Christ in China

How do revolutions get started? Obviously, rebellions begin with serious discontents about oppression, corruption and so on. The protest movement which began at Tiananmen Square in Beijing ten years ago this June was not really a revolution, although it could have turned into one. Oppression and corruption were certainly two of its root causes. But there were other influences, of a more cultural nature, which inspired the protesters. One of them was a television movie made a year before, in 1988. It was titled Yellow River Elegy.

This six-part series emerged from an intellectual trend in China in the late 1980s known as culture fever. Culture, like religion, is often a substitute for political expression. After decades of wooden communist culture, slash-and-burn revolutionary modernism and murderous political campaigns, Chinese intellectuals turned to traditional Chinese culture to find answers to China's contemporary problems.

China's descent into impotence has been an intellectual obsession since the middle of the last century, when British gunships exposed its weaknesses during the Opium Wars. How could the Middle Kingdom, the centre of civilisation, have been so easily humbled by long-nosed barbarians and, later, by the "dwarf bandits" from Japan? These were the questions asked by Chinese intellectuals in the 1890s, in the 1910s, in the 1930s and again in Yellow River Elegy.

Chinese civilisation, as presented in the film, is compared to the Yellow River, sluggishly following its changeless course through a vast, agricultural continent isolated from the world by the Great Wall, and governed by despotic emperors. This is contrasted with an idealised image of the west, enlightened by science and democracy, conquering the seas, trading with all the world. China has a closed, "yellow," land-bound civilisation; the west is as open and "blue" as the oceans. The message is that China has to discard its nostalgia for past glory, reject the symbols of its ancient civilisation and become just like the west. The less obvious message is that communist rule is as oppressive and closed as the old imperial system.

The "reformists" inside the government, like the Communist party chief, Zhao Ziyang, approved of the film. Conservatives hated it. After Zhao was ousted in 1989 and the tanks restored order in Beijing, party hard-liners blamed the film for helping to incite the rebellion. Its authors were put on the wanted list.

Four of the film's five writers escaped to the US. While living there, an odd and drastic change came over all but one of them. Two became evangelical Christians; one seriously considered it; and one is a decidedly secular businessman who sells bridal clothes, wines and expensive crystal knick-knacks out of the Sheraton hotel in Flushing, New York.

My curiosity to find out why took me to a Christian evangelical church in Glendale, California, in January. This is an odd place to meet a well-known political dissident from China. If he were simply a lonely man in exile whose mind had gone wobbly, there would be no reason to meet him. But political crises have turned before into bouts of religious zeal in China. The most notable was in the 1850s, when a failed Confucian scholar named Hong Xiuquan claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus, and tried to build the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in southern China. By the time Hong's enterprise was crushed by government troops, his murderous Taiping rebellion had cost millions of lives. There are signs of a new religious fever in China today, including an upsurge in the popularity of Christianity - an indication, I think, of political despair. So when famous Chinese dissidents become religious, they deserve to be taken seriously.

I take my place in the church hall, next to a Chinese Christian kindergarten, where the congregation has just had its evening meal. Everyone but me is Chinese, from Taiwan, Hong Kong or China itself. Some are old, some very young, but most are middle-aged. Parents speak mostly Chinese; children more often speak English. A young pastor from Hong Kong, dressed in slacks and a sport shirt, leads his flock in the singing of hymns, asking the Lord to bless China. The pastor then says how much he himself loves China. It is as if the 60-odd immigrants have gathered in LA to worship the motherland they left behind, as much as their Lord. Like Marxism before, Christianity can be a vehicle for Chinese nationalism.

New members are asked to stand up, introduce themselves, and say where they are from, so that fellow Shanghainese, or Hunanese or Hong Kongers can take them under their wing. Then the hall goes dark and a video screen comes to life. We are about to see a film of the famous dissident and Christian convert I have come to meet. His name is Yuan Zhiming. The film is the story of his conversion.

After some sketchy shots of Tiananmen Square in 1989, where Yuan played a minor role as an intellectual supporting the students, the action shifts to Paris, where Yuan found himself in political exile that same year, before moving to the US. His voice tells us how he felt rejected by his homeland, and how he went into a depression. As the camera jerkily pans to his tear-filled eyes, Yuan talks about his father, who died soon after Yuan's escape from Beijing; the strain had been too much for the old man. And he talks about his wife, a young woman with a sharp, intelligent face, who stayed in China with their daughter.

The marriage had been unhappy. But now that Yuan is in exile, first in Paris, then in Princeton, he misses his family desperately. The west, which was a utopian dream, now seems cold and lonely. Encouraged by some Christians in Princeton, Yuan makes his first moves to "receive Jesus." After hearing of his father's death, he prays all night to a postcard of Jesus he picked up in a street in Paris. He prays for his family's exit visas from Beijing. He prays for all the sinners in China. And on 28th April 1992, Yuan is baptised at the Princeton Chinese church.

Soon after that his family is permitted to come to the US. At first his wife is reluctant to become a Christian. She observes that she had not escaped from one authoritarian faith simply to join another. But the folks in church seem friendly, and it is an opportunity to learn English. So she ends up receiving Jesus too, although perhaps without her husband's fervour.

When the film is over, the lights come back on. There behind the pulpit is Yuan himself, a sleek and handsome man in his late 40s, wearing a grey tweed jacket. He says that Jesus saved him, and that he still loves China. Indeed he loves China more than ever. He has been able to go back once, and noticed how unhappy people were. It has become clear to him that China cannot be changed merely politically. First, a complete spiritual transformation is needed. Democracy is not just a political mechanism. The root of democracy is the spirit of Christ. Only God can save the Chinese. It is Yuan's aim to spread God's word to his people. That is how he intends to save China.

One month later I am sitting in the coffee shop of the Sheraton hotel in Flushing. Opposite me is Xie Suanjun, a pale, slim man in his late 40s. Before 1989, he wrote a number of books on world religions and mythology. He too had been an intellectual supporter of the student rebels in Beijing. In fact, Xie's story is quite similar to Yuan's. He came to the US via Japan. His wife and daughter remained stuck in Beijing. Even though he talked to his wife weekly on the telephone, the marriage, already tempestuous, suffered further as a result of his exile. Feeling miserable, he met Yuan in Princeton, but felt Christianity wasn't for him. Then, one night, in a trough of despair when he thought he might die alone, far away from China, he had a dream about being lifted in the arms of Christ. It gave him the most wonderful sense of floating free above all the cares of the world. But he still resisted conversion. For one thing, he was Chinese, and Christ was a Jew, a foreigner. Thankfully, he says, he discovered in the gospel according to Matthew that Christ's spirit was already present before Abraham was born, so Christ could not really be a Jew. And so with intense relief, Xie was able to convert at last.

It made him feel happy and yet oddly guilty: receiving Christ was also a sign that he couldn't cope with life on his own. He called his wife to tell her. She was not shocked, in fact she had already been baptised in one of China's many clandestine "house churches," small churches located in private homes. Yet she still finds it hard to believe in the Resurrection, without which Xie believes you cannot be a proper Christian. Like Yuan, Xie thinks that the Chinese must first find God before a political solution can be found to their problems. But the trouble in China, he says, is that too many people simply want to use religion for political aims.

The stories of Yuan and Xie are not especially rare or eccentric. Immigrants and refugees, alone in a foreign country, are often receptive to religion. Most of the older immigrants in the church in Glendale are from Taiwan, but the newly baptised members are almost all young people from mainland China.

In China, the destruction of traditional beliefs by the Communist party, and the subsequent disillusion with communism itself, has created a spiritual hunger for all kinds of Christian, non-Christian or pseudo-Christian beliefs. The officially sanctioned "patriotic" Christian churches in China, including the catholic church, have about 20m members. But the number of unofficial underground Christians could be ten times higher. They meet in private homes, in improvised halls, anywhere away from the beady eyes of authority.

The Chinese government is deeply antagonistic to the unofficial Christians, who refuse to register as members of the patriotic churches, and so are beyond Party control. To be sure, many areas of daily life are beyond Party control, but the Communist party has a particular fear of the evangelical zeal that combines faith and political subversion. That is, after all, how the party itself once came to power. Of course, by crushing popular demands for political participation, most notably in 1989, the government itself has provoked such zeal. Religion is all that is left when the expression of secular politics is blocked.

There is, however, a deeper reason for the appeal of evangelical religion for dissidents, embedded in Chinese tradition itself. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of China's first modern revolution in 1911, was a Christian convert who believed that "the essence" of the revolution "could be found largely in the teachings of the church." This statement would not have startled most Christians in the west. But by that time most western democracies had separated church from state. This had never been the case in China, where emperors were secular as well as semi-divine leaders. Political institutions were part of a cosmic order; it was this order which crumbled in the 19th century and collapsed in the 20th century. Chinese intellectuals have been looking for new cosmic orders ever since.

In 1919, dissident intellectuals in the May 4th Movement adopted "Science and Democracy" as a slogan. But it was more than a political slogan. These words were like the mantras of a new religion. It was but a short step from this to blind faith in scientific socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The radicalism of Mao Zedong owes something not only to the spirit of 1919, but also to the fanaticism of the Taiping Rebellion of Hon Xiuquan in the 1860s. Mao was not unlike Christ's "younger Chinese brother." Indeed, Mao was an admirer of the Taipings.

It would be grotesque to suggest that the pale Mr Xie, of Flushing, would wish to be anything like Hong Xiuquan or Mao Zedong. It was he, after all, who told me that religion should not be used for political ends. Yuan Zhiming's conviction, however, that China can be free only when all the Chinese have received Jesus, does have something in common with the zealotry of former Chinese revolutionaries. Like them, he believes in the spiritual transformation of China. As he wrote: "Democracy is not merely an institution... but a profound structure of faith."

The westernisation of China, which he advocated in Yellow River Elegy, lacked one component, he says, in his bungalow in Torrance, California: "I now realise that our film was superficial. It left out the most important element, religion. Chinese conservatives think we have to preserve our traditions. But Sun Yat-sen was right. If China wants to be as great as the west, we have to go to the root of western civilisation."

But what about the other two authors, now living in the US? How did they resist the blandishments of the church? The story of Su Xiaokang, his struggles with Christianity and his final rejection of it, tell us as much about the modern state of China as do the conversions of his colleagues. Su is the most famous of the authors of Yellow River Elegy and contributed most to it. He, too, has had a troubled personal history. I talk to him at his house in Princeton. He sits in front of his computer. Once in a while his wife Puli, who was badly injured in an auto accident six years ago, passes from the bedroom to the kitchen, slowly, with the support of a steel frame. Su, once a celebrated author in China, finds it difficult to write about anything any more. He told a Japanese reporter that the old Su Xiaokang had died. The new one is simply surviving.

"We intellectuals in exile," he says, " all struggled with Christianity. I was very depressed after the accident. I felt it was a punishment for me. I felt that without some contact with a God, a Chinese God, I couldn't survive. So I read the Bible all the time and even went to church. Twice a week, a young American came to my house to read the Bible with me."

Su's pain, however, is more than just personal; it goes back to that old despair about China, the source of Yellow River Elegy. The tragedy of China, he says, is that the Chinese see no difference between China and the Chinese government. The Chinese have a concept called tianxia, meaning everything under heaven, not of the state or the nation. Everything under heaven is a cosmic concept. It is where politics, religion and cultural identity are rolled up into one.

Like many exiles, Su feels ashamed to have survived, while others were arrested or killed. And he feels guilty about the failure of the 1989 rebellion. But the shame of his generation-the generation of former Red Guards now in their 40s and 50s-goes back further than 1989. He says: "We all feel deep guilt. All of us who lived through the Cultural Revolution, beating up our teachers, unleashing that violence. At least we intellectuals can talk about it, the ordinary people have it all bottled up inside them."

So why, I ask, did he end up rejecting the Christian faith? "I cannot believe in Christ. I tried, but I can't. He is a historical figure, like Confucius. I can't believe he is the son of God." This is a rational, secularist answer, which any agnostic might have given. But then he gives a different answer, more to do with the experience of his generation in China. "Since we lost faith in Maoism, we felt cut off at our spiritual roots. This made it impossible for me to believe in any religion, or ideology. I cannot have faith in anything any more." Su added that he finds the post-Tiananmen generation in China baffling. He says that all they care about is material things. Perhaps the difference between Su and them is that Su feels anguish at his loss of faith, while younger Chinese never had one.

It is rather refreshing, after these stories of painful conversions and spiritual despair, to talk to the fourth author of Yellow River Elegy, now also living in Flushing. Zhang Gang is a tall, bluff, chain-smoking figure with a Chinese army greatcoat wrapped around his shoulders. He has a loud laugh and a raspy voice, the kind of man for whom waitresses jump to attention as soon as he enters a coffee shop. The Chinese expression for his type is Big Brother. Big Brothers get things done, take care of others, run businesses, start rebellions. Yet business is not Zhang's main interest. "Business," he tells me, "is just a matter of staying in touch with Chinese affairs on the internet and talking to Chinese friends."

It turns out that Zhang was quite a Big Brother in China. He was born in Nanjing, the son of a high communist official. During the Cultural Revolution he was a leader of the Red Guards, with memories of seeing his most respected teacher beaten almost to death. Being an upper-class communist, as it were, gave him the opportunity to read a large number of forbidden books. Zhang concluded that Marxist analysis didn't apply to China. Pre-modern China wasn't really feudal. It was ruled by an authoritarian system based on ancient agricultural practices.

Zhang's main contribution to Yellow River Elegy was to introduce this idea of "oriental despotism." But he couldn't write for the series openly, because Zhang was working for the government as an economic adviser to the reformists around Zhao Ziyang. He understood the nature of power in China, he says. Zhang never got openly involved with the Tiananmen demonstrations, but he did act as a link between reformists in the party and the students. For this, he, too, was put on the wanted list after 4th June 1989.

I ask him about religion. He is no stranger to Christianity. His mother is a catholic. And he respects the "gentleness" of catholics. But unlike the others, he is self-sufficient. "I trust myself, rather than putting my faith in outside forces. The others need God to cope with their frustrations. But I'm very tough, independent. I can't see a difference between what I want to do, and what they want God to do for them."

Zhang has no interest in joining a dissident group either. "Not as long as I have a brain and I see what they do. You see, these dissidents are very inferior people. They have never touched real power and money." He snorts derisively. Some might call Zhang Gang arrogant. His air of Chinese machismo reminds me of Wei Jingsheng, the dissident leader who is often accused of being unable to listen to or compromise with anyone. Tough guys like Wei and Zhang are indispensable, however. How could Wei have survived for so long in jail if he hadn't been convinced of his righteousness? Big Brothers are natural leaders.

Christians and other religious people can have a role, too, by resisting political orthodoxy and staking out moral positions independent of the state. Things may only become dangerous when Big Brothers take a religious view of their political missions and want to affect a moral transformation of China. It was Xie who observed to me, with the wan smile of a man who had known despair: "The problem with China is that instead of adopting Christ's ideals, too many Chinese think they are Jesus Christ themselves."