Zhao Haiyan teaches English at a prestigious state school. She is also a devout Christian. Bright and attractive, she is quite open with her colleagues about belonging to an unregistered, and technically illegal, house church. Her conversations are peppered with references to “the Lord”, and her “brothers and sisters”.
The school officials are Communist Party members. Yet far from persecuting her, they recently invited her to devise and teach an elective course on Christianity. Her enthusiasm for the course is matched by its take-up among the school’s mainly middle class students.
Kim Chul is an overseas student at a Chinese university. He is in his late forties and arrived from Korea in 2005 with his wife and four children. While his young classmates live in dorms, Kim leases a huge apartment spread over three floors. The living room is strewn with Bibles and Christian literature. Kim attends class irregularly and makes little effort to conceal that his real business in China is missionary work. In many parts of China, Korean and American missionaries, officially students, teachers or businessmen, operate more or less openly.
Christianity is not suppressed; on the contrary, many of China’s leaders – most recently Jiang Zemin – have been well-disposed towards it. But the law allows freedom of worship only in officially sanctioned churches that are shunned by many believers in favour of unregulated house churches. The differences between the two lie not in doctrine, but in loyalties. Like England’s Elizabeth I, the government does not “seek a window into men’s souls”, but neither will it permit what it sees as allegiance to foreign powers.
In practical terms the legal position of worshippers in unofficial churches is far from clear. Wide discretion is left to local government and the level of tolerance varies. In Henan province nearly 2000 house church members were arrested during 2005 alone. In March 2007 40 house church members were arrested in Nanyang city; their preacher and his wife were detained for 10 days. The authorities often claim they are responding to complaints about noisy prayer meetings.
Many of China’s Christians are evangelical Protestants. They tend to preach an aggressive self-help doctrine that is popular among the middle class and the entrepreneurial poor. Yet this message differs little from official enthusiasm for the free market.
What irks the authorities is not so much the individualist, pro-capitalist message but the suspicion that under the cover of religion some organizations are seeking to undermine Communist Party rule.
Some house churches are heavily influenced by overseas evangelicals who push a hard-right, pro-American agenda. Many Chinese Christians hold pro-American views on world political issues including the invasion of Iraq and unqualified support for Israel. Some house church leaders even talk about evangelizing the Islamic world, an ambition that could cause foreign policy embarrassments and even lead to tension with China’s large Muslim minority.
