Portraying Chinese Christianity: the American Press and U.S.-China Relations Since the 1920S Dong Wang Gordon College

Portraying Chinese Christianity: The American Press and U.S.-China Relations since the 1920s Dong Wang Gordon College

In April 2006, the New Statesman of London ran a cover story titled “China Goes to Church,” which revealed how Christianity has “become cool” in the “spiritual marketplace” that is part of the hurly-burly of China today: Seventy percent of the world’s Christmas decorations are produced in China, and many Chinese now view the festival as an unofficial holiday. On 25 December, in cities across the country, shopping malls are fes- tooned with Christmas trees. In the new China, Christianity is a source of fascination, almost a craze, yet its precise nature remains a puzzle. . . . University students sport crosses and join Bible groups. Smart new churches in Chinese cities are packed on Sundays. . . . Television soaps imported from South Korea, where 30 per cent of the population is Christian, offer a “Christian lifestyle with an Asian accent,” which is as eagerly consumed and copied in China as Korean pop music and fash- ion. At the same time, American missionaries, employed as cheap teach- ers of English at Chinese universities since religious controls were relaxed in the 1980s, discreetly promote the religion.1 Indeed, today Christianity is “hot,” just one aspect of the nation’s social and economic transformation and increased role in the world economy—phenomena encapsulated in new phrases like “the China effect,” “the China price,” “the China century,” and “China’s long over- due renaissance.” Characterized by some researchers as the fastest-grow- ing wing of the evangelical movement today, Christianity in China, however, has ironically become a kind of nemesis for the ruling Chinese

The Journal of American–East Asian Relations, Vol. 13 (2004–2006) © Copyright 2008 by Imprint Publications. All rights reserved. Funding for this project was provided by the East-West Institute of International Studies at Gordon College. I wish to thank Daniel Bays, Ka-che Yip, Kim-kwong Chan, Charles Hayford, Paul A. Cohen, Mark Selden, Paul Sorrell, Tom Wells, Tom Grunfeld, Melissa Dale, James O’ryan, Kawashima Shin, Xu Yihua, Wang Jianlang, Min Jie, Zhang Xiaoyan, and the doctoral students at the Center for American Stud- ies of Fudan University for their ideas and assistance in the various stages of prepa- ration of this article. 1. Xiao Jia Gu, “China Goes to Church,” New Statesman, 10 Apr. 2006.

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Communist Party (CCP). The CCP often finds itself on the defensive over the issue—it has certainly not been given much credit for the rapid growth of Christianity in its dealings with the United States. This article dis- cerns patterns of relationship between the CCP and Christianity, espe- cially Protestantism, through the lens of the American print media from the 1920s to the present, an angle from which Chinese Christianity has not hitherto been approached. A study of relevant press reports and representations since the birth of the CCP in 1921 brings a number of issues into focus. First, in a way that departs from existing scholarship, this article proposes that the study of Christianity in modern/contemporary China should be rehabilitated as an important issue in the context of the history of U.S.-China relations. My second concern is to define the relationship between Chris- tianity and the CCP through its portrayal in the media at particular historical moments. Third, over the past nine decades, shifting percep- tions of the relationship between Protestantism and the CCP—as a cause célèbre—have acted as a barometer of U.S.-China relations as well as reflecting the swings in political, social, and economic conditions in both countries. Religion has kept pace with the overall trajectory of Sino- American relations and indeed mirrors the contradiction between strengthened economic ties and continuing geopolitical strains, particu- larly since the end of the Cold War. Hence my beginning this article with a selected survey of state visits to China by U.S. presidents since the 1970s.

Chinese Christianity and Three U.S. Presidential Visits through the Lens of the American Press: From Rejuvenated Hopes to Center of Controversy This section surveys the evolution of the press discourse on Chinese Christianity in connection with the visits of Presidents Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush to China in 1971, 1998, and 2002/ 2005. Although the progress of Christianity in China has always been of concern to Americans since the inception of the bilateral relationship in the late eighteenth century, the evolving treatment in the American media took shape in four distinct ways. First, it reveals religion as one of a composite of factors contributing to the development of Sino-American relations. Second, it demonstrates the astonishing pluralism of Ameri- can Christianity, with the result that different forms of evangelicalism in America took up the same issues in very different ways. Third, over the past thirty-five years, religion has been drawn into a sharpened moral crusade which has pitted the American political regime against the CCP. At the risk of over-generalization, I believe that this trend reflects the continued push by conservative American Christians to shape public