Property of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; unedited;

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Michael Cromartie: Welcome to the Ethics and Public Policy Center. My name is Michael Cromartie, and I’m Vice President of the Center. We wanted to put a little intimate group together for a lunch with David, and sixty of his closest friends showed up. We’re quite delighted about the response, and of course, grateful to have David here.

Before I introduce David Aikman, I want to tell you some ground rules and call your attention to some of the literature on your seats. You’ll see a Center Conversation with Samuel Huntington about religion and international affairs that you will find of interest. You will also see a list of all the participants here today, and then also, you are cordially invited to our annual William E. Simon lecture on October 24, 2002, and you’ll see the invitation on your seat also. George Weigel will be giving a lecture and there will be a reception following it. His lecture is on Moral Clarity in a Time of War. George will be addressing some of the controversies related to modern just war theory and our current crisis. So feel free to join us on Thursday, October 24, at the Mayflower Hotel.

David Aikman has been a senior foreign correspondent for Time magazine for over 23 years, and after he left Time, he wrote this book called Great Souls. If you don’t have a copy, David has a lot of copies that he can get you a good deal on. After he finished Great Souls, he became a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Until recently, he went over to China and spent three months investigating the state of the church in China. What’s most interesting about that is that David had wonderful access to a lot of sources that we will hear about today. That’s one of the reasons that we’re delighted to have David Aikman with us today.

Welcome to you all. David, welcome to you.

David Aikman: Thank you, Michael. I want to thank Michael and Hillel Fradkin, the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for being hosts not only to distinguished China watchers from all over town, but to some of my fellow hacks—journalists who are a part of Gegrapha, our global fellowship of Christians in journalism that meets once a month for lunch. Michael very kindly decided to host China-watchers and Gegraphites today. So, thank you very much. It’s a great delight and great honor to be here.

I have had a chance to speak about China before at EPPC; it’s a very good place, very hospitable, and the people who come generally know probably a lot more about China than I do.

The trip I took is or was a little unusual because I spent three months nominally based in Hong Kong, although I spent very little time in Hong Kong, essentially crisscrossing China, meeting with people some of whom I knew already from previous visits to China, some of whom I met for the first time, to try to answer these questions, "What is the status of Christianity in China? What is happening to it? And more importantly, what is happening to China because of Christianity?" People who call themselves Christians are obviously very interested in Christian churches anywhere in the world, but I spent a great deal of my adult life either living in China or in Hong Kong or reporting on China so I am probably more familiar of Sinologists and reporters about China than I am with the sort of evangelical community as such. And I wanted to investigate in a way through the viewpoint of somebody interested primarily in China. Obviously, the fact that I’m a Christian has something to do with it, but it’s a very interesting story.

I went there with about three broad questions in mind, the first is: It’s generally been accepted that Christianity has been expanding very fast in China, probably from the late 1970s onwards, certainly from the 1980s. I wanted to find out whether that growth was still continuing and whether it had expanded beyond its initial base in the countryside. I wanted to find out what the attitudes of the authorities were or are/is/was. I wanted to see how the authorities were relating to this Christian phenomenon both at the national and local levels. And, I think a more subtle and harder question to ask and to answer which I felt is very important is "Is Christianity changing China?"

You may say, Well, Christianity generally changes most communities where it becomes influential, and that of course is true. But China is a very big country. China has been invaded and conquered by numerous people but there is an essence of Chinese culture which has steadfastly resisted almost everybody who has tried to deal with it. And even though you might argue that well, intellectually China was conquered by Marxism-Leninism—which it was—and the regime that now runs China calls itself Communist and claims to base its legitimacy on this bearded European whose face appears in Tiananmen Square once a year, nevertheless, it’s quite apparent to everybody today that hardly anybody in China today is a Communist! I spent all my time in China trying to find Communists, and they are very hard to find. Lots of party members—party membership is like being a member, with no disrespect to this organization, of the Rotary Club, or the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or all kinds of other noble civic organizations that in some parts of the United States don’t require membership but where membership in these organizations is helpful to you at the local or business level. That, in a sense, is what the Communist Party in China has become.

I had some great advantages when I started this trip. I sold my house. I didn’t have a job—and I still don’t have a job—but I decided that this was such an important story, no matter what happened afterwards in my life, I really wanted to report it; I would turn it into a book. I had some advantages because neither of our guests today, Mark O’Keefe, a fine reporter who at the time was at the Oregonian, he and I visited China in 1998. Though I had met members of China’s underground house church community before, this was the first time leaders of the major house church networks—and I’ll come to describe what they are in a moment—had agreed to meet with two foreign reporters on camera as it were. We took cameras—the Oregonian sent a professional photographer, and I took pictures—we had photographs of them with their own names. Previously, it was some mission newsletter from the "Something Or Other" Mission Organization and it was "Brother X Is in Trouble in Hanong Province." Well, who is Brother X? You want something more concrete than that if you really want to know what’s going on at the grassroots. So these people, to their great credit, and at considerable risk to themselves, identified themselves, and spoke about their lives, and that was sort of a breakthrough. At the time, they issued the first public statement by any network of house church leaders to the government and to the official Christian organizations for Protestants, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), basically saying, "Stop harassing us. We’re as Chinese as you are. We are patriotic. We love the country. You are stupid if you don’t realize the fact that by being good to Christians you are actually being good to China. Essentially, we pay taxes, we’re patriotic, what a stupid thing you are doing trying to harass us."

Well, that made an impact like a lead balloon in terms of any official response. On this trip, I brought that topic up with an official from the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and I said to him, "You are stupid, silly. You should reach out to these people. They are the majority of Christians in China! By pretending they don’t exist, you are making yourselves look very silly because everyone knows they do, and you are missing out on things that could benefit your own organization, like a little bit of theological realism and energy and vibrancy. So, I had contacts from the house church leaders I had met back in 1998, and I had been in touch with in 1999, and then again in 2000. I had kept up with them, met them on two more occasions in different parts of China, and I have been in touch with people who flit in and out of China, developing all kinds of underground seminaries and stuff like that. So, I started with a great deal of advantage in terms of access. The access I got throughout the three months was quite extraordinary. I got to places I didn’t know existed. And I met people who turned out to be extraordinarily interesting and important. And I found out things about China—not only the church in China—that I certainly wouldn’t have found out without the special access that I got.

My project was to learn not only about the so-called underground church where I had sort of head-start, but also about the Three-Self Movement, with which I had been in contact before, and a group I had no previous contact with: the Catholic Patriotic Association. I’ll speak a little bit about China’s Catholics in a moment because it’s a rather interesting twist to the whole story. Everywhere I went, doors opened. I cannot say that I was the first Westerner to visit all these places, because I wasn’t, but I was the first Westerner to go to some of these places and certainly to meet some of these people. First of all, one of the things that was really striking, when you talk about the underground church, it sort of has a vaguely cloak-and-dagger-ish connotation to it. You think of people meeting in dark alleyways and so forth; occasionally I did meet people in dark alleyways, and I would sometimes go into and out of certain locations crouched down in the backseats so people wouldn’t see my big nose and my white skin. It was often the case of going into and leaving a place in the dark so that the locals wouldn’t see me, but by and large, when you say "underground," what you really mean is "not approved by the government." It doesn’t necessarily doesn’t mean that the government doesn’t know about it. Chinese government and I guess what we really mean is the Public Security Bureau and the Ministry of State Security, the Public Security Bureau is more like the FBI for anti-crime, and the Ministry of State Security is more like what used to be the Fourth and Fifth Divisions of the KGB, or FBI Counterintelligence and the CIA. So the Ministry of State Security is particularly nosy about contacts by Chinese with foreigners that have not been officially approved. Those are the people who would be quite interested to know about what I was doing had they had the chance to be informed about it. So, underground really means a variety of different things. I’ll give you some examples of really underground stuff and then not really underground stuff which we in the West might consider underground and which the Chinese might.

One evening in Beijing, I was picked up by a Chinese friend—brother, Christian—and some of his friends, and driven out about an hour and ten minutes to what I thought was a rural location outside of Beijing. In fact, it was technically within the municipality limits of Beijing. It was a small van, not as big as an SUV over here. We stopped at the gates of a fairly large compound which were chained together. The driver got out, undid the chains, opened the gates, we drove in. Then the gate was closed and chained up again. This was an underground Christian music conservatory—completely secret. In fact, the people organizing it had paid local night watchmen to tell everybody that this was an English school and if anybody paid any attention or started nosing around, they would said, "Listen, we are Communist party members, these are just people studying English," which they were, amongst other things. This music conservatory had, when I visited it, about 50 students from about 19 different provinces in China, all of them leaders of church worship in various house church communities. They had agreed to be locked up—literally—for about a year, no permission to leave the campus—this compound—at all, and they were being trained in basics like sight-reading, keyboard, choral signing, composition, history of music, by one of the top conductors of one of the best symphony orchestras in Beijing, who was a Christian, and by about seven other top musicians around the city of Beijing who were also Christian, and by one teacher who was not a Christian but was sympathetic to Christianity.

For one year, these people were separated from their families, from their friends, from everybody they knew, to be instructed in music from the point of view of leading Christian worship. I thought, "This is unbelievable; this is going on under the noses of the regime. Nobody knew anything about it. It would be closed down instantly if anybody had a clue, and they had some clever little tricks to throw people off. Early each academic year, this is the second year that it was going, the organizer of the school who incidentally is the conductor who did the first live performance of Handel’s Messiah in Beijing since 1949, early in the year he would bring in friends from the military also Christians, who would run a one-week military training program in the music conservatory. I said, "Why do you want military training for future musicians?" "Oh," he said, "it’s good for discipline; you are teaching people to obey authority, but when people passing by the conservatory, see us all in khakis, marching up and down, and saluting, and doing all kinds of military things, they think, Oh, this is another secret patriotic military association, and we won’t ask too many questions." It was a very clever disguise, but it had some practical pedagogical implications too. So that was one secret, totally underground thing. I think I was the first Westerner to visit there.

Or, take another place. Some of you have seen the move, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, there is a famous scene in that where the protagonist is having a fight with one of the villains in a sort of an incredible bamboo forest, jumping around from tree to tree. Imagine that bamboo forest, ten times more beautiful in a gorgeous mountain setting, about a two hours drive outside the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province. I’ll come to Wenzhou, the most Christianized city in the Chinese speaking world. And you drive up a concrete, one-lane pathway, and you get out of a van, which had tinted windows so the locals wouldn’t see the foreigner arriving, and you walk up this incredible stone pathway with a wonderful mountain stream coming down, absolutely gorgeous location! It’s the sort of place where somebody who lives in McLean would instantly buy a country house if they knew about it. And when you come to the top, there was this large house with thirty-eight students between the ages of 18 and 26, all at the particular time in a worship session, music worship—they ere singing. This was a top-secret, an underground seminary. They have teachers from all over China, prominent Christians from various house church groups that come to meet them. Nobody knows about it. The local villages are all Christian so things like electricity bills are paid for by friends, and again, you’ve got these young people who are willing to commit their lives for three or six months to a year at a time, to be taught about the Bible, about prayer, about church history, about basic theology because what they want to do is evangelize China. They want to be teachers of Christianity in China, and they want to change their country. Or, another underground place in a city—I won’t say where it was—but this was an urban underground seminary, about thirty kids this time. Very difficult circumstances; only allowed out of the campus maybe once a month in groups, not allowed to make phone calls except seven or eight blocks away. Not allowed to use cell phones. Neighbors are so suspicious that they aren’t allowed to sing, because people might have reported them to the authorities. But, what comes out of the fact of finding young people willing to live underground lives for extended periods of time, is a level of commitment to Christian evangelize, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere in the world. And, that’s at the underground level.

Now, let’s talk about something that’s technically underground but really isn’t. The city of Wenzhou, which I mentioned before, sometimes called China’s Jerusalem. Wenzhou was first evangelized by missionaries from the China Inland Mission founded by Hudson Taylor in the 19th century. It had a number of prominent and very effective Bible teachers in the pre-communist era, but when the Cultural Revolution clamped down on Christianity all over China, the citizens of Wenzhou got their act together better than anywhere else, and they managed to maintain totally underground cell groups with visiting preachers and so forth as early at the late 1960s with the result that when China began to open up to foreign trade and business was encouraged, the citizens of Wenzhou proved unusually—well, I shouldn’t say this was a product of Christianity—but the citizens of Wenzhou which is a port city, proved unusually adept at retail business. Wenzhou is one of the retail capitals of China. So, the combination of business acumen, relative openness after the Cultural Revolution, meant that from 1980s onwards, the church in Wenzhou, in Zhejiang, grew very fast. I’ve heard various estimates. The minimum estimate is about 14 percent of the citizens of Wenzhou are Christian. I would say it’s possibly as high as 30 percent. Now, what’s my basis for that? First of all, Wenzhou business people are all over the world. I have met Wenzhou Chinese Christians in Barcelona, in Florence; I have friends of mine who visited Wenzhou Chinese Christians in Bucharest, in Budapest, in Berlin, in Moscow, in Habarask, as well as all over in China. Wenzhou Chinese Christians have taken Max Weber’s principle to its logical conclusion, and they are using business to spread Christianity not just all over China, but Chinese communities all over the world. If you drive along a freeway, and I mean a freeway, I don’t mean some rinky-dink little urban street in Wenzhou, and you see huge buildings with big red crosses. Now, these are not official churches. They are not built by the Three-Self Patriotic Movement with government funds, but they are built by Wenzhou business people. They are gigantic; some of them are as big as European cathedrals, and they are tolerated by the government. They do not have to register with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. All they have to do is register as a religious building with the municipal authority of Wenzhou city, and every now and then some spook comes in from the Ministry of State Security to make sure they aren’t advocating the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party, but couldn’t care less whether they are preaching evangelical theology or liberal theology or anything else.

So, in Wenzhou, there is a great deal of freedom, compared with the rest of China, for people to have churches openly. What there is not freedom to do, and that is why they have to go out to the countryside of Zhejiang province, is to train young Christians in the way that Church leaders all over the world always like to see young Christians train. So, it’s a strange mixture. It’s not quite underground, and yet it’s clearly not fully open. Just to sum that up, that particular situation, I have a friend who’s a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai—Fudan is kind of the Harvard of Shanghai—he put it very well: "You know, there is no freedom in China, certainly not freedom for religion, but there is a lot of tolerance." And that is true, but sporadic tolerance, not universal tolerance. You go to another place sometimes called the Jerusalem of China… Well, Wenzhou is called the Jerusalem of China because there are so many Christians and Christianity is so public, but another part of China which has sometimes been called the Jerusalem of China because of the number of missionaries and Christians groups it’s generated is Hunan Province, now the biggest province in China ever since Chongqing was separated from Sichuan and became an independent municipality. If you go to Fungtrung County you’ll find it is—I don’t know what the analogy is—it’s kind of the Bible belt of China if there is such a thing. It’s the place where the biggest revival of Christian growth started in the late 1970s, and is still continuing. If you go to Fungtrong country, you’ll find the local authorities viciously anti-Christian. They want to arrest everybody they can. So, for example, "Brother Z" as he is sometimes called, Jiang Rung-Lian, his real name, has been acknowledged as the leader of the largest of the house church groups, the Funtrong Fellowship, is on the run from police. That hasn’t stopped him getting a false passport and traveling to Jerusalem, to the United States. The American Embassy knows exactly who he is, doesn’t mind if he comes into the embassy and asks for a razor and calls himself Mr. Wong. "Mr. Wong, we know who you are," he has a visa, etc. etc. By the way, the American Embassy is very good about that. Let’s these guys out to the right place, usually knows who they are. But, Jiang Run-Lian is on the run, and several other leaders of the Funtrong Fellowship because of the local persecution in Funtrong County. This is bizarre because Funtrong County, which has given its name to largest of basically five major protestant house church networks, has been a dynamo for Christian growth in China. There’s Funtrong in Hunan province, then Tongue-Her, also in Hunan Province, another very large group—also called the China Gospel Fellowship. I’ll come to those in a moment because 34 top leaders of the China Gospel Fellowship were kidnapped by the Eastern Lightning, a strange and vicious quasi-Christian cult back in April, and I interviewed several of these people after they got out and I’ll come to Eastern Lightning in a second. There are two groups in Anwhey province and then there is Wenzhou, maybe larger than the others. Wenzhou is semi-public because there is overlap of the house church leadership of Wenzhou and the people who run these "tolerated" large churches. It’s gray area. There’s another group that’s broken up—the so-called "Born Again Movement," some people call it a cult, some people don’t. We can get into the theology later on if you like. Those are the largest protestant house churches in China.

How many? This is the questions that sinologists and Christian observers of China have been asking for years: How many Christians are there in China? And the answer is: nobody knows! The authorities don’t know. They have made a stab at it from time to time. The public security bureau made a stab at it about three years ago, and said they thought there were about 35 million Christians in China. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which is of course under the Religious Affairs Bureau, the Religious Affairs Bureau is run by an atheist—they claim 15 million Christians. Of course, they confine their number to the people who go the official open churches. A figure that was leaked from the State Statistical Bureau in 1993 or 1994 came up with about 70 million Protestants and about 12 million Catholics. I think that’s a fairly realistic assessment. My guess is that number of people in the five large house church groups comes to about 35 million, and probably almost as many are part of other house church groups that are independent or much smaller in numbers. I’m comfortable for Protestants around 80 million altogether. For Catholics, I’m more comfortable with about 12 million; that’s a figure I’ve heard from underground and official Catholics.

Let me touch on Catholicism, of which I’m not an expert either in the English language or in Chinese, but I’ll do my best. In China, after 1949, the Communist party made an effort to control Roman Catholicism the same way they were controlling Protestantism; they founded something called the Catholic Patriotic Association. They basically said, ‘We’ll allow you to go church, but we’re going to run the seminaries, and you aren’t going to have any contact with Rome, we’re going to chose the bishops, we’re going to ordain the clergy, etc." So, you have the bizarre situation when after Vatican ii, the only national Catholic Church in the world that was still conducting masses in Latin was in China, and that lasted until the 1980s when the Chinese grew up a bit and realized that it didn’t make much sense to cut themselves off from the main body of Catholicism. Well, now you have a situation, and I hear this both from Chinese Catholic Officials and from Vatican Officials outside China, we’re got something like 66 Catholic bishops, officially approved by the Catholic patriotic Association, about 2/3 of those have secretly sworn loyalty to the Pope, and are recognized by the Pope as official Catholic Bishops, and the authorities in China know this, and can’t do anything about it. You have a problem though because during the period of intense persecution in the Counter Revolution, the Pope at the time authorized the ordination of underground priests, and indeed underground bishops, so now you have a situation where in some parts of China, you have an officially approved Catholic bishop, who is also officially approved by the Vatican, and you’ve got underground Catholic bishops who have arguments with the official bishops because they kind of got their start when the Catholic Church was terribly badly persecuted and now they are saying, Why should the official guy have more authority than I do? Sometimes, there’s a gentleman in Hong Kong who has to travel in to China to try to sort out some of these squabbles. The Catholic Church in China is doing quite well. Let me just give a brief anecdote, well, two brief anecdotes. I met with a young Catholic lay person, a lady, in Shanghai, through a Protestant Christian friend, and how had she become a Catholic? She was a secular person, not from a Christian or Catholic family, living in Shanghai—how would a person like this become a Catholic in China? Well, guess what she did? She got interested in religion and she looked up the Shanghai yellow pages for churches, and the only church that returned her phone call was the local catholic church, and the local Catholic Church returned her phone call, said "if you are interested in Catholicism, come to our beginners study," which she did. She went for s series of teachings, and at the end of few months, she became baptized and a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

Take another case: a hotel I like to stay at in Beijing, a lot of foreigners do, is the Jainquoll. Jainquoll was one of the first Western hotels, close to the friendship store, very close to one of the few Starbucks in the City, and used to have a lot of Americans. Since 9/11, all the Americans left, and now you have a bunch of chain-smoking Europeans tourists who volubly discuss their trips in Spanish, Italian, and German in the lobby. Well, most Chinese hotels—if they are four or five-star—have paid orchestras or musicians; it’s rather nice. You go into a lobby of the Garden Hotel in … and there’s a sixty-member symphony orchestra playing Bize or something like. Well, they have pianists, and every self-respecting hotel in China has two Filipino women singing in the bar in the evening, but here we are in the Jainquoll hotel, it’s three in the afternoon, and I’m talking to somebody, and I say, "There’s a pianist playing, and she’s playing Amazing Grace," so I listen, then she starts playing, "Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God," and then she is playing, "I am the bread of life," a whole series of protestant/roman Catholic charismatic worship tunes are being played on the piano of this totally secular hotel by a young lady. So I go up to her and I didn’t want to make a big fuss about it, so I say to her, "You’re a sister, aren’t you?" And so we get talking. She says she is, and I find out that she’s been a Christian four years, and she was a Roman Catholic. There were two things that were interesting to me about this: First of all, it was the first example of a Catholic believer in a public environment clearly playing Christian music. Well, Europeans wouldn’t know Amazing Grace if they were hit in the backside with it! But, she was clearly playing Christian music. The second thing is how she had become a Catholic. What was it about the Catholic Church among the different groups of Christianity that had attracted her? She also had been drawn into a legal Catholic official study group and had been baptized and so on.

Driving around Beijing, a taxi driver has a picture of Jesus on a medallion. I say, ‘Why do you have that?" "Well, I go to such-and-such church, which is not a house church, it’s an official church?" "Are your parents believers?" "Yes, I’m a fourth generation Christian, and we go to the Something-or-other Three-Self Patriotic church." So, at the public level, you’ll find far more people openly saying they are Christian believers, or Catholics—mostly Protestants, but certainly a large number of Catholics too. Which leads to another question, and an answer to the third question that I had in mind when I went to China, is, "how is Christianity really affecting China?"

First of all, you’ve got the fact that the growth of Christians in China in the 1970s and 1980s was largely in the countryside—Hunan Province, for example, often through outside foreign preachers and missionaries who came in. I’ll come to theology in a moment, because that’s related. But in the last four or five years, and this is brand new—I have not experienced this before—there’s been the growth of huge numbers of cell groups of Christian believers in Beijing and Shanghai—completely illegal! I met a sociologist at Peking University—Bay Da—who had done a study of one district of Beijing, the Chaoyang district in Beijing, which is slightly more upscale university district part of Beijing, maybe equivalent to the Georgetown area of Beijing. She found out that in that district alone, there were 20,000 groups of people studying religion. Now, they weren’t all Christian, but most of them were, and the vast majority would be Protestant evangelical.

Chinese universities, probably about 17 or 18 now, have started things called "Institute for the Study of Christianity." Secular universities, secular departments. Why are they doing this? Because they realize that there’s something about the history of the West connected with Christianity. The West has dynamism, growth, a sort of outward approach to life that has to be connected to Christianity, and they want to know what it is. I asked the organizer of one of these Institutes at People’s University, "Why are you studying this?" "Because, we realized there’s a profound impact of Christianity on culture, and we in China are very interested in the effect that Christianity may have on our own nation." I was polite and asked, "When people ask you if you are a Christian, what is your reply?" And he said, "Oh, people are always asking me that. A German theologian told me to answer this way, ‘Not yet.’" Of course, he was. The same professor in Shanghai said, "What is the attitude of these professors who study Christianity and culture towards Christianity?" He said, "They are overwhelmingly pro-Christian." And my final anecdote: I didn’t hear this story—my disclaimer for fellow hacks—from the person who said it, but I met that person, so I know who he is, and I trust him. At a dinner party in Beijing in February or March this year, one of the guests was Jiang Xia-Ming, currently the president of China, head of the Communist Party. Jiang Xia-Ming was asked, it being known that by September or October he would supposedly be giving up power, "President Jiang, if you could decree one thing for China, what would it be?" Jiang’s reply, "If I could decree one thing for China, and know that it would be carried out, it would be that China would adopt Christianity as its main religion." This is the president of China, the head of the Communist Party. Because they understand that of all the world views, the philosophical world views, that you put up on the wall over the last five hundred years, the Christian world view has been most tolerant to scientific growth, to trade, to cultural freedom, to all the good things of civilized life that the Chinese as a consensus now wish to adopt for their own country. So I leave that with you as a teaser, although there’s many more things I could say, and I don’t want to take up too much more time with monologue. I’ve been reminded that it’s time for Q&A.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you David. I’m delighted with your report today. One would have thought that you might have found some horrific stories. I’m glad to be optimistic today.

David Aikman: There are horrific stories, but one of the things that is happening is particularly since the party meeting on religion in December 2001, the consensus at the local level is that the leadership of China in Beijing does not want to crush Christianity.

Michael Cromartie: That’s new.

David Aikman: That’s new. And not only that, but religion is not a bad thing. That doesn’t stop local bureaucrats from viciously attacking house church groups especially when those groups are conducting teaching, seminary-type teaching. I certainly met people who had been beaten up, but it’s not the rule, currently.

Rich ( ): Actually, you took the words right out of my mouth. I’m pleased to hear about the optimism, but the perception that we have here is that it is so un-free for people to worship there, that they are having a hard time.

David Aikman: Well, let’s put it this way. The strange twilight zone of freedom—it’s not free, but in many cases it’s tolerated. It’s not freedom, but it’s tolerance. And I put it this way: the authorities have sort of nudged and winked at the Christians, and have said, "We pretend not to notice if you pretend not to do what you’re doing." If the authorities really wanted, they could root out in most parts of Beijing and Shanghai, many of these groups. You’ve now got Bible studies of theatre producers, of playwrights, of high level cultural professionals who are studying Christianity. It’s all the way up through the society. Lee Pung’s son was baptized. Dung Show-Ping’s Dung-PU-Fung was baptized. Leo Show Shee’s three daughters were all baptized, not in China, but when they came overseas. You’ve already got the infiltration into the leadership amongst their children, of large numbers of believing Christians. This is something they have to deal with.

Don’t you think they talk about it with each other? "Hey Comrade Wu, what do you think about this? My son just came back from Stanford, and he’s going to church. He went to church there."

"Well, that’s funny you should say that. My daughter just came back from Berkeley and she’s the same way."

Michael Cromartie: David, might it be that it’s a privatized form of religion that is easily tolerable?

David Aikman: They hope it’s privatized. But they understand that you can’t privatize religion indefinitely.

Karin Finkler: Could you address groups like Lightning from the East and how the Christian groups are addressing that problem?

David Aikman: Yes, I’m sorry, thank you. I was going to address that. Lightning from the East is a strange, quasi-Christian cult. It started off from a group that was at one time Christian. It grew out of a group called "Witness Lee," sometimes called the Shouters, that’s how they are referred to in China both by the authorities and by the others. Witness Lee was an offshoot—no relation to Watchman Nee, but one of Watchman Nee’s protégées—and he developed a personality-based cult where some of his followers actually prayed to Witness Lee. From Witness Lee, from that group—the Shouters—came a fellow called Jaweh Shan, to whom the United States very kindly gave political asylum. He’s still here. Jaweh Shan has been conducting a vicious policy of kidnappings, murders, and beatings in China, targeting house church Christian leaders. And, in April 2002, this group kidnapped 34 leaders of the China Gospel Fellowship, held them for up to about 60 days; and in the process, brainwashed them; tried to seduce them with women; tried to bribe them, poisoned their water so they would become hallucinogenic. I mean, they are an unbelievably violent group. They’ve been doing this several years, and they are based in the United States. They have a website called "Godword.org." They are very nasty. And this is one of the few areas where the house church leaders have agreed to work with the authorities, because the authorities don’t like them either. I mean, this is the most serious threat to Protestant Christians since the Cultural Revolution, and yet it’s not a government-based threat.

Michael Cromartie: Is this also the group, David, that believes Jesus is coming back as a woman?

David Aikman: Yes, they believe Jesus has come back to Hunan Province as a 58-year-woman. Yes, it’s a cult.

Bill ….: My question is about the per capita growth in China. When we talk numeric growth, well, China’s been growing by leaps and bounds over the last decade. As a percentage of the population, has the church grown significantly?

David Aikman: Well, let’s take figures that most sinologists and Christian observers are agreed upon. In 1949, there were about 3 million Roman Catholics and about three-quarters of a million Protestants. Let’s round it out and call it 4 million people calling themselves Christians in 1949. The population in 1949 was about 450 million. Today, the population in China is about 1.3 billion, so it’s increased by about 2.3 times. If the population of the Christians is 80 million, you are talking about a 20 fold increase in the Christians population compared with a 2.5 fold increase in the overall population. Something is happening.

Amy: Under what guise did you go to China? Were you watched closely? Was there suspicion involved in the work you were doing?

David Aikman: A lot of people have prayed for this trip, and one of the things I’ve asked them to pray for was that I would be beneath the radar scope, and I was—for the entire period—until the end when I surfaced and I said, "I want to talk to your leaders." And until today. Nobody knew I was there; I got there on a 6-month multiple-entry tourist visa. I came and went. I was never followed. I had to be very careful. I was at a meeting in Quangdong Province which was raided two hours after I left, so there were a few squeakers. And this was a secret weapon. If you ever want to go to a country and get email without getting on an internet service provider, go to a pay phone, call the United States—pay phones are very seldom scrutinized—you can upload and download your email from any pay phone in the world. It’s a pocket mail composer.

Steve McFarland: David, thank you for going and for your report. It’s beneficial to have some first-hand information. Are non-governmental organizations arising? Specifically, Christians in social service and the possibility of prison ministry?

David Aikman: The answer is yes. The fellow who quoted Jiang Xemin about the future of Christianity in China is a fellow called Yon Ming-fu who was amongst other things the Russian interpreter for Moa Tse-Dung during Moa’s meeting with Khrushchev. He speaks quite good Russian. This fellow was put in charge of China Charities Foundation, which was China’s effort to allow NGOs to come into existence that could then acquire tax-free status for charitable purposes. One of the first organizations that they allowed to get tax-free receipts was CBN in China, the Christian group that is doing a lot of social services in different parts of China, well-approved by the authorities but also has contacts with non-official Christians. That is definitely happening. Ya Ming-Fu who visited the United States and met many of the foundations here understands very well the value of NGOs as the grease to make the wheels of society and social change take place without resorting solely to the political system.

Steve McFarland: And the China Charities Foundation remains in place?

David Aikman: Yes, they are growing, and now they have a law in place where you can get tax-free status for charitable work in China.

Les Roach: I have two questions. The first is sort of a social kind of question, in terms of the way Chinese Christians are living their lives. How do Chinese Christians live under the regime of the one-child policy? How have the different groups, both Protestant and Catholic, operated under that? And also, I suppose that question relates to the distinction between the state-approved Catholic versus the underground Catholic churches. There is sort of divergence at least in terms of their willingness to talk about the one-child policy, their approach to it pastorally?

David Aikman: That’s a good question. I did not meet any leader of the underground Catholic Church; I met leaders of the official Church who were willing to talk quite openly about the underground church. We talked about the one-child policy, and of course, they don’t like it, they disprove of it. But, in my experience, the one-child policy is fairly easy to get around. I met a number of people who had young children—children under five—two children. I said, "How did you do this?" And they said, "Oh, we just pay the fine!" Two thousand dollars, which is a lot in China. Either you bribe the official or you just pay for an exemption from the one-child policy. I’ve met many people who have done that. In some parts of China, it doesn’t seem to be particularly strongly implemented. Don’t ask me why, it’s just part of China.

Michael Cromartie: But, David, the follow-up to that, what happens if that person’s faith not causes them to pay the fine, but raise questions about the policy, which then becomes not only just a privatized fine, but a public faith…

David Aikman: Then you are running into trouble. You cannot publicly question government policy, even under the religious auspices. If you get up in your pulpit and say something about that, you’re going to be in trouble. No question about that. Anything that smacks of political dissent in the public arena will get you into trouble, but it’s rather like the Soviet Union in the late seventies where what you said at the kitchen table wouldn’t get you put into prison, as long as you didn’t say it publicly.

Michael Cromartie: Well, trouble’s coming then, don’t you think? Public implication of private faith will lead to trouble…

David Aikman: Yes, it could. It depends how it’s expressed. You could have the infiltration of Christian ideas into public policy debate but not calling them Christian ideas. There are very good reasons to argue against one-child policy beyond the obvious Christians one; one is you have a dangerous imbalance of gender in China. You have far too many men! This has already led to problems of bride-theft and kidnapping and the rise of prostitution with HIV going absolutely crazy in some part of China, all because of that.

Les Roach: As you negotiate and think about possibly writing a book about your experience, do you worry at all about exposing more about the underground churches in China than maybe the government may be aware?

David Aikman: Oh, I’m sure I will expose a lot more than what the government is aware, but I will protect the identities and the places and the people, except those who are already "outed" as it were, people who are already in the public arena. I will quote them, but I will not indicate where the secret seminary was, or where the secret music conservatory was in any way that could enable the authorities to uncover it.

Mike McManus: What about the Falun Gong movement? Why is that being so persecuted? To what extent are Christians still being persecuted?

David Aikman: Falun Gong is being persecuted primarily because they took the Communist Party by surprise. Back in 1998 they had a public demonstration in Beijing which is an absolutely no-no, and furthermore, nobody knew it was going to happen until it happened! They seriously embarrassed the government. Then they proceeded—courageously, from a human point of view—to hold a series of public demonstrations in places like Tiananmen Square, which were savagely cracked down upon, and they used the suppression of those demonstrations as kind of recruiting for dissidents in the religious framework. But I have to say that Falun Gong is very unpopular in China. There are very few people who say—including Christians—"Why is the government hitting these peaceful old ladies on the head in Tiananmen Square?" What the Christians believe, and what ordinary Chinese believe, is that it really is an evil cult. For example, unfortunately, one Falun Gong family killed a woman in a hope that she would have a quicker journey to heaven. You only need one of these incidences to kind of poison the water of what people think of Falun Gong. I’ve also heard from Chinese Christians—I won’t go into here—some very disturbing stories about Falun Gong practitioners and the control their have over their supporters. It’s not very nice.

How many Christians in prison? Golly, I don’t know. I would say less than the past. I would say, for example, a lot of the house church leaders I met this time had been in prison and out again since the first time I met them four years ago. Usually only for a period of a few months at a time; sometimes they got permission to turn a prison sentence into a sort of house arrest. You can buy your way out now. It’s totally corrupt. You can buy your way out of anything in China, including imprisonment for illegal religious meeting.

Jody Hassett: I have a variation on the same Falun Gong question. Because they are so much more provocative and media-savvy now,

David Aikman: The Chinese government has managed to persuade the vast majority of the Chinese people that Falun Gong is a vicious, wicked cult that makes people burn their children in a suicide burnings in Tiananmen Square, which is to overthrow peace and law and order in China. Most of the Christians I met had no good words to say about Falun Gong. When I would say to them, "Surely you don’t agree with beating up people," they would reply, "No, we don’t agree with that, but…." So, I think by now, the authorities have a very clear distinction in their mind between Falun Gong and other religious groups, including Christian groups. Early on, some people were worried that Christians would be tarred with the same brush [as Falun Gong]. Briefly, there’s a wonderful elderly Christian leader in Beijing who is semi-open. Every year he baptizes in public in a river about two-hours outside of Beijing. Anything up to three hundred Christians, they all became believers in house churches. He does this early in August, and I said, "Don’t the authorities ever stop you?" "Oh no," he said, "last year when we had the meeting, the police showed up, they looked at us, and they said, ‘You’re not Falun Gong are you?" And we said, "No" and they say, "Okay, that’s fine."

Jody Hassett: Have you seen human rights activists international who were there not necessarily

David Aikman: I haven’t been in much contact with the human rights community outside of China. A number of the Chinese human rights activists have become Christian. Several of the people on the most wanted list after Tiananmen Square in 1989 have become Christian. But I don’t detect, and I must admit that I haven’t looked at this very closely, a willingness or an interest by groups outside of China to focus upon religious freedom as part of the overall context of freedom in China.

Bill Newcott: In our country you talk a lot about the high percentage of people who call themselves Christians, but there’s always that suspicion that within that set of people who call themselves Christians, there’s a subset of people who truly are Christian. My question is, in China, you talk about people who call themselves Christian—is there a similar percentage? Is there a larger core of people who have that quality of experience?

David Aikman: Well, this is a generalization that anybody who’s had any contact with Christians in China would agree with. Of the people who call themselves Christian, the overwhelming majority are very ardent, evangelical types. Even if they’re Roman Catholic. There’s no question the degree of commitment, the seriousness of their faith, is way, way higher in China than it is in the United States.

Steve Smith: This generally hopeful presentation has caused a change in the way I think about China.

David Aikman: I hope my book does the same, my friend!

Steve Smith: Well, what you’ve said is not generally known, as it will be after your book is published. Do you think that it will cause similar change in the minds of people who have the power to change policy? Particularly with regard to the assessment of China as a geostrategic threat and its relations to Taiwan.

David Aikman: Yes. I’m hopeful that if I can write this book properly, it will have the same effect upon an understanding of China amongst sinologists and policy makers that—I hope I’m not brash in using this analogy—that Edgar Snow’s book Red Star over China did in 1978 when he starting saying, "You can’t keep calling the Communists Red Bandits because they will probably end up running China." Now, he didn’t say the Commies are good guys, but until that time, nobody had any idea what the Communists were doing at the grassroots. Nobody in this country—even people who read books like China Wakes by Nicholas Kristof or China: Alive in the Bitter Sea by Fox Butterfield—people who read those books, haven’t a clue about what’s going on at the grassroots in China. If China is going to be Christianized, as I believe it will be, that doesn’t mean that everybody in China will be Christian, it means the high-points of the gate-keepers of culture and worldview will be Christian. If that is going to happen, obviously China’s whole strategic global position is going to be very different from what it is if you’ve either got the Commies today or ultra-nationalists, which is another danger of course. And if the Chinese become Christian, you have a possible solution to the Taiwan problem, which is not necessarily a violent one, and is much more congenial to what we would understand is a reasonable way of resolving it.

Grace Lee: My question spins off this question—what would your mission be, having been surprised by what you found in China, for this book to have an effect in Beijing? Is the exposure good, does it prompt us to continue to look the other way, or does it prompt something else?

David Aikman: People have said, "Aren’t you scared that you’ll never get back to China again because you are writing about all this underground church stuff?" And I say, "I’m not scared of anything! If they don’t let me back, well, that’s a problem. I’d love to go back to China." I don’t think they’ll keep me out if I write the book I want to write. What I’m saying about China is, not that they’re a bunch of nasty Christian persecutors. Well, there are some Christian persecutors in China, no question. They’ve done some nasty things. But the big story is the growth of Christianity in China is part of a tendency that most people in the world would approve of—opening up of civic liberty, and openness to outside ideas. A dilution of authoritarianism and that is really the big story. China wants the world to believe that’s happening anyway. Well, some of the hard-core communists may resent the fact that Christians have been playing the lead role in this. But so be it.

Sarah: Are the labor camps still active? Are there still Christians there?

David Aikman: Yes, the labor camps are active. The Weekly Standard was kind enough to let me write about this a few years ago. "Reform through labor" camps are not as numerous as they were, and generally replaced by "education through labor," which is a much less draconian form of punishment. They are still active and I’m sure there are still Christians there. But, generally, reform through labor camps are limited to three years. Labor camps generally now are hard-core criminals. Christians, by and large, are not treated as hard-core criminals anymore. They are treated as social nuisances, disturbers of the peace, which is not the same thing. Yes, I’m sure there are Christians there, but most of the mistreatment of Christians occurs not in the camps but after Christians are arrested and taken to police stations. Chinese police have a routine way of beating up first and asking questions second, and so if you are picked up, and you’re Chinese, they’ll beat you up, and then say, ‘Alright, tell us everything you know.’

Josh Good: Given the sociological history that you described, there’s some prospect that more hopeful. Is there the hope that Christianity is more intentionally attached to political freedom?

David Aikman: Totally. There are all kinds of ways in which religious freedom is likely to increase rather than decrease in the future, even before you have full-scale democratic freedoms, which may not happen for a while. But, I think, one of the first stages will be complete freedom of religion, including for Christians. That can happen even if you still have a communist party with political monopoly, but I think at that point, the communist party will split, and I think you will have a proto-democratic, social-democratic wing, and you’ll have a hard-core loony left-wing, and that may be in a sanguine scenario, that may be the beginning of multiparty democracy in China.

There is an amazing convergence of what you might call dissident political thinking, and what I would call utilitarian-establishment political thinking in Beijing. China’s leaders want China to be strong, modern, powerful, respected, but humane. They don’t want everyone to be in a labor camp that disagrees with it. You then say, "Well why are they still running Communist Party control?" There are clearly some people at the top of China’s political ladder who would like to see serious political reform continue. At the other end of the spectrum, China’s political dissidents are divided between those who want instant democracy tomorrow and don’t care anything about religion, and those who say, "Now hold on! How do you get a functioning democracy in place without some of the social and cultural soil necessary for these strong plants to grow? You can’t just dump it on the place." Those are the people who also feel, along with the political establishment, that Christianity is the best possible seeding soil for genuine political freedom.

Steve McFarland: You said that religious persecution occurs at a provincial level. Do you see a role for global corporations to exert their economic power to the benefit of their employees or for the populace in general?

David Aikman: Steve, I have strongly favored that approach for a long time, selective corporate favoritism towards provinces that have a better track record of human rights and religious freedom than provinces that don’t.

Steve McFarland: Is anybody doing that?

David Aikman: There are some private corporations in Beijing that helped set up factories and other things as part of joint ventures and part of the terms that they will go into a Chinese town, "When we get our factory going, we’re going to have a Christian church within the factory. Is that okay?" And they swallow hard, and they decide yes or no. Generally it’s yes because they want the business, as long as they’re not advocating the overthrow of the Communist Party, no problem. I’m totally in favor of that kind of approach. Actually, let me raise my hand on behalf of Beijing taxi drivers. Like most journalists, I always talk to taxi drivers whenever I can, and if I speak the language. I speak enough Chinese to talk to taxi drivers. Beijing taxi drivers are about a hundred thousand people—how many days off do you think they get a week or a month? Zero. How many days off do you think they get a year? Zero. This is one of the most oppressed working groups I’ve ever come across. Now, why do they get zero days off? Because nobody represents them in lobbying for higher taxi fares, for a lower proportion of their income to be paid to company that owns the car, and so on. That’s a classic area where I’ve said to some of the Christian leaders in China, you should start getting out there on behalf of these people, because if you did that, you would show one aspect of socialist efficacy of the Christian witness.

Mark O’Keefe: You mentioned growing tolerance. Are you seeing signs of tolerance for foreign organizations, a decrease in paranoia, etc?

David Aikman: Yes, I’m seeing much more tolerance. Groups like ELIC—the English Language Institute in China—which has been around for about twenty years. They basically provide English teachers to colleges and universities all over China, hundreds of them. And the authorities at the universities know that all of these people are Christian, and that they are not going to keep quiet about their faith. They are going to obey the rules; they are not going to hand our tracks in the classroom. And they’ve basically come to accept that. They have also accepted the fact that foreigners come in and teach in underground seminaries. Somebody here—Cathy—did that recently. I know lots of foreigners who teach in underground seminaries for a week or two weeks at a time, and do a tremendous job. And don’t tell me the authorities don’t have a clue about any of them. They don’t know all of them, but they know it’s going on. They are not trying to stamp it out.

Michael Cromartie: David, thank you.