Fed up with a persistent drought, the government fired 186 doses of silver iodide into the clouds on Nov 1 last year, commanding a snowstorm which turned Beijing white in autumn.

The snowflakes fell on more than 500 members of Shouwang Church shivering by Haidian Park. It was the first outdoor Sunday congregation for the underground church and it came after their landlord succumbed to official pressure, forcing them out of their two-year-old home in an office building.

‘It got so cold my feet went numb. But it was more important to me that we were defending the church’s right to worship freely,’ recalls a member surnamed He, who attended the service.

Shouwang’s public defiance was a rare challenge to the CCP.

While all religions are enjoying a revival in China after being suppressed as ‘spiritual pollution’ during Mao Zedong’s reign, Christianity seems most likely to cross swords with the communist sickle for influence and adherents.

The religion is not new to China, arriving from Persia as early as the seventh century. But since China embarked on its economic reforms in 1978, centuries of slow growth have given way to a staggering jump.

There are now 70 million Christians in China, according to the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, compared to just 2.5 million 30 years ago.

This brings the number of parishioners to just eight million shy of the CCP’s 78 million membership. The rate of growth in the number of Christians during this period has been 2,700 per cent, compared to 110 per cent by the party.

More troubling for the party, an estimated 75 per cent of these new believers – Protestant and Catholic – are not to be found in state-blessed chapels but ‘house churches’, so named because they started in the homes of members. As illegal institutions, these churches can be closed and their leaders detained.

However, despite periodic official sweeps, Pastor Zhang Mingxuan, head of the unregistered Chinese House Church Alliance, declares: ‘The more they repress us, the more Christians there will be.’

Contributing to the growing numbers is a surge in urban believers in the past decade, which has shifted the centre of Christianity from the villages of Henan and Anhui to the apartments of Beijing and Shanghai.

This burgeoning white-collar crowd is more aware of its rights and assertive in its demands to worship freely, publicly and legally.

The growing numbers worry the atheist regime, long wary of the potent mix of politics and religion.

The last imperial Qing dynasty was brought to its knees by the Taiping and Boxer rebellions in the 19th century, the former led by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus and the latter by pugilists calling on ‘spirit soldiers’ from heaven.

When the CCP first came to power in 1949, it quickly set up the Three-Self Patriotic Movement – ‘self-governance, self-support and self-propagation’ – to ensure all Christian churches fell in line and conformed to the new government’s political objectives.

Those who baulked ended up in jail, sometimes for decades. Although less extensive and harsh now, crackdowns on those who prefer to worship outside the legal margins continue to this day.

Pastor Zhang, who says he has been arrested 37 times over the years, observes: ‘The government thinks that if we have lots of people with us, we will challenge their political power. And they worry that we have links to churches overseas or bring in foreign funds or political movements.

‘Some fear us like they used to fear the Falungong. But we’re not the same. We never challenge the government. But they still fear us, because we’re all over at the grassroots.’

The Falungong movement, whose members practise a mix of Buddhist and Taoist beliefs and breathing exercises, staged a protest outside Zhongnanhai, the CCP leaders’ compound, in 1999. It was the last faith-based group to launch an open and public challenge to the CCP – until Shouwang Church.

While the authorities came down hard on Falungong, their approach to Christians has been more uneven and nuanced.

The CCP sees Christianity as tame compared to Falungong, says University of California, Los Angeles’ Professor James Tong, who in June presented a statement on China’s religious affairs to the US Congressional Executive Commission on China.

Prof Tong notes that the Supreme Procurator delivers an annual report to the National People’s Congress each year, in which he lists the major law enforcement issues in China.

‘Falungong, Xinjiang Muslims and Tibetans have made that list in some years, along with murder, kidnapping, organised crime and drug trafficking. No Christian group has made that list in the reform period,’ he says.

But rough tactics have not entirely disappeared.

Last year, hundreds of policemen raided the mega Golden Lamp Church in Linfen, north-western Shanxi province. Bibles were seized, the church compound was smashed and pastors were jailed.

But more subtle methods were used in the Shouwang case.

No one was arrested or beaten but parishioners working in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were threatened.

A church member in an SOE was told to choose between her job and Shouwang. She resigned. Yet a month later she received a call from her boss offering her her old job back. She took it.

Such inconsistency in the CCP’s response is reflective of a regime still grappling with how best to assert control over this burgeoning faith.

It no longer enjoys the totalitarian power it had in Mao’s time, but remains determined to manage any mass movement.

Instead, in recent years the CCP has been trying to promote Confucianism as a belief system, aware that post-Mao China has been searching for a new faith to help it come to grips with a rapidly changing society.

‘After the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the CCP lost its devotees,’ observes Mr Fan Yafeng, who was dismissed from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for religious activism.

However, the Confucianism project has had limited success so far, partly because it is not so much a religion as a system of moral principles. Some analysts point to the lukewarm box office support for the state-backed Confucius movie, shown earlier this year, as an indication that such top-down efforts find little traction among young people.

Religious scholar Liu Peng from the Pushi Institute of Social Science observes that the ability to choose one’s religion is a key factor in the popularity of the house churches.

‘They elect their own pastors, so the members feel a firmer commitment to the community,’ he told state-run daily Global Times in May.

The house churches also prefer liturgical independence and a more passionate, evangelical outlook, attributes which bring them into conflict with the authorities.

That house churches, especially those in the cities, have taken an independent bent, is unsurprising. A sizeable number of their founders, such as those in Shouwang, were university students during the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

’1989 was a key turning point. It turned mainstream intellectuals from the CCP. Many turned to Christianity for answers,’ says Mr Fan.

The answers have taken on an evangelical tone. While some Christians still go for the guerilla tactics of yore, retreating into homes and ceding public space to the government, others like Shouwang have elected to step out and make themselves heard.

The CCP’s response to Shouwang is instructive on how the party may go about managing the challenge.

Initially, though it had bought an office, the house church was not allowed to move in as the Beijing government viewed ownership of properties as yet another step forward for the Christians.

However, instead of throwing its leaders into jail after the Nov 1 open-air protest, and an even larger outdoor gathering a week later, the authorities offered Shouwang’s leaders a deal: Go back indoors and we will leave you alone.

Alas, the church could not find a suitable venue on short notice, prompting the government to play the unlikely role of housing agent. Eventually it found a theatre operated by the People’s Liberation Army for Shouwang’s Sunday service.

‘It is a hopeful sign of how the government will deal with unregistered churches,’ says analyst Carsten Vala, who is writing a book on the politics of Protestantism in China.

As long as the house churches do not threaten the CCP’s grip on power, there are reasons to be optimistic that tensions on the road ahead will be adroitly defused. But if that line is crossed, the sharp end of the sickle is likely to come down swiftly. This, after all, is a party that believes there is no God and not one to take kindly to political challenges to its secular authority.

(Source: The Straits Times 4 September 2010)