China and Bibles:

Another information piece for you, since I seem to be universally tripping over this piece about a Bible-publishing concern that is printing a huge number of Bibles in a Nanjing site. Personally, I remember well from our trip to China to get Meredith in September 2000 that the Chinese news and papers were loaded with all sorts of ‘don’t you foreigners dare sneak all sorts of religious propaganda into our country’ materials. They saw Billy Joe Willie’s efforts to smuggle bibles into China as Foreign Interference In How China Is Run, and you can’t get bigger on the government hit list than that.

First off, you should understand that China has never had a ‘national religion’ or any sort. There are all sorts of religious threads through Chinese history, and a full list of Chinese ‘gods’ and ‘godlings’ and a set of mythology, but it’s very much catch as catch can. You had to add admixtures of localization of some local or minority group deities, and various strains of Buddhist belief and practice, Daoism, and so on. (Tibetan / Mongolian / Manchu Buddhism is quite different from other forms.) Add in sizable Moslem minority sets (the Hui minority group and the various groups from Chinese Turkestan are the largest) and Christians….

Number two: belief structures. The major one in Chinese history is that the state involves itself in anything that could interfere in the Way Things Are Organized and Run. When you had Emperors, they involved themselvs in religious rites and allegedly ruled with the ‘Mandate of Heaven‘. See this quote from Wikipedia:

The Mandate concept is similar to the European notion of Divine Right, which legitimized rule, but the Mandate concept allowed the overthrowing of unjust rulers. In Chinese thought a successful revolt was considered evidence that the Mandate of Heaven had passed. In both systems it was wrong to revolt, but a successful insurrection was understood as evidence of divine approval.

In short, the only revolutionaries who could claim the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ were the successful ones; failures were because Heaven was not with them. Neat, that. So the idea is that the central government will put a big hook into the idea of people putting forward Outside Ideas that might fool with that proposition.

Falun Gong / Falun Dafa fell awry to this when they protested government actions against them by organizing a mass protest at the front gate for the enclave in the Forbidden City area where the big shots in the Chinese government live, and that ‘personal’ shot really galvanized the Powers That Be into action. Shut Down These Nuts, the word went out, and that’s that. Nothing to do with the rightness of their beliefs and everything to the feeling of the authorities that this organization is a threat to total government control.

In an authoritarian government such as that in China, anything that smacks as a organization that people can get involved with in a mass manner (and use as a platform to stand up against the government someday) is under Government / Party scrutiny. This is nothing new; other authoritarian governments have controlled things like churches, youth organizations (think Boy Scouts) and so on over the years. The story states that this publishing outfit is turning out a lot of cheap Bibles and is the only official source for Bibles in China. My question is: ‘official Bibles’? Wonder what the difference might be…

(See also this article on Bible translations into Chinese, this note from the Canadian government on Chinese Christianity and Bibles, and this review of modern Chinese Christian practice.)

In any event, the Chinese government has very specifically banned the idea of people outside of China involving themselves in religious matters without government review. That means that the Pope can’t oversee Chinese Catholics, and it also means that a lot of people who are Christians in China either attend an ‘officially sanctioned’ and ‘patriotic’ church, or attend a secret ‘house church’.