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Report
on the visit of the General Secretary of the Bible Society in
Northern Ireland to China,
14
- 24 NOVEMBER 2003
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The
General Secretary of the Bible Society in Northern Ireland was
invited as part of a delegation to visit China at the invitation of
the Chinese Government. This followed a series of contacts between
the United Bible Societies and Chinese Church representatives
culminating in a visit to the UK in November 2002. Then,
representatives of the Chinese Government's State Administration for
Religious Affairs (SARA), the China Christian Council and of the
Three Self Patriotic Movement (the officially registered Protestant
Church) had visited Bible Societies in England and Scotland.
The
purpose of our visit was to reinforce the positive relationships
that have been built up with China through the United Bible
Societies' support for the Amity Printing Press, to see how the
interaction of State and Church is contributing to the growth of
Christianity in the country, and to discern as far as is possible in
a short visit, the nature of any difficulties being experienced by
Christians, either in registered or unregistered worship centres.
China
is rapidly opening up to the West with huge levels of economic
growth that are reflected by construction work, the volume of car
manufacture and incredible increase in the use of modern technology -
for example in the number of mobile phones being registered monthly.
Clearly the Government wishes to present China as a major force on
the world stage and wishes to demonstrate that it is concerned to
protect the interests of minorities. Our delegation was one of twelve
to be received this year from different countries, and SARA officials
have recently been to Canada.
Our
programme comprised a number of elements:
We
were also taken to visit a massive Buddhist shrine that was created
with Government funding as a tourist attraction, and to the 264-floor
Pearl of Asia broadcasting tower. Throughout our programme we were
accompanied by Mr Liu, a SARA director from the Department of Foreign
Relations, and by Brother Lo from the Beijing Christian Council, who
both acted as translators. The programme involved 9 flights and
transfers to five different hotels.
Reflections
The
formal and informal discussions with SARA were illuminating, not
just for their content but for their apparent openness. We were
invited to question officials at all levels to the point of
exhaustion and were provided with a Chinese-English booklet of SARA
regulations for the conduct of religious activities. SARA recognises
five religious groupings and expressed a desire to act benevolently
towards each on an equal basis: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, the
Three-Self Protestant Church and the Catholic Church. Registration of
worship centres is recommended to ensure legal protection as a
minority grouping. We were given Government figures of registered
Christians, churches and meeting points although there was some
interesting recognition of the fact that the number of Bibles printed
at Amity (32 million) now exceeds the official number of believers
(16m Protestants/ 6 million Catholics). SARA is prepared to wait for
unregistered 'underground' churches to register as SARA believes it
is in their interest for their protection. They stated that they do
not have the desire or the resources to 'police' the Christian
church, and believe Christians to be a power for good within the
country. (Elsewhere we heard of a businessman building a church
alongside a new factory to encourage the building up of a Christian
workforce and of prayers being offered by workers that a new manager
to be appointed would be a Christian). SARA stated that:
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They
were committed to investigate any incident where Christians claimed
to be experiencing persecution and one provincial director of the
Religious Affairs Bureau in Yunnan told us of local officials being
summoned and carpeted for closing down a church, and told to
apologise to the church leaders. (He was aware that this matter had
been covered in BBC news).
- Stories
of Christians being persecuted were exaggerated by foreign missions
to support their own agenda;
- Registered
churches were under no restriction as to who they distributed Bibles
to. SARA believed that Bibles should be sold through the churches,
rather than bookshops, so that they would not attract VAT.
The
meetings with Church leaders indicated the combined role of the
Christian Council / TSPM at national and local level: the Council
takes responsibility for publishing while the TSPM seems more
concerned with administrative/development issues. They work extremely
closely with SARA in a relationship that seems to be mutually beneficial.
The
visits to the theological seminaries were encouraging as
evidence of progress in training pastors for the Church (130 students
on one campus). This training is vital to equip what is a rapidly
growing Church.
The
church visits allowed us to worship with 800 - 900 others at
an 8.00am Service in Beijing where numbers, then and at the second
service at 10.30am, required arrival an hour beforehand to avoid
sitting in the overflow area; an older congregation was followed by a
younger more family-oriented composition. We shared in six short
Scripture readings. At 9.30 I witnessed two queues - one to get into
the church and one outside to purchase Scriptures. We were told that
300 Scriptures had been sold the previous Sunday. The following
Sunday we travelled for almost two hours to a church on a
mountainside where, as on this occasion, the people worshipped
outside when possible due to their being insufficient space for a
congregation of 200. The Service was preceded by a cooked meal that
was prepared on the spot (the Maio only eat two meals daily),
discussions with the elders (one of whom had walked over 20 km to
attend) and singings by a colourfully dressed choir and also by our
group in reply. We presented three boxes of Mandarin Bibles. The Maio
Old Testament will be completed within months - benefit for one of
the elders who does not understand Mandarin. All of the other
churches that we visited during our stay were large, and there was
evidence of growing congregations in sharp contrast to the West. At
our church meetings and visits we were told of church closures
during the Cultural Revolution, the new beginnings from around 1985,
and how house meetings which had begun with a handful of people were
growing rapidly.
The
Amity Printing Press at Nanjing has been key to Bible
production and distribution in China, and its work was widely
praised. It employs 320 local people and produces up to 10,000 Bibles
per day, mostly in the 1919 Union translation, although the Today's
Chinese Version is growing in popularity among the young. In
Shanghai I purchased a PVC-covered Union edition for the equivalent
of £0.58 pence, reflecting the low incomes even in the cities
(750 Huan / £57.70 per month was considered a good salary, much
higher than in rural areas; the minimum Nanjing wage is set at 550
Huan/£42.30 per month.) The low cost of Bibles is made possible
by the provision by the United Bible Societies of huge quantities of
printing paper.
Summary
This
was a most instructive experience, revealing an inter-connection
between Church and State that appeared open and harmonious.
The
Chinese clearly wish to have ownership of any Bible-based initiative
within the country, and this will be essential if it is to succeed. I
interpreted this as a need to assert their own cultural identity and
to place distance between them and the efforts of foreign
missionaries of the past whom they regarded as a dominating influence
and irrelevant to a strong nation.
Other
Questions
Our
delegation was interested to explore as far as was possible the
relationship between the registered and unregistered churches. It
appeared that unregistered churches were being ignored by SARA. It
was not possible to establish to what extent the apparently neutral
behaviour of SARA officials was mirrored in the rural countryside
which makes up the vast proportion of the land area, or how
effectively the Government was able to achieve consistency of
application of regulations on Religion. We did not have an
opportunity to either visit unregistered churches/meeting points or
speak to their leaders. Clearly, in such a vast country, there is
every prospect that rural communities which are remote from the big
cities may have a very different religious environment. In the cities
it was encouraging to see churches full of worshippers, and plans for
new churches taking shape.
The
future
China
is changing at a rapid pace, particularly in the cities. This is
encouraging as, in the face of economic growth and increased contact
with the West, it is more rather than less
likely that religious freedom will grow within China in years to
come. China's hosting of the Olympic games in 2008 is seen as a
pivotal moment, both within and outside China, as the Government
seeks to present a progressive nation where freedoms are protected,
whose people wish to do business with the West. While our visit was
only superficial and restricted to only the most prosperous part of
the country there was much to thank God for. It would be our prayer
that the freedom and harmony that we witnessed would be experienced
throughout that country by all its people
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John
Doherty |
15
December 2003 |
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