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Frontline/World
Tuesday, June 24, at 10 p.m.
on WKAR-23
Frontline/World Looks at Christianity in China
A massive wave of Christianity has been sweeping across China in recent years, and the Chinese ruling party, officially atheist, is now struggling to figure out how to control it. In Jesus in China, a joint project of Frontline /World and the Chicago Tribune, airing Tuesday, June 24, at 10 p.m., reporter Evan Osnos investigates one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the world, and how it could potentially transform China at this explosive moment in the country’s development.
Osnos travels first to Henan province, a place known as the “Bethlehem of China,” home to China’s largest population of Christians. Here, members of an “underground” Christian church tell Osnos that, until recently, they worshipped in caves high above some farmers’ fields in Henan to avoid detection by the government. Walking through the weeds and woods where they used to pray, church members publicly describe for the first time the extremes to which they went to conceal their services: “The cave on the left was our Bible classroom. The one on the right was the prayer cave for 5:00 in the morning. The children came here, too.”
“This is what it’s like when a church is underground,” says Zhang Yinan, a historian of Chinese Christianity. Zhang and others say they are coming forward because the government is now signaling a new openness to their faith. But the dangers remain: In an underground “house church,” Osnos meets the wife of a well-known Chinese Christian whose husband has been jailed at least five times in recent years. “He was sentenced to seven years in prison the first time,” she says of her husband, Zhang Rongliang. “The second time, 11 months. The third time, three years in a labor camp....”
In the last few years, the Chinese government has arrested hundreds of house church leaders and, in some cases, destroyed the house churches themselves. Still, the Chinese government recognizes that its homegrown Christian movement can no longer simply be branded an instrument of foreign influence and suppressed. Last year in Beijing, the government raised the profile of its “official,” state-controlled Christian Church, opening a multimillion-dollar “megachurch,” complete with coffee bar. A senior member of China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs, Ma Yuhong, tells Osnos that the Party is embracing the religion that it once rejected. “In the old days, there used to be this saying, ‘One more Christian is one less Chinese.’ Nobody says that anymore. ... It’s no longer a foreigner’s religion; it’s now something that belongs to the people.”
At the same time, Ma Yuhong makes clear that the government will still closely watch the ever-shifting line between church and state in today’s China. “You can’t make use of religion to interfere in the country’s administration,” Yuhong says. “So if anyone tries to use religion as an excuse to create divisions or to sponsor terrorist activities, that will not be tolerated.”
published: June 24, 2008
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