It is needless to say that any email beginning with the lone header “Current Situation” in bold letters can be slightly unsettling. Crossing Borders staff received an email starting with these exact words not long ago from missionaries operating in China. Enclosed were details of an ongoing phenomenon in the country - a situation that has been unfolding since 2015.
In May 2015, Chinese government officials attended the Central United Front Work Conference. The meeting was held to discuss internal influences in China as well as the ongoing external influences that affected the Chinese people from beyond the country’s borders. Presiding over the conference was President Xi Jinping himself, in the second year of his presidency. It was, as reported by scholars of the Department of Religious Studies at Fudan University, at this conference that President Xi first began the discussion of “guiding religions in the direction of sinicization.”
Sinicization, as described by Bitter Winter, a publication focusing on human rights activism in China, is the process of coercing or establishing leaders of organized influences to “operate within a framework of strategies and objectives indicated by the [Communist Party of China].” Generally speaking, it is the effort of the Chinese government to hold authority over national, influential organizations and their corresponding influence on the Chinese people. One such influence that was and is regularly organized en masse throughout the country is religion. But controlling religious influence has posed a problem to the Communist Party.
The results of the Communist Party’s ongoing efforts to control religious influence and its organization have recently made headlines. In October 2019, an exposė in the New York Times revealed a collection of over 400 leaked pages documenting the Chinese government’s ongoing mass detention and imprisonment of over one million Uighur Muslims in Northwest China. The camps are aimed to indoctrinate government values on Muslims in the region. Family members of those detained, including their children who were left behind, were given documents to precisely explain why these “treatments” or “schools” could not be visited or expect release. Such camps and their processes, the Communist Party argued, were for the betterment of society.
It should be noted that the same region in which this internment is occurring today, Xinjiang, has seen a 93 percent increase in its internal security budget from 2017 to 2018 as these internment camps expanded. In fact, China’s domestic security spending, according to The Jamestown Foundation, has increased almost ten-fold in the last decade. The Chinese government is responding to its need to control and monitor its people more closely than ever. It was also from the region of Xinjiang that a leading Communist Party official, Zhang Chunxian, stated that the sinicization of religions was a necessity to prevent the infiltration of destructive social activities. The goal of increased security was to "immerse religions in the Chinese culture... in order that religions can develop in a normal and healthy way," noted Zhang in the South China Morning Post in 2015.
Readers should be cautioned to believe that this work of the Communist Party to control religious development and its core ideologies is illogical or simply oppressive without reason. The Central United Front Work Conference of 2015 was clear in the purpose of religious control within China. As spoken by President Xi, the efforts of the Communist Party are to “resolutely guard against the infiltration of Western ideology, and consciously resist the influence of extremist thought.” Religious control exerted by the Communist Party is a preventative measure against an influence that cannot be controlled or organized in a massive population of over one billion citizens. The unpredictability and potential subversion of core communist values through religion is not appealing to a government focused on action, order and prosperity. However, it is this same mentality that has resulted in religious human rights abuses that are taking place today in the nation.
The pressure on religion in China is not only limited to Northwest regions where there are large populations of Muslim believers. Reports from Beijing, according to the Washington Examiner in July 2019, have stated that Arabic symbols were forcibly removed from public spaces throughout the city. The effort, according to the Examiner, is for the enculturation of the Chinese language in the Arabic population. Such stringent control further extends to Christian churches. In 2016, the New York Times wrote about how churches had been “decapitated” as their steeples were forcibly removed. The Business Insider reports that many churches were ordered to install facial-recognition devices that monitored their congregants’ activities within their buildings in 2018. According to the Acton Institute, state-run Christian facilities were officially ordered to remove any displays of the Ten Commandments as of September 2019 and to replace them with quotes by President Xi upholding Communist values. The Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School, Xi Lian, noted that in 2019, China is approaching a “reversal of the somewhat tolerant religious policy of the Deng Xiaoping era and a return to the Mao-era hostility toward all forms of organized religion.”
It is a tumultuous time for Chinese Christian believers. As reported by the Council on Foreign Relations, The number of Christian Protestants in China has increased by approximately 10 percent annually since 1979 and the nation will have the world’s largest population of Christians by 2030. Ironically, with the expansion of powers in the Communist Party, the nation is also approaching a time when religion will be greatly condemned.
Even state-sanctioned churches have begun to self-criticize the “Western” elements of Christianity, upholding nationalistic core values as primary objectives in religion. In a public speech recorded by the South China Morning Post in March 2019, Xu Xiaohong, chairman of a government-sanctioned and state-approved Protestant church, noted that “Christianity was spread widely to China along with the colonial invasion of Western powers… that’s why [Chinese nationals] have the saying: ‘one more Christian, one less Chinese.’”
In this past month, Crossing Borders staff received the email entitled “Current Situation” with grim faces and folded arms. The report enclosed detailed the ongoing closures of churches, the persecution and subsequent evacuation of missionaries, the ongoing fear present on the field for foreign and Chinese Christians alike. With ongoing research, the persecution of religion in China seems all the more likely as long as the nation continues to focus on the growth of nationalism. Concurrently, the tension and unavoidable fear that the difficulty of working in China will inhibit the spread of Crossing Borders’ refugee network is consistently palpable. Looking forward to 2020, it is very possible that the efforts of sharing the gospel to North Koreans in China will grow more difficult.
But simultaneously, there are incredible undercurrents to be noted. Crossing Borders is amazed at the dedication of field workers who are risking everything to minister to North Korean refugees and their children. Crossing Borders served the largest population of North Korean women and children to be gathered in China thus far, 92 North Korean women and children, at an annual retreat in 2019. It is incredible to see, furthermore, that the network of North Korean refugees in Crossing Borders’ care is growing faster than ever as persecuted, fearful women and children are more readily accepting the faith than ever. Over 140 North Korean women and children were served throughout 2019. These are clear indications that the need for the gospel is present in China, that Crossing Borders always has reasons to remain thankful and hopeful.
The possibility that 2020 will be more dangerous and that Crossing Borders will need more help to conduct its work in China is more than likely. But the hope and faith of Crossing Borders grows each time the gospel is shared. This is the heart of many Christian believers in China in an era of oppression. All of our work thus far has been more than a privilege. Crossing Borders will continue to serve, if only to reach one more person in this period of great change and persecution.
