News editor Harry Genet recently met with several China watchers to gauge their assessment of developments there. The impressions he gleaned:
Just a year ago, Jonathan Chao, dean of the China Graduate School of Theology in Hong Kong, told a Christian gathering of China watchers that they probably had twenty years to lay a sound foundation for a renewed opportunity to share in evangelizing China.
The establishment of diplomatic relations on January 1 between the United States and the People’s Republic of China suddenly made Chao’s then optimistic timetable decidedly conservative. Now, prominent Christian voices are hinting that missionaries will be returning to the mainland tomorrow.
The U.S.-China reconciliation is bound to bring benefits, the China watchers say, simply because a nation of more than 900 million persons, isolated for thirty years, has been brought into the mainstream of world history.
Restrictions that prevented the Chinese from fraternizing with foreign visitors were reportedly lifted last July.
At the end of 1978 more than eighty U.S. firms were seeking contracts in China and some twenty Chinese technical delegations were visiting in the United States. And this appears to be only the beginning. The potential opportunities for Christian lay fellowship, encouragement, and tactful witness will certainly increase.
The Far East Broadcasting Company reports that written responses from listeners on the mainland have increased 1,200 per cent in the month following the Carter administration announcement.
Current negotiations between the United States and the People’s Republic regarding some $200 million in American assets frozen in China include some $60 million in churches, schools, and hospitals seized in 1949.
The coming of 10,000 or more students and scientists from the People’s Republic to universities and research centers throughout the Western world provides another opportunity. The visitors will be, in many cases, “mature scholars who would be expected to assume positions of leadership on their return to China,” according to the Chronicler of Higher Education. Here in the United States at least, the magazine reports, “the Chinese evidently want their scholars to live in dormitories and have no plans to isolate them in special housing.” Openings are therefore bound to present themselves to alert Christian fellow students and scholars.
Ralph Covell, missions professor at Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver and a former China missionary, acknowledges that “the God who has done far more in a very short time to change the China situation than we could have possibly imagined may again grant an opportunity for the worldwide church in an institutional way to help meet the spiritual needs of this vast country.”
However, Covell said it is too early to predict the results of China’s great leap outward. “The life of the churches and Christian people may go on relatively unchanged for the rest of the century.”
He said that Christian testimony may be limited to Chinese and non-Chinese whose lives and words are shared as they serve China with their professional skills.
Some Christian leaders familiar with China cite a tendency for American Christians to jump “compulsively on every bandwagon, and always with one eye cocked to gain the best possible promotional advantage.” They fear that this trait may erect more barriers against the Christian faith. What is needed now, they say, are patience, unhurried prayer, consultation, and cooperation.
The time is not ripe, Covell and other China watchers agree, to recruit missionaries on a broad scale for possible service in China. They believe it is time to put in place, on a limited basis, research teams, providing background for mission agencies and education for the church as a whole, so that it will be ready to move “if things really open up.”
Covell, in an article appearing in the Evangelical Missions Quarterly, identifies certain mistakes that missionaries to China made in the past (he also asks for new attitudes, strategy, and methods to avoid their repetition):
• Missionary activities were allied with power and privilege and were characterized by “a certain arrogance.” Any echo of this “religious imperialism” would be counter-productive.
• The Christian message never really came to grips with the Chinese (Confucian) worldview or with the ideological challenge of Marxism. What is the distinctive Christian message in a collectivistic society?
• The church that was planted there became denominationally fragmented. “All reports on Chinese churches in the People’s Republic agree that denominational labels have disappeared. Scattered and persecuted believers have found a deep unity in Christ and put no priority on manmade divisions.” Denominational rivalry should be shunned.
• Every mission society did what was right in its own eyes. A new degree of cooperation among evangelical agencies (and perhaps with ecumenical groups) will be required. Mission activities should be conducted only with the advice and direction of Chinese colleagues. There should be concerted effort to weed out “fly-by-night” enterprises that will seek to make spiritual capital from the China situation.
In the pre-communist era, Covell reminds us, missionaries to China penetrated a society without any church and planted it there. This time around, he said, God’s people are already there. “They are a spiritually lean, disciplined, committed church, molded and refined in the crucible of testing by the Spirit of God. We must develop lines of communication with them that will enable us to be sensitive to their needs and their precarious situation.”
Fleeting Fellowship
What is that situation? Teng Hsiao-ping’s Long March to Modernization notwithstanding, China remains a regimented society. Residents in Peking are not allowed to travel outside a twelve-mile radius from the city without governmental permission. Families in Canton, which is split by the Pearl River, may be allowed to see relatives across the river only several times a year. Pervasive loudspeakers repeat the communist line: Believers who do not accept their message admit that they can’t avoid internalizing the propaganda. “It becomes a part of your mind,” said a Chinese Christian who spoke last summer with Allen Russell, a Hong Kong missionary who visited Canton as part of a tour group.
Russell managed to talk to several Christians. He observes that most believers were converted before the communist takeover in 1948. (Protestant Christians in China before the takeover are roughly estimated to have been one million. There were 19,000 Protestant churches and chapels, but only 2,200 ordained Chinese Protestant pastors—compared with 5,500 Roman Catholic Chinese clergy. Current Protestant population is estimated at about 900,000, or one-tenth of 1 per cent of the total.)
It is simply impossible to meet publicly in groups in most of the country, says Russell. Even if five or six believers gather in a park to worship they are sure to find a security officer attaching himself to them within a few minutes. For this reason Christian fellowship is likely to be fleeting—four or five believers walking single file and singing and praying as they go. Small clusters meet in homes over tea.
Russell said that after his contact with Christians he was questioned by the police. He later learned that those he talked with were questioned also.
Even Peking’s two showcase churches permit no preaching—only singing, Scripture reading, and communion.
Bob Phillips, a Hong Kong missionary and a Conservative Baptist, was in Peking last May, and his two Christian contacts expressed amazement that professing Christians were allowed into the country.
Many Western Christians are appalled by what seems to be a rigorous denial of many basic human rights in China. But China veterans urge a broader perspective, saying that great changes for good have been effected on many levels. There are no longer starving peasants forced to sell their children to pay staggering debts to demanding landlords. Teams of bandits no longer prey on travelers. Most hotel rooms have no locks. Widespread corruption and inflation have been checked.
Nationalist Nuances
And the alternative for Chinese elsewhere is not usually political freedom. The overseas Chinese are typically a prosperous but detested minority deprived of a meaningful voice in the governments under which they live. Hong Kong is a British colony. And Taiwan’s Republic of China is in some respects as repressive as the mainland regime. Its intelligence operation permeates not only all facets of life in Taiwan but has made Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang the real power in every Chinatown in the United States and Canada.
This makes true opinion on Taiwan difficult to gauge, they say. The demonstrations after President Carter’s announcement were reported and photographed. But to what extent, they ask, were they spontaneous and to what extent staged?
The real feeling of the church is equally difficult to assess. The record shows that church leaders reacted to the announcement with anger and protest. The Taiwan Christian Tribune called on all churches in Taiwan to show Christian patriotism by devoting their Christmas services to prayers for the nation and to designate their Christmas offerings to be sent to the Nationalist government for use in the national defense budget. The Tribune’s statement was endorsed by some fifty churches and Christian agencies, representing all denominations. But, the observers point out, this unanimity could flow from conviction or from a pattern of accommodation to authority for survival.
An immediately apparent development was the readiness of the Republic of China government to harness church efforts for political purposes. Late last December, for instance, Nora Lam Sung, a Chinese-American evangelist who holds annual evangelistic campaigns in Taipei, Taiwan, received the active cooperation of government troops for a special project.
Her Nora Lam Ministries provided several thousand Chinese-language New Testaments, intended to reach every province of the People’s Republic. The soldiers obligingly slung them under radio-controlled balloons provided by the government and released them from the offshore island of Quemoy.
The linking of the Word of God to Nationalist Chinese persuasion tools provides an immediate example of compulsive, promotion-oriented outreach to China, in the eyes of some veteran China missionaries. Similar balloons have, in the past, wafted food-and-political-propaganda packages across the mainland. A spate of such operations, they say, could quickly slam shut for another generation a slightly opening door.
