The Chinese Chance
On a gray Beijing afternoon
in May, I found myself back at Nantang Church, an otherwise nondescript
building that rests on ground given to a Jesuit missionary by the emperor four
centuries back. In the courtyard outside I bumped into several parishioners,
all politely curious about where I was from and what I thought of China.
Ordinary
stuff, in most places. Yet, for most Chinese, "ordinary" is a huge step
forward. At the first Mass I attended in this very church almost a decade ago,
the Chinese, who made up most of the congregation, kept their distance from
foreign Catholics such as myself. This time was quite different, and American
Christian leaders calling for restrictions on trade with China would do well to
keep in mind that the greater freedom--or, at least, the lower levels of
apprehension--with which many Chinese Christians now practice their faith owes
itself in large measure to China's economic opening to the world.
This is not to say that Beijing now respects freedom of
religion. But when American critics declare that things are getting worse, it
prompts the great unasked question: Compared with what? With what China was 10,
20, or 30 years ago? With what we are likely to get even in the best of
circumstances today? Or with some romantic abstraction about what we would like
China to be? (Also see "Christians as Victims? Part 1," Franklin Foer's
"Cross-Purposes:
The spurious campaign against the persecution of Christians.")
Viewed
from Asia, much criticism now leveled by American Christian activists seems
less a snapshot of China in the late 1990s than a caricature drawn from the
high days of Maoism a generation ago. Perhaps that's because few of these
critics have taken the trouble to spend much--or even any--time there, or to
consult with their fellow Christians in Taiwan and Hong Kong who are actively
exploiting opportunities in China. One notable exception is Nina Shea of the
Puebla Institute, whose wider experience may explain why her recent article in
Crisis magazine at least acknowledges that many "friends in Taiwan and
Hong Kong and many Chinese dissident intellectuals argue against" tying Chinese
trade to human rights.
At the heart of the problem there exists a
simple impatience for the long-term give-and-take any real China policy
demands. The immoderate language employed, moreover, is often both intolerant
of those who would achieve human rights by other means and out of touch with
current realities. For example, an open letter to Vice President Al Gore on the
eve of his 1996 visit to China--signed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Robert
Casey, Christian right activist Ralph Reed, and the Rev. Richard John
Neuhaus--claimed that the "campaign against men and women of faith has been
intensifying rather than diminishing." The Family Research Council's Gary
Bauer, another signatory, claimed in the Weekly Standard that human
rights are being sold out "in order to sell a few more Big Macs."
For those
of us who have seen firsthand the dramatic improvement in the lives of ordinary
Chinese that opening the market has brought, this agitation against Americans
doing business in China is baffling. Indeed, for unregenerate anti-Communists
such as me, it is the height of irony to now find ourselves attacked as being
"pro-China." Nor do I speak as a Rockefeller Republican. My family has helped
build two churches in China, my daughter is from Yangzhou, and I doubt that
anyone has devoted more editorial space to China's repellent one-child
policy.
Undeniably, China remains a nasty place for many
Christians, who, in many parts of the country, risk harassment and detention
simply for practicing their faith. And their co-religionists abroad should be
encouraged to continue to document and publicize these abuses, such as the
ransacking of the home of Bishop Joseph Fan Zhongliang of Shanghai just before
Easter. But, as one missionary who has been building churches in China for two
decades put it to me, "Almost everything that is said about the church in China
is true for some part of China. But it no longer comes from the center
[Beijing]."
Friends in
the United States to whom I mention this have little patience for such fine
distinctions. But in China they can make a world of difference. Just last
month, Seth Faison reported in the New York Times how economic growth is
fast eroding the government's control over people's daily lives, in this case
with respect to the one-child program. The new mobility of labor means the
government simply cannot exert the control it could when everyone stayed put
and depended on the work unit for everything. At an even more basic level, as
Faison pointed out, more and more Chinese women are now able to escape
once-mandatory abortions by simply paying a fine. As anyone involved in China
will tell you, you can do a lot more than the rules suggest as long as you
don't rub the authorities' noses in it. How many Catholics who signed the
letter to Gore know, for example, that some two-thirds of the
government-appointed Catholic bishops have been reconciled with Rome?
This kind of progress is messy, but it is real
and palpable. Surely it is no coincidence that the countries most cut off from
trade and business (and embargoed by the United States) have been among the
most miserable for Christians and human rights: Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam. It
is a slow process, but daily China looks more and more like Taiwan or South
Korea in the 1970s. Ask Chinese Christians what they want from the United
States, and they will not talk about linking trade with human rights. It is
more likely they will talk about help in building churches and developing
stronger links with their co-religionists overseas.
What
matters most for China's struggling Christians is not where religious freedom
ranks on some abstract scale of good and bad. What matters is how to make a bad
situation better, how to widen the cracks in the Communist concrete. Instead of
walking away from China, American Christians should be rushing in.
