As evangelical schools capitalize on the desire of affluent Chinese families for the prestige of an American education, many Chinese students are learning first-hand how the Bible Belt got its name.

While proselytizing is banned in China, Protestant — and, to a lesser extent, Catholic — high schools are doing their missionary work on this side of the Pacific Ocean. Through placement agents and religious networking, they’re recruiting growing numbers of students from China, most of them atheists, and encouraging them to convert, in the hope that some of them will spread the faith back home.

Plunged with little preparation into an intense religious environment, Chinese students often struggle to fit in. Some shed their skepticism and become Christians, delighting school officials and dismaying their families in China.

Eighty of Ben Lippen’s 108 international students come from China, up from hardly any five years ago, said Emery Nickerson, director of the boarding program. A “large minority” commit to Christianity, he said.

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Post tags: Christianity, overseas students, religion, study abroad
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The concern appears quixotic, but China is now in the grips of a moral crisis. In recent months, the Chinese Internet has been full of talk about the lack of morality in society. And the problem is not just associated with the very rich or the political connected—concerns shared in western countries—but with the population at large. This has been precipitated in part by a spate of recent incidents in which people have failed to come to aid of fellow citizens caught in accidents or medical emergencies. A few weeks ago, a two-year-old girl in Guangzhou was hit by a car and left dying in the street while eighteen passers-by did nothing to help her. The case riveted China, causing people to ask what sort of society is being created.

So, no sooner was the plenum over than the party indicated that it would limit the amount of entertainment shows on television and possibly set limits on popular microblogs. While it is easy to read this move simply as censorship, which it certainly is, it also reflects the new preoccupation with morality: many of the banned shows are pure entertainment—the party now wants more news programs—and Chinese microblogs have long been a forum for anonymous character assassination. Meanwhile, though it has been far less noted, Beijing is giving new support to religion—even the country’s own beleaguered traditional practice, Daoism.

After decades of destruction, Daoist temples are being rebuilt, often with government support. Shortly after the plenum ended, authorities were convening an International Daoism Forum. The meeting was held near Mt. Heng in Hunan Province, one of Daoism’s five holy mountains, and was attended by 500 participants. It received extensive play in the Chinese media, with a noted British Daoist scholar, Martin Palmer, getting airtime on Chinese television. This is a sharp change for a religion that that was persecuted under Mao and long regarded as suspect. What, exactly, is gong on here?

On his blog, Useless Tree, Sam Crane argues that the lessons of Daoism actually run counter to those the government wants spread among the population:

Long story short: there’s more to Daoism that the “1,800 year old religion” moniker reveals.

And that more complex history, and the secular, philosophical, political readings of Daoists texts, most notably the Daodejing, could pose some problems for the effort to make Daoism into a soft power resource for the PRC state.

One problem is that the Daodejing, rather like the Analects and Mencius, can rather easily become a source of critique of any state that attempts to use it for political purposes. What might Politburo Standing Committee member Jia Qinglin have to say in response to passage 75:

The people are starving, and it’s only because you leaders feast on taxes that they’re starving.

The people are impossible to rule, and it’s only because you leaders are masters of extenuation that they’re impossible to rule.

The people take death lightly, and it’s only because you leaders crave life’s lavish pleasures that they take death lightly,

they who act without concern for life: it’s a wisdom far beyond treasuring life.

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“China is an economic powerhouse,” Mr. Li said at Alibaba Group’s annual summit for small to medium-sized business owners in Hangzhou. But the world’s most populous country has little cultural influence compared to the U.S., South Korea and Japan, he said ….

Mr. Li, who has starred in major movies on both sides of the Pacific including the 2002 Zhang Yimou epic “Hero,” lamented that Hollywood and other cultural industries make up a significant portion of GDP in the U.S. but represent only a fraction of China’s economy. “Italian coffee is better than Starbucks,” but consumers around the world recognize Starbucks more than Italian coffee “because it’s a cultural experience,” he said.

He did not disclose financial details of his partnership with Mr. Ma, but said the company will be called Taichi Zen International Culture Company.

For China not to have a contribution to the rest of the world would be a “pity,” he said. “I feel shame before my ancestors,” he added, saying he wants kids to be proud of their “national culture.”

Martial arts have long been one of China’s most prominent cultural exports, producing sometimes incongruous cross-pollinations. From Jamil Anderlini’s interview with Shaolin abbot Shi Yongxin at The Financial Times:

With my iPod headphones plugged in, the abbot of Shaolin keeps his expression perfectly neutral as his eardrums are assailed by the thumping beats of the Wu-Tang Clan.

“I don’t get it,” says Shi Yongxin in his heavily accented Mandarin, after politely listening to the pioneering 1990s rappers from the New York borough of Staten Island who, in homage to kung fu movies of the 1970s, described themselves as coming “straight from the slums of Shaolin.”

The interview goes on to discuss the “CEO-monk”‘s management of commercial interests, protection of the Shaolin brand, and the tricky relationship between temple and state: see also a video report at FT.com. The temple’s ventures include more than forty kung-fu and meditation centres abroad, though these have apparently not achieved the sort of soft power critical mass for which Jet Li hopes.

A long way down the family tree, the 9th Edition of China’s official radio calisthenics program aims to combat the physical ill-effects of contemporary office work. From The Wall Street Journal:

“Chinese are facing more pressure than ever before and they need a way to release it,” says He Fengxiang, the director of the administration’s “Sports for All” division, after stubbing out a cigarette in his office. “They need the hoohah.”

Mr. He is referring to the vocal elements, or rather tribal-like chants, that he and other sports authorities have added to the 9th Edition of the People’s Radio Calisthenics.

This government-promoted 40-minute workout, full of kung-fu-type lunges and kicks, was established by Chairman Mao in 1951 to train China’s proletariat in the fight against the capitalist West. And now, while still broadcast over the radio, the exercise has been overhauled to prepare the masses for the next stage of the fight—a long, a healthy future in front of their computers.

Even Maoist calisthenics have not always resisted the taint of American cultural imperialism:

Officials … hope not to repeat the disaster of the 7th Edition, which caused an uproar when it was released in 1990. It incorporated disco steps that even John Travolta in his prime would have struggled with and the program was just too hard to follow. “It was a blow to the establishment,” said the Sports Administration’s Mr. He.

Sources:

Jet Li Ashamed of China’s Soft Power – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Lunch With the Abbot of the Shaolin Temple – Financial Times (via Slate)
Putting the cash into kung fu – FT.com
China’s Remedy for Stressed Workers: ‘They Need the Hoohah’ – WSJ.com

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“They may stem from Jewish ancestry, but they aren’t Jewish,” says Rabbi Shimon Freundlich, who runs the orthodox Chabad House in Beijing. “There hasn’t been a Jewish community in Kaifeng in 400 years.”

Except there is one, though it’s divided and diminished. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people in the city say they are descendants of Kaifeng Jews and cling to at least some Jewish traditions. A canvas poster at No. 21 Teaching the Torah Lane announces the street as the site of a synagogue that was destroyed in an 1860 flood and never rebuilt. Inside a tiny courtyard house, “Esther” Guo Yan works as a tour guide and sells knick-knacks decorated with Jewish stars.

When tourists stop by, she quizzes them on Jewish ceremonies, like what prayers to say when lighting Sabbath candles. She says she hasn’t yet managed to fast a full day on Yom Kippur, though she is trying. As the granddaughter of a Kaifeng Jew, she says the orthodox standard on Judaism is unfair: “We read the Torah with Eastern thoughts; deal with it.”

Source: Chinese Jews Face Existential Questions – WSJ.com

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The amiable Mr. Zhang had a propensity for spitting on the lapel of his dark gray suit coat as he preached in a coarse Henan accent about the need for greater religious openness. He founded in 2005 the Chinese House Church Alliance, an organization that brings together dozens of underground church pastors from across China. Unlike in Beijing and other large cities, where the embrace of Christianity is stylish for young and upwardly mobile Chinese, many of the Christians served by Mr. Zhang’s House Church Alliance are those left behind by the country’s newfound economic power.

… At another service at the Beijing Zion church, about 500 miles northeast of Nanyang, … the scene was strikingly different. Women decked out in floral summertime dresses clicked away on iPhones as they waited for Pastor Jin Mingri to begin. At least one Mercedes, Audi or BMW is parked most Sundays outside the office building where Zion is housed ….

The government wouldn’t likely oppose much of what Mr. Jin preaches. He talks a lot about morals and family. Occasionally, however, he’ll delve into politics, at times using biblical allegories to explain repression of Christians in China today.

There are no purely religious questions in China, Mr. Jin told me in one of our conversations, because faith and politics remain deeply intertwined.

Read about suppression of house churches and the parallel resurgence of other religions in China via CDT.

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Besides some tourism destinations that feature religion, such as the Wudang Mountain in Central China’s Hubei province, which is rich in Taoism culture, the Beijing-based China Sunrise Travel Service has also launched religion-themed routes to Nepal and China’s Taiwan in recent years, Zhang Rui, a manager for the company’s religious tourism sector, said.

Such tours usually include stays in temples and other religious activities like meditation and Buddhist lecturing, she said.

Also, tourism has become a major income source for places of worship, experts said.

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[Southern Weekend]: This year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci. China, Europe and the United States have held memorials and exhibits. Matteo Ripa who came over 100 years later is also highly regarded by Chinese, even though he did not agree with Ricci on things like rites such as veneration of Confucius and ancestor worship. What common substance do these two offer to modern people in terms of cultural dialogue between China and the West?

Sepe: Ricci and Ripa have one thing in common. They both came from Italy to China and became one with the people of China. They did not want to change Chinese people’s habits into Western ones. They adapted to the local environment, hoping to be like the Chinese.

Ricci brought culture, science and experience from the West as an offering to China. A century later Ripa’s method of evangelization was different in that after living in China for 13 he returned to Italy. In 1723 he brought a group of Chinese back to Naples to live there.

They seem the same on the surface and Chinese respect Ripa just as they do Ricci. He and his group of Chinese caused eastern and western cultures to meet. They founded Eastern University which is a national university today. But everyone knows the founders were Ripa and a group of Chinese. Eastern University today teaches Chinese, and eastern culture and philosophy. If you visit you can see a painting of Ripa and his Chinese colleagues wearing Chinese clothes and it has their names in Chinese. This painting is valuable both for artistic and historical reasons. They were the first Chinese to come to Naples.

See also “The Vatican, Immigrants, and Urbanization: ‘China and the Holy See Will Find a Way to Solve it Together,’” also translated by Hathaway.

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RELIGION HAS LONG played a central role in Chinese life, but for much of the 20th century, reformers and revolutionaries saw it as a hindrance holding the country back and a key reason for China’s “century of humiliation.” Now, with three decades of prosperity under their belt — the first significant period of relative stability in more than a century — the Chinese are in the midst of a great awakening of religious belief. In cities, yuppies are turning to Christianity. Buddhism attracts the middle class, while Taoism has rebounded in small towns and the countryside. Islam is also on the rise, not only in troubled minority areas but also among tens of millions elsewhere in China.

It is impossible to miss the religious building boom, with churches, temples and mosques dotting areas where none existed a few years ago. How many Chinese reject the state’s official atheism is hard to quantify, but numbers suggest a return to widespread religious belief. In contrast to earlier surveys that showed just 100 million believers, or less than 10 percent of the population, a new survey shows that an estimated 300 million people claim a faith. A broader question in another poll showed that 85 percent of the population believes in religion or the supernatural.

Officially, religious life is closely regulated. The country has five recognized religions: Buddhism, Islam, Taoism and Christianity, which in China is treated as two faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each of the five has a central organization headquartered in Beijing and staffed with officials loyal to the Communist Party. All report to the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which in turn is under the central government’s State Council, or cabinet. This sort of religious control has a long history in China. For hundreds of years, emperors sought to define orthodox belief and appointed many senior religious leaders.

Beneath this veneer of order lies a more freewheeling and sometimes chaotic reality. In recent months, the country has been scandalized by a Taoist priest who performed staged miracles — even though he was a top leader in the government-run China Taoist Association. His loose interpretation of the religion was hardly a secret: on his Web site he used to boast that he could stay underwater for two hours without breathing. Meanwhile, the government has made a conscious effort to open up. When technocratic Communists took control of China in the late 1970s, they allowed temples, churches and mosques to reopen after decades of forced closures, but Communist suspicion about religion persisted. That has slowly been replaced by a more laissez-faire attitude as authorities realize that most religious activity does not threaten Communist Party rule and may in fact be something of a buttress. In 2007, President Hu Jintao endorsed religious charities and their usefulness in solving social problems. The central government has also recently sponsored international conferences on Buddhism and Taoism. And local governments have welcomed temples — like the one on Mount Yi — as ways to raise money from tourism.

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No one knows exactly how many Christians there are among China’s population of 1.3 billion. There are an estimated 21 million members of the government-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic movement, but nobody knows how many Protestants worship in unregistered house churches.

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

About 30 miles from Pastor Ni’s church in a dusty country town, a group of women from another state-sanctioned congregation pray ahead of a public performance they have planned for the day. China’s constitution protects freedom of religion, but proselytizing in public places is forbidden. However, the gray areas are growing ever greater, and these women are exploiting those blurred lines.

See more NPR coverage of China’s “religious revolution” here.

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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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