secular bookshops from selling it. It is still widely available at most ‘Three Self’ (government registered) churches and I was encouraged by visits to the two large Three Self Christian bookshops in Shanghai and Hangzhou. At both, books by Martyn Lloyd Jones, John Bunyan, Billy Graham, Iain Murray and other evangelical authors were on sale – all in Chinese.
Like a bolt from the blue
However I was reminded at the huge Chongyi church in Hangzhou (it seats over 10,000 and may be the largest Chinese church building in the world), which has one of these bookshops and has a thriving evangelical ministry, that there is a darker side, often hidden to the casual visitor.
Pastor Joseph Gu was the lead pastor at Chongyi and a senior member of the Three Self provincial church leadership in Zhejiang. When I interviewed him a few years ago he spoke enthusiastically of his church’s spiritual roots in the China Inland Mission and how they were holding six major evangelistic outreaches every year with hundreds converted and baptised. However, soon after, like a bolt from the blue, thousands of churches across Zhejiang were desecrated and their crosses forcibly removed in a vicious anti-Christian campaign. Pastor Gu courageously spoke out against the persecution and for his pains was arrested and dismissed from the pastorate.
He was only released last December and warned not to preach, on pain of a ten-year prison sentence. Needless to say, this time it would not have been wise to seek him out.
Forced to turn away young people
House-churches in Zhejiang, we were told, are much more careful about doing Sunday School work and youth outreach, which is now effectively banned. We were also told that some Three Self churches are now being forced to actively turn away young people under 18 from their doors.
It was difficult to get reliable information about the situation in rural areas and China’s deep western and northern hinterland. However, I had the distinct impression that if things had worsened considerably in the rich, open eastern coastal cities such as Hangzhou and Shanghai, then Christians upcountry were probably facing even greater repression.
Church blown up
This has been borne out by reports from ChinaAid and China Source of severe crackdowns in provinces such as Henan. At the beginning of the year the megachurch in Linfen, Shanxi, in north China, was actually blown up by local authorities.
The new crackdown should be seen in the wider political context. President Xi Jinping has seized all the levers of power in an unprecedented way since the dark days of Mao 50 years ago. His campaigns to eradicate corruption and to alleviate rural poverty are undoubtedly popular, but alongside these have come crackdowns on human-rights activists and lawyers (many of them Christian), tighter control of the Internet and draconian surveillance.
Re-education camps
Conditions in Xinjiang in the far north west of China, home to 12 million Uygur Muslims, have been described by those who know the situation as ‘hell’ – hundreds of thousands of Uygurs have been sent for long periods to ‘re-education camps’ and often had their children forcibly removed. (Tibet is also ruled with an iron fist, as I saw firsthand a few years ago.) In Xinjiang the tiny Uygur church has been forced even more underground, and according to a reliable source who has worked there for many years, most overseas Christian workers have been forced to leave.
Xi is openly supporting Confucianism and traditional Chinese culture and values. This is combined with an increasingly strident nationalism. Against this backdrop, Christianity is viewed (wrongly) as alien and potentially subversive. Marxist researchers warned the government that Protestant Christianity could grow to 200 or even 300 million adherents in the next few decades. The government is determined that Christianity should be made ‘compatible with socialism’. This has been expressed in Party documents for several decades. In actual fact, the attempts made by the Party and by the small number of leaders in the state-registered church (such as Bishop K.H. Ting, who died a few years ago) who espoused a watered-down liberal theology and sought to impose it on the church at state bidding, have failed dismally. Ironically, the majority of Three Self churches have become broadly evangelical, admittedly under Party supervision. What is different about the recent new religious policy is that it may represent a strategic, long-term policy to control both Three Self churches and house-churches and interfere more blatantly in their affairs. It may even seek to change basic Christian teaching which is deemed to be incompatible with the state ideology.
The Chinese state now has the means to crack down repressively on any sector of society seen as a threat to one-Party rule. Surveillance techniques have become ever more sophisticated with CCTV installed in some Three Self churches to monitor activities; new face-recognition technology is already widely used in Xinjiang to track down terrorists and could easily be more widely applied against house-church Christians.
Much tighter control
The Internet is closely monitored and educated Christians who have in recent years cleverly bypassed firewalls to download Christian teaching from overseas may find it more difficult to do so. I was told that it was now dangerous for Westerners to come to China to do preaching and training, as many have done over the years. Christians based in Hong Kong, who have been engaged in carrying large quantities of Christian literature across the border for years without much of a problem, report much tighter control.
Although China today is very different socially and economically from the China of nearly 40 years ago, I felt in some way that the situation for Christians now and the general spiritual atmosphere had reverted in some ways to that of the early 1980s. Certainly in my many contacts with house-church Christians over the last 20 years or more, there has rarely been such caution, even fear.
‘Pray for us to stand firm’
We attended a crowded Three Self church for morning worship. The preaching was evangelical and Christ-centred. Afterwards, the leading pastor spoke surprisingly openly about the church, its ministry and the problems from some cults.
We asked him what his chief prayer request was for us to convey to British Christians. His answer was: ‘That Chinese Christians stand firm in their faith in the face of many pressures.’ They will certainly need much wisdom as the church appears to be heading for a stormy period.
