Although Chinese Christians are overwhelmingly female, the leadership of the house church movement is mostly male.  But then there is Ding Hei, born Ding Xiuling in 1961.  Becoming a Christian at the age of thirteen, “she was the only Christian among the students” at her school but within six months forty of the students had found faith, “meeting secretly after school.”  While still a teenager she acquired a reputation as a powerful speaker.  But her father was not amused.  As village leader, he was embarrassed by her faith and her preaching, and he beat her for attending meetings.  At twenty, advised by her Christian mother, she left home and went to live with the family of preacher Zhang Rongliang in a village 30 miles away.  The next several years were filled with active preaching and organizing, including the staging of open meetings in defiance of the authorities.  In 1989 Ding was arrested and sentenced to three years at a labor camp.

The prison authorities soon discovered that Ding “was an astonishingly gifted leader and administrator.”  Within months, she had been appointed head of her hut, and became an intermediary between the authorities and the prison population: helping the prison fulfill its norms, yet fighting for better food and better treatment for the inmates.  She “became a legend of good management among the nine women’s labor camps in Henan Province.”  But after her early release in 1992 she resumed evangelizing, becoming one of the top Christian leaders in Fangcheng, organizing national prayer events.

Christians, our cultural elite knows, are people who are ill-educated and easily led.  Who cares if the daughters of village elders get Christianity?  It’s in the city that the modern world lives.  So it is in China, except that Christianity is growing on the intellectual classes too, people like documentary filmmaker Yuan Zhiming.

In 1988, Yuan’s River Elegy aired on Chinese TV.  It proposed that China’s symbols of greatness, its two great rivers and its wall, were “emblems of captivity and restriction.”  The great rivers had held it back from access to the rest of the world, and China needed to sail out beyond its rivers into the “Ocean Blue” of the west.  After the Tienanmen massacre, the government sought him out as a scapegoat, but Yuan escaped to the west.  At Princeton University, he encountered committed Chinese Christians who believed that the answer to China’s problems was not just in instituting the forms of democracy but in building a foundation of faith.  “Yuan began to read the Bible… and became baptized in August 1990.”  He came to believe that “the root of democracy is the spirit of Christ.”  His River Elegy, he came to think, “was superficial because it left out ‘the most important thing, the core of Western civilization, which is Christianity.  Without that you cannot have democracy or human rights.’”  (Aikman 2003 p247)

Yuan then created a new multi-part documentary, “Land of God,” (in English, China’s Confession) that reinterprets China’s history as a fall from God, starting in the Spring and Autumn period of 770-476 BC.  Its narrative presents a solution to the Chinese people for the difficult problem that God revealed Himself to mankind in the Middle East and not China, the most advanced and culturally sophisticated country in the world.  In fact, Yuan proposes, China had a foundation that could have led to God’s self-revelation in China, but fell away from its initial potential as “the ancient land of God where people believed in God, feared heaven, [and] obeyed the Tao.”  Now Yuan is engaged in a project called The Cross that “seeks to explain to ordinary Chinese what major contributions Christians have made to Chinese life in the past century or more,” relating Christianity to Chinese culture.

There seems to be in the Christianity of the educated Chinese an attempt to breathe transcendental meaning into the Chinese project.  Scholar Liu Xaiofeng, who has written titles like Salvation and Freedom and Toward the Truth of the Cross, has noted that “throughout Chinese history the Chinese have lacked any kind of transcendent religious character at their root” and “Chinese culture has lacked the religious temperament of love and fear… and the moral sense of the tragic.”  By the end of the Cultural Revolution China had experienced not the Nietzschean transvaluation of values but the utter annihilation of values.  China was reduced once more to the culture of the teenage gang, the “harsh baseline to which all collapsing civilizations return,” according to Lee Harris.  This is great fun for teenage boys, but utterly humiliating for everyone else.  It is the genius of the West that it has, in its separation of powers and its mediating institutions, developed a defense-in-depth against the kamikaze of the teenage gang.  From the point of few of the Chinese demoralized after two hundred years of Troubles, the most intriguing institution in the western package is Protestant Christianity.  It is popular, yet it is hierarchical.  It is emotional, yet it is practical.  It is transcendent, yet it is down to earth.  And now they have found for themselves a particularly Chinese role within worldwide Christianity.  They have a dream of taking the Gospel “back to Jerusalem.”  They experience Christianity as a westward moving phenomenon that originated in the Middle East, moved west to Europe, then to America, and then to East Asia.  Now it is the turn of the Chinese people to complete the westward movement and bring Christianity to west Asia, evangelize the House of Islam, and return to Jerusalem.

Despite the skepticism of the elites, ordinary people demonstrate a pretty good instinct for that which benefits them.  They instinctively search for beliefs and the knowledge that solve their problems.  But humans have a less than stellar record in judging what is good for other people.  The program that humans construct for the “rest of the world” commonly gets tangled up with what they think is best for themselves.  The beginning of wisdom to entertain the possibility that other people might possibly possess the competence, or readily develop the competence, to judge what is best for themselves without the constant supervision of enlightened elites.   Our modern elites have regaled an uncaring world with the frightful possibility that a bigoted and hypocritical religious subculture is engaged upon a campaign to destroy creativity and alternative lifestyles.  This is, to say the least, improbable, first of all because the enthusiastic Christians of the Religious Right really don’t understand what it is that the creative classes want, and not understanding are therefore hardly in a position to develop and execute a strategy to destroy them, and secondly because the creative classes, by natural right, occupy all the positions of trust and power in the world of cultural production and transmission.  This relegates the bigoted and the superstitious to a subcultural redoubt.  They can succeed in maintaining a subculture, in tension with the general elite culture, but cannot hope to take over under normal conditions.  It is a monstrous canard to pretend that the cramped and limited subculture of the lower middle class can ever succeed in toppling the best and brightest.  It is true, of course, that ordinary people may elect fascists to power, as they did after World War I when the reigning elites failed to sustain a working polity and economy for them.  But this should be a warning to the elites rather than an excuse: fascism is the wages of elite failure.  Anyway, fascism in its Italian and German versions enjoyed widespread support from the elites.  Fascism wanted to control and dominate bourgeois culture and commerce; the elites were all in favor of that.  Unfortunately, fascism lost.  So history had to be rewritten to show that the enlightened elites were really against it all along.

| <<prev | 1 | 2 | (3) | 4 | next>> |

print view

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill