Set amid the spacious greenery of the embassy, the church, which dates back more than a century, has recently been restored to its former glory. Cleaned and repainted, the church was being used as a garage during much of the Soviet period. Given its compact size and onion dome, its grounds resemble a village church in Crimea or Volgograd. But this is Beijing and the church hopes to give China’s small Orthodox community a place to continue growing.

Pozdnyaev estimated that his Beijing flock is nearly 400 strong, and that at least 50 regularly attend Sunday service, which are usually conducted by laymen. The figure swells by several hundred more when a festival like Pashca (Orthodox Easter) occurs, even though local law forbids locals from attending services on foreign diplomatic properties.

Given Beijing’s influx of Russian traders and students, the numbers filling Beijing’s only functioning Orthodox church have been steady. Last year more than 300 marched as part of an Easter procession on the grounds of the Russian embassy in Beijing.

Apart from Russia and Greece, the Eastern Orthodox church has a significant following across Eastern Europe, but its following in Beijing, explained Pozdnyaev, is very international. Most are Russian “but there are even French, American and British people.” Multi-national worshippers brought dyed Paschal eggs for blessing during a recent nighttime Easter procession.

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Thursday, July 9, 2009
王力雄：非法宗教活动二十三种表现
Wang Lixiong: The 23 Behaviors of Illegal Religious Activity

乡村学校大门上方，挂着「反对非法宗教活动及民族分裂」的红色横幅，门前贴着通缉恐怖分子的布告。现在学生放暑假，但教师还在学校。看门人告诉我，即使是放假期间，教师也被要求每周四天集中到学校政治学习，主要是反分裂。前一段学的是关于热比娅问题的文件。现在教师的政治任务太多，政治学习比业务学习用的时间还多。
Above the main entrance to a rural school hangs a red banner reading “Oppose illegal religious movements and ethnic separatists,” and in front of the entrance is pasted a notice ordering the arrest of terrorists. Right now, students are on summer break but teachers are still at school. A security guard told me that even though it is the summer break, teachers have still been required to come to school four days every week for political studies, primarily on how to prevent ethnic separatism. In the previous period, they studied documents related to the Rebiya Kadeer problem. Right now, the teachers’ political tasks are so great that teachers are spending more time studying these political issues than studying how to become better teachers.

校园里面，墙上挂着一排宣传板，标题是「关于非法宗教活动的二十三种表现」。每种表现画成一幅图画，配有维文和汉文两种说明。二十三种表现归纳起来分别是：
In the school yard, on a wall hangs a row of notices, titled “23 behaviors of illegal religious activity.” Each behavior has a picture with an explanation in Mandarin and Uighur. The 23 illegal behaviors, together, are:

一、强迫他人信教；
Forcing others to profess a religion

二、强迫他人封斋；
Forcing others to observe Ramadan

三、私办经文学校；
Opening private schools to study religious texts

四、按传统方式主持婚姻；
Conducting marriage ceremonies in traditional methods

五、纵容学生礼拜；
Encouraging students to attend religious services.

六、以传统方式干预社会生活；
Interfering with social life by implementing traditional practices

七、在官方之外组织朝觐；
Going on non-government-sponsored pilgrimages

八、按传统收宗教税等；
Collecting religious taxes or fees

九、擅自兴建宗教场所；
Building new religious places without authorization

十、没有官方证书主持宗教活动；
Organizing or hosting religious activities without government credentials.

十一、跨地区宗教活动；
Organizing religious events outside of permitted areas

十二、印发宗教宣传品；
Printing and distributing religious propaganda

十三、接受国外宗教捐赠；
Receiving religious contributions from foreign countries.

十四、到国外进行宗教活动；
Conducting religious activity in foreign countries.

十五、随意发展教徒；
Arbitrarily growing religious following

十六、攻击爱国宗教人士；
Attacking patriotic religious people

十七、国外的宗教渗透；
Infiltration by foreign religious elements

十八、教派纷争；
Inter-religious feuding or fighting

十九、传播邪教；
Spreading cults

二十、散布与官方不一致的言论；
Disseminating speech inconsistent with the official version

二十一、集会示威游行等；
Organizing demonstrations or protests

二十二、建立反革命组织；
Establishing counter-revolutionary organizations

二十三、其它妨碍秩序的活动。
All other activities that interfering with the social order.

真够巨细无遗啊。我拿相机拍摄宣传板时，学校办公室里出来两个维吾尔人，一男一女，看样子是学校负责人。穆合塔尔用维语跟他们说什么，大概解释我们来旅游之类。我抓紧拍完照片，便和两位负责人友好地告别了。
It’s very detailed, isn’t it? When I took a picture of the notice board, two Uighurs came out of the office, one male, one female, who looked like the school’s directors. Muhetaer spoke in Uighur to them, explaining that we are on vacation. I quickly finished taking my pictures, and exchanged a friendly farewell to the two directors.

（本文节选自王力雄著《我的西域，你的东土》，2007年10月台湾大块文化出版
the above text is an excerpt of Wang Lixiong’s “My West Land, Your East Turkestan”, published by Dakuai publishing house in Taiwan in October, 2007.）

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Temples thrive, monks travel far and wide in search of enlightenment, the faithful fill the halls of worship — after decades of atheist policies, Buddhism is making a huge comeback in China.

Nowhere is this revival more apparent than at Wutaishan, the most important of China’s four holy mountains and home to a sprawling complex of temples, 300 kilometres (180 miles) southwest of Beijing.

“I have come to study at Wutaishan because Zen Buddhism, Han Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, all the different schools from different places, are represented here and mixed together,” itinerant monk Master Shi told AFP.

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Not since late antiquity has the world seen a migration of peoples like the great urbanization of China now in progress. By 2025, migrants will make up two-fifths of China’s billion-strong urban population, a fifth of all the Chinese, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

Many analysts have observed that this great confluence of ethnicities and languages has prepared the ground for a great wave of Christian conversion. At the end of World War II, with a nationalist government supportive of Christian missions, barely two percent of Chinese were Christians. The World Christian Database now counts 111 million Chinese Christians, while an internal survey conducted in 2007 by China’s government puts the number substantially higher: 130 million, nearly 10 percent of the total population.

Far less often observed—and potentially more important—is the fact that this exponential growth of Christianity in China would not have been possible without the forbearance and tacit encouragement of the regime. In recent years, the Chinese government has shifted from persecution of Christians to subtle—and sometimes even open—encouragement of Christianity. Christianity never will be a state religion in China, to be sure, and the Communist party in China is still officially atheist. But it is not an exaggeration to say we are near a Constantinian moment for the Chinese Empire, as the government looks to Christianity—particularly Catholicism—for an instrument of social cohesion.

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In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism – a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China’s only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China’s 1.3 billion souls.

Many regard religion as a new force, unaware that missionaries – Protestant for the most part but also Roman Catholics – tried to spread Christianity across China in the 19th century and met with fierce opposition during the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. But it was former leader Deng Xiaoping, who effectively endorsed freedom of worship, and gave Christianity the chance to take hold, with his sweeping market reforms in 1978.

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While statistics are hard to come by, monks, followers and experts say that growing numbers of middle-class Chinese are turning to Tibetan Buddhism, driven by the perception of a spiritual vacuum in society and aided by the voluminous information available on the Internet. Communist Party officials and celebrities alike have embraced Tibetan Buddhism, despite having to worship at home, meet their lamas at night and run the risk of attending officially unauthorized events, such as the fish release and “fire sacrifice” at Huangsongyu Reservoir.
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China’s Communist Party tightly regulates religious activity, especially the banned Falun Gong sect, but allows wide latitude for many law-abiding Catholics and Protestants who meet in unofficial house churches. Tibetan Buddhists however, are in a different category.

[...] “Out of protection for my followers, I said they were only some new friends,” recalled Dorje, a lama from Sichuan province who said he was chatting with followers in a hotel room in Wuxi, in coastal Jiangsu province, last year when officials from the local religious affairs bureau barged in and announced that it was not permitted to promote Tibetan Buddhism among Han Chinese. “I knew this was ridiculous, so I asked which central government regulation said so,” Dorje said. “They could not answer, and they eventually left.”

On a visit to some of his 600 followers in Shanghai last month, Dorje, who asked that his monastery’s name and his Chinese name not be published, said he was turned away from four hotels until he finally changed out of his monk’s robes. He has 10,000 followers in various cities, 6,000 of whom are women, he said. Most are concentrated in Beijing, Wuxi and Shandong province and have helped him raise $88,000 in the past three years toward the cost of a new sutra hall, he said.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Recent meetings between government officials and leaders of banned underground Protestant house churches marked the first step toward reconciliation in decades, the Rev. Ezra Jin said.

Jin, who founded his Zion house church two years ago, said the government, including the police, have realized the time for confrontation is past.

“The government is anxious to work out the way to go forward,” said Jin, noting he prays and sings with several hundred worshippers each Sunday in Beijing.

For more information on underground Christianity in China see this Frontline World production with Chicago Tribune reporter Evan Osnos.

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Inside-Out China’s author Xujun Eberlein has re-posted on an previous milk scandal comment:

The Chinese expression “quede” (缺德) , meaning “short of virtue,” used to be one of the most vicious insults in verbal arguments. Nowadays, the expression seems to have lost its admonishing power and has simply become a portrait of reality. Last year, a Chinese blogger cyber-named “David” attempted to analyze this. In his widely read article “Why have Chinese become ‘quede’ now?” he lists a few representative views on the Chinese moral sphere: all citizens worship money; no more baselines exist for minimal morality; today is the worst time of moral degeneration in China’s history; China should return to its traditional values.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis comments at China Brief on the moral valence of the recent tainted milk scandal, as well:

I find it hard to believe the Chinese executives at Sanlu, when faced with the request to recall their defective products deliberately set out to hospitalize or kill Chinese babies. Yet their actions, in not recalling product, and those also of the local government officials who failed to act, demonstrate a deep rooted inability to determine between right and wrong. They were amoral.

Earlier on in the article, Devonshire-Ellis accounts for this moral insufficiency in citing a lack of religious education:

[...]the deeper implication however is an essential lack of morality within Chinese society. With China being an atheist state, religion is strictly controlled. There is no religious education in Chinese schools, a situation completely at odds with most of the rest of the world. The impact of this has been to create a society largely amoral, ignorant of the differences between right and wrong.

Religious education notwithstanding, Eberlein also offers the contemporary Confucianist Jiang Qing’s take:

To [Jiang Qing] the essential problem is the lack of state ideology and a corresponding political system. Since the Cultural Revolution led to the self-destruction of Communism, that once ideological monopoly has lost its past aureole, and common Chinese have been unable to find the ultimate meaning and value for their individual lives.

“The problem isn’t that people don’t follow moral standards; the problem is that there no longer exist moral standards,” says Jiang Qing. He attributes the loss of morality to five decades of atrophy under Communist political power, plus two decades of corrosion under the money and wealth brought by the Western market economy.

See also CDT guest blogger Josie Liu’s recent post.

© browland for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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In China, it is now trendy to wear a cross, hanging from a small chain at the neck and fully exposed on the chest. The cross might be made of wood, metal or, even, silver or gold or with precious stones. However, the cross is not always worn for the sake of fashion. While it may be worn as jewelry, it is also worn by many as a religious statement.

Today, when asked about the meaning of the cross, the bearer might answer, proudly and clearly, “Yes I am a Christian.” Yet, after that pronouncement, everything becomes blurred. Most people do not know the difference between being Christian (jidujiao in China refers to Protestants) and being Catholic, or of the various branches of the Protestant faith.

A Chinese government estimate puts the total number of Chinese “Christians” at 130 million, almost 10% of the population, and at least five times the percentage of Christians (Protestants and Catholics) as when the communists took power in China in 1949. Even taking into account the country’s population increase during the past 60 years, the absolute numbers of Christians has grown immensely from the original 8 to 9 million in 1949.

However, when taking a closer look at these numbers there might, in fact, be little change from 1949. The Catholics, even in their more optimistic estimates, make up no more than 12 to 13 million, or about 1% of China’’s population. Of note, this is the same percentage of Catholics as in 1949. The rest of the Christians are Protestants or members of similar groups.

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Athletes, officials, spectators and tourists can pick up the Bible or just the New Testament for free during the Olympic Games next month.

Tens of thousands of copies of the Bible, the New Testament and booklets with just the four Gospels (according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) have been printed for the purpose, say officials of China’s Christian society.

The cover of the Gospel booklet will have the Beijing Olympics logo. “This is especially significant (because) as far as I know, this is the first time an Olympics logo will be used on a religious booklet,” Xu says. “The Olympic spirit and the spirit of living a ‘purpose-driven life’ that Christians believe in come together in the combination.”

As the newspaper notes, the announcement is attempt to quash rumors that suggested Beijing would refuse to help Christian athletes procure Bibles.

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CB: Do you think of the rise of Christianity mainly as a subset of a larger phenomenon, such as a turn toward spirituality more generally that has also seen an increase in the popularity of other imported and local religions? Or do you see it as something that is completely distinctive?

EO: The rise of Christianity in China is part of a broader spiritual awakening. People are seeking new sources of guidance everywhere, from mystical Taoist sects to B’hai temples. Among the measures of that, a survey by East China Normal University found that nearly a third of those polled described themselves religious. In particular, the rising middle class seems to be searching for a kind of moral reference as they confront new social and economic choices. One of the interesting things about Chinese Christians is that we don’t yet know what kind of social positions they will endorse: Will the mainstream of Christianity in China be a form of liberal Protestantism familiar in some American churches or will it be closer to the conservative brand that is thriving in the developing world?

See an video diary by Osnos, plus other pre-release materials related to the documentary, here.

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Those who strive to establish a monopoly of labor are accustomed to sneer at the Chinese as “Pagans.” They urge that citizenship ought not to be granted to them, because their religion is different from ours. Yet those who talk in this way make no objection to receiving Irish emigrants and intrusting them with the elective franchise. But is the Buddhist religion, which prevails in China, much more foreign to our customs and our modes of thinking and believing than the Roman Catholic religion is? There are, in fact, many striking resemblances between the two, and in some particulars the parallel is so close that it is difficult to perceive any difference, except in names. I will verify this declaration by pointing out some of the most obvious points of similarity.

Buddha Sakia — which means the Holy Sakia, or Saint Sakia — is reverenced by his numerous followers as Christians reverence Jesus Christ. The date of his birth is veiled in obscurity, and varies much in different countries. According to Mongol records it was two thousand one hundred and thirty-four years before the Christian era; but, according to Chinese records, it was one thousand twenty-nine years. Sir William Jones and other learned Oriental scholars, who have examined the subject, think they find sufficient evidence that lie came into this world about a thousand years before Christ.

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The number of religious believers in China continues to grow almost exponentially, far outpacing population growth.[1] Meanwhile, vague and unchanging official estimates, which since 1994 have reported “over 100 million faithful” in the country, reflect the government’s tendency to mask the rapid growth evident on the ground.[2] In February 2007, for the first time, the official media reported on an academic challenge to these earlier figures. Scholars in Shanghai had made very rough projections based on a limited survey, suggesting that there were up to 40 million Protestants in China among a total of 300 million religious adherents (not including estimated adherents of informal popular religions or “folk faiths”).[3]

Of the officially tolerated faiths, Christianity has grown at the fastest pace. There were fewer than 1 million Protestants and over 4 million Catholics in 1949–a little over 1 percent of China’s total population of 450 million. By 1965, there were far fewer practicing Christians, of course, as Mao Zedong pursued his policy of escalating persecution. Yet, by 1980, the total was back up to 4 million and growing. As of 2005, Christians were approaching 5 percent of the population, four-fifths of them Protestants, all with virtually no public support or access to China’s mass media–and with the majority not registered with the government. Projections for 2020 show even more growth, with a jump to 10 percent or even more.[4] Unregistered Christians may be the largest autonomous social group in China.

Read also Christianity in China 1900-1950: The History that Shaped the Present by Daniel H. Bays.

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Beijing is setting up sites and training local believers to provide religious services for foreigners attending the Olympic Games, religious officials said on Wednesday.

Large numbers of religious faithful are expected among the athletes, coaches and tourists crowding into the officially atheist nation for the Olympics, opening on Aug. 8.

“Major religions in Beijing are all making preparations to serve the Games,” Imam Chen Guangyuan, president of the Islamic Association of China, told reporters in Beijing.

His association had been training volunteers in English and Arabic so that they can help with prayer services for visiting Muslims, Chen said.

Image: Muslim girls in northwest China. By Oansari2000, via Flickr.com

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Editor’s Note: Christianity in China is showing signs of emerging from the underground. The 5,000-attendee Gospel of China conference held last month in Hong Kong is a perfect example of this new force, writes NAM editor Jun Wang.

Although Christianity is still almost totally invisible in the public sphere some 200 years after it was first introduced to China, the Chinese Christian population is growing as the country opens up economically and spiritually.

More than 5,000 Christians from the mainland poured into Hong Kong at the end of last month to join the Gospel of China Conference organized by the Christian Life Quarterly, a Chinese-language Christian magazine headquartered in Chicago.

“It’s the first time we held this conference out of the United States,” said Jingling Qu, executive editor of the Quarterly. “The audience number doubled that of our former conferences.” [Full Text]

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There was Hu Jintao, head of the Chinese Communist Party, warmly shaking hands at a party-sponsored New Year’s tea party with one of the country’s main Christian leaders. To make sure the message got through to China’s 68 million party faithful, a large photograph of the moment was splashed across the front page of the official party newspaper, People’s Daily.

Hu’s display of holiday courtesy to Liu Bainian, general secretary of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, was one in a series of recent signals that China’s rulers, despite the party’s official atheism, are seeking to get along better with the increasing numbers of Chinese who find solace and inspiration in religion. The shift in tactics does not mean the Politburo has embraced religion, specialists cautioned, but it indicates a desire to incorporate believers into the party’s quest for continued economic progress and more social harmony. [Full Text]

(...)
Read the rest of China’s Leaders Signal Shift in Tactics Toward Religion – Edward Cody (3 words)

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Buddhism is booming — quite a paradox given the Communist Party’s official atheism and its troubled relationship with the Dalai Lama. The faith’s growing popularity reflects a yearning for meaning among China’s yuppies, who increasingly are attracted to Buddhism’s rejection of materialism and emphasis on the transitory nature of life. “They have a BMW and a house in the countryside,” says Lawrence Brahm, an American who runs three boutique hotels, including one in Tibet. “And they’re bored. They’re realizing there’s more to life than collecting toys.” Buddhism’s trendiness has spawned a surge in faith-related business: Flights to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, are booked solid, monasteries are building guesthouses, and Web sites offering free downloadable mantras are proliferating. [Full Text]

[Image: Buddhists crowd the Yonghe Temple to burn incense, via businessweek.com]

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(...)
Read the rest of A China Guy Goes To India (3): Religion (722 words)

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“100,000 yuan to cure cancer. As quickly as ten days but now later than twenty days. If you have faith, you will be saved.” A fifty-ish illiterate rural woman who has never been in school for a single day went by the title “Little Goddess.”

(...)
Read the rest of Chinese Police Arrests “Jesus’ Sister” – Southern Metropolis Daily (141 words)

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Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Chinese government is not antireligious. Its stated worry is social “harmony” ” the political dimension of religion. In order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, officials now celebrate religions that sustain social stability, from Buddhism to Confucianism ” the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. Last year, Ye Xiaowen, China’s top religious official, told Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that “religion is one of the important forces from which China draws strength,” and he singled out Buddhism for its “unique role in promoting a harmonious society.”

What bothers Chinese authorities are sects like Falun Gong that insist on independence from state control. In the same vein, the problem with Tibetan Buddhism resides in an obvious fact that many Western enthusiasts conveniently forget: the traditional political structure of Tibet is theocracy, with the Dalai Lama at the center. He unites religious and secular power ” so when we are talking about the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, we are taking about choosing a head of state. It is strange to hear self-described democracy advocates who denounce Chinese persecution of followers of the Dalai Lama ” a non-democratically elected leader if there ever was one. [Full Text]

Slavoj Zizek is a professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

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