American public discourse on the Church in China

China Review

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 1-16

  Bays, Daniel H ^a,b  

^a Department of History ^*

^b CALVIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73049111524     PISSN: 16802012     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. The year 2007 was the Bicentennial of the arrival of Robert Morrison in Canton as the first Protestant missionary to mainland China, sent by the London Missionary Society. Dutch missionaries had been in Taiwan in the 17th century. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at two conferences: "A Bridge between Cultures: Commemorating the two-hundredth Anniversary of Robert Morrison's Arrival in China", 15-16 March 2007, Washington, DC; and "Meeting of East-West Culture: Celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Rev. Robert Morrison's Arrival in China and the Fifth Conference on the History of Christianity in Modern China", 25-28 April 2007, Hong Kong. I also wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Josh Dekker, who worked with me on this project as a MacGregor Fellow in the summer of 2006 at Calvin College. The views expressed in this essay are entirely my own, however, and represent accumulated impressions developed over several years of trying to make sense of the church in China.
2. Some of these popular impressions of China were cultivated by American films and magazines, especially publications of Henry Luce, Time and Life. Of many sources
3. See T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China 1931-1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996)
4. The essay by John Hersey, "Henry Luce and the Gordian Knot", in China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s, ed. Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p7-22.
5. Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This work is full of insights into the dynamics of Sino-American relations.
6. Missionaries were deported, and a few jailed as spies, not mainly because of anti-religious motivation, actually, but because in the late fall of 1950 China and America had become bitter antagonists in the Korean War.
7. Sources decrying the end of the missionary age are too numerous to mention. One of the few on the other side was David Macdonald Paton, Christian Missions and the Judgment of God, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). The first edition came out in 1953.
8. These vary widely in nature, interpretive stance, and dependability. A few examples from various points on the spectrum would range from the publications of the conservative Chinese Church Research Centre founded by the late Jonathan Chao, to the very informative but now-defunct bimonthly Bridge magazine from Hong Kong, edited by Deng Zhaoming, to the conservative but still fairly objective Overseas Missionary Fellowship and its publications, especially Tony Lambert's China Insight. Others include China Notes, published by the National Council of Churches in the USA, which ceased in 1992, and China Study Journal (until 1986 Religion in the People's Republic of China: Documentation) of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, UK.
9. See Daniel H. Bays, "Protestant Christianity Today", in Religion in China Today, ed. Daniel L. Overmyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 182-98.
10. Robert Evans, "China Policy and Church Partnership", The Christian Century, 24 September 1997, 839-41.
11. Tony Carnes, "House Church Leaders Flee with American Help", 1 September 1997, 70. Thanks to Sarah Johnson of Duke Divinity School for these citations.
12. For example, Britt Towery, Churches of China: Taking Root Downward, Bearing Fruit Upward, 3rd ed. (Waco, Texas: Baylor University, 1990).
13. I have not heard of any organization's publicity promoting Bible transport without a financial contribution.
14. For example, Luo Guanzong, ed., Qianshi buwang houshi zhi shi (Remembering the Past, a Lesson for the Future) (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2003), a hefty volume of over 480 pages revisiting much of the same anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1950s. Also English summary in Amity News Service 13, nos. 1-2:1-3.
15. Organizations whose websites in my opinion seem to have these tendencies include Voice of the Martyrs (www.persecution. com), Open Doors (www.opendoorsusa.org), and the Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China (www.china21.org).
16. The "back to Jerusalem" movement was first widely promoted in a book co-authored by three of these Chinese leaders and Paul Hattaway, Back to Jerusalem... (Waynesboro, GA: Gabriel, 2003), and then represented by www.backtojerusalem.org and other sites. In my personal opinion this project appears to be a chimera, if not an outright scam.
17. Several could be mentioned. Two seem to me to fit this pattern, the Bible League (www.bibleleague.org) and the bible-distribution affiliate of Voice of the Martyrs, Bibles Unbound (www.biblesunbound.com).
18. From a November 2006 interview with Peter Dean, director of the Amity Press. The press has been assisted in the past two decades by the major Bible societies and the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, organizations that on the whole are supportive of the TSPM and CCC.
19. Some of the more objective evangelical commentators on the Chinese scene, such as Tony Lambert (China Insight, published by Overseas Missionary Fellowship), acknowledge these links, but do not emphasize them. The larger among these "evil cults" include Eastern Lightning (Dongfang shandian), The Established King (Beili wang), and Three Grades of Servant (Sanban puren), among many.
20. For example, the following publications of Human Rights Watch/Asia: "Continuing Religious Repression in China" (June 1993) ;
21. "Continuing Persecution of a Protestant Sect" (June 1994) ;
22. "Religious Persecution Persists" (December 1995).
23. Amnesty International, "China: Religious Freedom Rhetoric Fails to Translate into Reality" (21 December 2004).
24. This issue was subtitled "China's Spiritual Revival." HRIC, Ren yu renquan, no. 4 (2003).
25. As early as 1995 this HRIC journal had a substantial article by Mickey Spiegel, of Human Rights Watch/Asia, "Religion in China: Regulating the Opium of the People", ibid., 14-17.
26. In North America, Hong Kong, and China itself, Ian Buruma, doing the research for his 2001 book Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (New York: Random House, 2001), found that several of the dissidents he interviewed had become evangelical Christians.
27. James Mann, About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Vintage, 1998).
28. The most well-staffed of these (other than-probably-the CIA) seems to be the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), made up of 18 Legislative Branch Commissioners (9 Congressmen, 9 Senators), 5 Executive Branch Commissioners from various cabinet departments, and a very capable group of China scholars and experienced China hands constituting the staff. In the 109 pages of the 2004 "Annual Report" of the Commission, the chapter on religion was 12 pages, followed by freedom of expression at 11 pages. Other units, for example the State Department, are charged with making such reports as well, but the CECC is the only one devoted almost solely to human rights, rule of law, judicial process, and the like.
29. The other production is in its English title "China Confession", produced in 2000 by China Soul for Christ, Petaluma, California. There is a chapter devoted to Yuan Zhiming in Ian Buruma's Bad Elements. Looking for videos of respectable production and content value that defended the TSPM and the registered churches was a fruitless task. I could find nothing as effective as half a dozen different evangelical apologies for the unregistered churches, including some fictional stories, e.g. "Bamboo in Winter", from Gospel Films, with Open Doors (n. d.).
30. Randy Alcorn, Safely Home (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001) ;
31. "Brother Yun" with Paul Hattaway, The Heavenly Man (Grand Rapids: Monarch Books, 2002).
32. The full title is Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003).
33. China Notes of the US National Council of Churches ended in the 1990s and the China publications of the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches have also ended. Two important institutional supporters of the TSPM, The United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia and the Foundation for Theological Education in Southeast Asia, are not very publicity minded and do not often publicly join the partisan fray of opinion.
34. For example, China Study Journal, published by the ecumenical Churches Together in Britain and Ireland since the 1980s as a good source of documentation and translations, stopped publication in early 2005 and only in early 2007 resumed, having retooled itself as a scholarly journal of analysis and evaluation, as well as retaining some documentation. In Germany, China Heute has long had a high reputation for quality reporting on church affairs in China.
35. John S. Peale, The Love of God in China: Can One Be Both Chinese and Christian? (New York: Universe, 2005) ; Werner Burklin, Jesus Never Left China, the Rest of the Story: The Untold Story of the Church in China Now Exposed (Enumclaw, WA: Pleasant Word, 2006).
36. Reconstructing Christianity in China: K. H. Ting and the Chinese Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007).
37. Philip Wickeri, Seeking the Common Ground: Protestant Christianity, the Three-Selfa Movement, and China's United Front (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988).
38. An aggressive attack on this work is found in Thomas Harvey, Acquainted with Grief: Wang Mingdao's Stand for the Persecuted Church in China (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002) ; in my view Harvey's attack is overdone.
39. "Powers of evil" from Norman H. Cliff, Fierce the Conflict: The Moving Stories of How Eight Chinese Christians Suffered for Jesus Christ and Remained Faithful (Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2001), 16