Grace LiuHPSC essay11/20/2014

The Current Predicament of Chinese Christians

China Detains Five ‘Cult Members’ for McDonald’s Murder is the headline on Bloomberg

news to detail the story of five proselytizers beating a 35 year old woman to death in broad daylight, in a

McDonald’s restaurant for refusing to give them her phone number. To reiterate what the China Daily

newspaper said in an editorial on June 3, 2014 “There will undoubtedly be a harsh crackdown on the

illicit cult.” (Bloomberg News). This cult that they speak of is The Church of Almighty God, also known

as Eastern Lightning, it teaches its followers to abandon their families and to hate the Communist party,

those five members will go on trial on the last Friday of August this year. (The Telegraph). Now you

might be wondering, from the perspective of a citizen that lives in the free world where there is religious

freedom and the separation of church and state, that this is a cult, like the People’s Temple, anyone who’s

not part of it will have no fear from the authorities right? Right?! Oh no, far from it. In order to

understand how this would impact all Christians in China now. We have to look back into history.

The Christian gospel actually arrived in China in 635 carried by a band of Persian Nestorian

Christians. At that time, even the emperor of Tang dynasty China believed into it. There’s no consensus

on why Tang Christianity disappeared, but in the sparce documentation of the Nestorians that ethnic

Chinese became converts or monks, and as a result, have been a marginal religion and not able to

maintain doctrinal integrity and fade from the scene. (Bays, 11).

It is in the 1860s where Protestant societies such as the London Missionary Society start to try

and send missionaries to China, one of which with Robert Morrison who had to go as an employee of the

British East India Trading Company, who don’t want missionaries because it tends to cut into business

relations with China. There was J. Hudson Taylor that founded the China Inland Mission in 1865 with no

finances guaranteed, no real budget and all rely on God’s provision. Many institutions of schools,

hospitals were set up and eventually the Chinese elite class warmed up to the missionaries and cooperated

with each other to take care of the people when famine comes. In the movie we saw, we see that the

Grace LiuHPSC essay11/20/2014

people are still not happy and they circulate rumors of the Catholics stealing babies from their families.

So in the 1902, the Boxer Rebellion occurred in North China fired by intense anti-foreign sentiment, with

anti-Christian sentiment as an unfortunate after effect. (Bay, 85). They ended up killing many “foreign

devils” and “secondary foreign devils”, the term they use for Chinese Christians. This resulted in eight

countries, the United Kingdom, France, German Empire, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Japan and the

USA to send armies in to put down the Boxers and extend their spheres of influence. With more anti-

foreign sentiment bubbling beneath while the missions enter a Golden Age, while Pearl S Buck noted and

criticized missionaries “for being arrogant, ignorant, and narrow-minded.” (Bay, 122). It is in the 1930s

where a couple of indigenous Chinese Christian churches came to the scene, foreign financing was gone.

What had made this happen was “One key vehicle for Christian influence over the new elites was

higher education. Many professionals and urban elites had been trained in the Western colleges in China

or abroad. Among the universities and technical training institutes founded since the last years of the

nineteenth century, a good half were church run, and some private universities were founded by Christian

Chinese philanthropists; the only, but important, exception to Christian influence was military

academies.” (Goossaert & Palmer, 70). Under Chinese Nationalist rule, even the generalissimo Chaig

Kai-shek converted to Methodism and was publically baptized in 1929, and seven of the ten cabinet

ministers in the new Nanjing KMT government, established in 1929, were Christians. (71-72) This next

decade or two is when not at all politically oriented Chinese Christian groups, such as the True Jesus

Church, the Little Flock or Assembly Hall, and the autarkic communes of the Jesus Family get their

growth. (72-73).

When the Communist party came to power in China, the new government of the PRC derived

from Marxist ideology, “the new leaders assumed that because Marxist dogma taught that religion was

socially retrograde, doomed to eventual extinction, the mechanisms of control devised for all religions

were not only to register and monitor religious believers, but also systematically to reduce the influence

Grace LiuHPSC essay11/20/2014

of religion in society. At times, this resulted in harsh policies trying to eradicate religion, especially in the

late 1950s, and during the Cultural Revolution.” Instead, the regime started the “Three-Self” church,

officially recognizes it as the only true legal way to be a Christian. The three “selfs” were self-support,

self-government, and self-propagation. (Bays, 159-160). Which most of the indigenous Chinese

Christian groups were already doing, but by the law, all but the “Three Self” Church were not legal, and

all possible missionaries would be monitored, even today. So many of those indigenous Chinese

Christian groups survive by operating in secret as house churches, as in they meet at home, no physical

building of a church.

Eastern Lightning Started in 1989 in Central China, it is a particularly virulent cult that parades as

a Chinese house church network, and then quickly spread across China and then overseas. What

normally makes it so virulent is that in China, it aims deceptive, well-organized attacks at only house

churches and their leaders. (carm.org).

Now with harsh crackdowns on Christian groups in the aftermath, users on Weibo have noted that

even the government approved “Three Self” Church got persecuted. What chance can the house churches

have? Once again, Chinese Christians much like myself, have to straggle both worlds, the well

intentioned yet ignorant and ultimately outside intervention, along with the primal angry mass darkness

that lurks in the hearts of men.

Grace LiuHPSC essay11/20/2014

References:

Bays, D. H. (n.d.). A New history of Christanity in China (pp. 11-160). N.p.: Wiley-

Blackwell.

Goossaert, V., & Palmer, D. A. (2011). The Religions Question in Modern China (pp. 70-

73). Chicago&London: The University of Chicago Press.

Mathieson, R., & Sanderson, H. (2014, June 3). China Detains Five 'Cult Members' for

McDonald's Murder. Bloomberg News. Retrieved from

http://mobile.bloomgberg.com/news/2014-06-03/china-police-detain-five-cult-members-for-

murder-in-mcdonald-s.html

Moore, M. (2014, August 21). Inside China's most radical cult. The Telegraph. Retrieved

from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11046155/Inside-Chinas-most-

radical-cult.html