LETTER FROM BEIJING : Trying to Catch Its Breath
Aikman, David
leTTeR fRoM beIJInG Trying to Catch Its Breath China struggles to keep up with Olympian expectations. by David Aikman F rom the 20th-floor window of a new apartment block in the...
...Minimum outlay for a pri-vate dining room in the Shangri-la Hotel: 10,000 Chinese yuan, or some $1,200...
...David Aikman’sbooks include Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Regnery) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (ThomasNelson...
...The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has dubbed the Beijing Olympiad “The Genocide Games” because of China’s stubborn support of Sudan, perpetrator of massacres in the Darfur region...
...The centerpiece of Beijing’s preparations has been the National Olympic Stadium, called by every-one “the bird’s nest” because of its tangled steel design...
...Things will not be the same in China after 2008...
...Wang Dong wondered aloud in the sermon if this was not the beginning of an openness to theistic longings on the part of a senior Chinese leader...
...How, then, does one measure if China is moving for-ward overall or backward on human rights...
...I n many ways, Beijing is actually the ultimate global consumer-friendly big city...
...In the last lurch to reduce the amount of soot athletes will 40 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 havetobreathe,Beijingcardrivershavebeenwarned that they will have to limit their driving to alternate days—odd and even number license plates—once the Games are under way in August...
...Meanwhile, prestige Chinese corporations vie with each other for the most outlandish commercial skyscraper designs...
...Christianity poses no such separatist fears...
...According to Chinese law, no trial or official sentencing is needed to throw some-one in a labor camp if the period of detention is less than three years...
...In February, Zhang Mingxuan, the president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, wrote an appeal to the international community to be aware that, despite the Communist Party’s offi-cial policy of trying to construct a “harmonious society,” life for Christians who are not part of China’s officially approved Protestant or Catholic organizations is extremely hazardous...
...But if the world is expecting significant improvements in the area of human rights, it may be disappointed...
...Only when the north wind blows in gustily from Mongolia does the shroud momentarily rise, and the Western Hills appear like a magic mirage of nature to your left...
...He angered the authorities because he exposed the bureaucratic snafus endured by the families of AIDS sufferers...
...And the effect on China of the 2008 Games...
...Zion, he said, was an independent house church, but it was not registered with the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement, China’s “official” Protestant body...
...Partly in protest against China’s apparent complicity in the Darfur violence, U.S...
...But as the largest, and fastest-growing, religion in China, Christianity poses significant challenges for the authorities, especially as the Olympics draw near...
...Last December the authorities raided a Christian house church leaders’ conference in Shandong, arrested all 249 present, and then jailed the 21 most important leaders for “Education through Labor” on sentences of one to three years...
...42 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008...
...In predominantly Muslim Xinjiang, far away in China’s west, the authorities’ biggest worry is that Islamic revivalism may morph into irredentist support for an Eastern Turkestan separate from China...
...On a Sunday afternoon, 200 people are packed into rooms rented from a Beijing sauna-manufacturing corporation...
...According to the LondonTimes, at least ten workers have fallen to their deaths during its con-struction, their deaths hushed up and their families quickly paid off by the authorities...
...When China first competed for the Games in 1993, barely four years after the Tiananmen Massacre, billboards around Beijing sheepishly announced that a “more open China” was vying for the prize...
...The answer is that China is going in both direc-tions at once...
...Chinese and foreigners alike have billed the games as China’s “coming out” party, a sign that China has finally “arrived” in the world...
...With Beijing’s Summer Olympics only months away, athletes from several participating nations have declared that they will delay their arrival in the Chinese capital until the last possible moment...
...It is this boutique quality of economic freedom that,inastrangeway,isreflectedintheprogressively uneven treatment of the wide variety of philosophies and worldviews that have emerged in China along with economic freedom...
...In February 2007 it released Singapore Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong, who’d spent 1,000 days in jail on allegations of spying for Taiwan...
...A choir in pink and black robes that would not be out of place in Peoria, Illinois, sings contemporary Chi-nese Christian songs...
...China’s Christians have made it APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 41 leTTeR fRoM beIJInG abundantly clear they would not support either an independent Tibet or an independent Taiwan...
...In the 1980s and 1990s, the rural church took center-stage...
...Will “foreigners” seek to use Christianity to destabilize Chinese politics and society...
...But it is now too late for China to retreat from the world...
...The question of Sudan aside, China’s own human rights performance remains curiously mixed...
...Yet in late December it unceremoniously arrested veteran envi-ronmental and human rights activist Hu Jia after he had tried to help families of AIDS sufferers cope better and Chinese farmers to resist more effectively the expropriation of their farmland by avaricious developers in league with local party bigwigs...
...A young preacher, Wang Dong, on one winter Sunday quoted a poem by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao that was published in the People’sDaily in September 2007: As I look up into the starry expanseIt is so vast and so profoundThat infinite truthMakes me struggle to seek and follow it...
...The answer is that China is going in both directions at once...
...Almost every franchise popular in the U.S...
...After the service, he admitted in conversation that Zion Church was playing a new, and unpredictable, role in China’s fast-changing urban society: a mission-minded urban house church that is only six months old, is not “underground,” but is also not officially recognized as a legal entity...
...film director Steven Spielberg has resigned as an “artistic consultant” to the Chinese Games...
...You can do almost anything in China today as long as it doesn’t have political overtones: travel abroad, get married and divorced and have a mis-tress, start a new corporation, invest overseas, own your own car, and even have your own private heli-copter...
...We believe that Beijing will provide the model for urban churches in the rest of China and we hope our church becomes the model for Beijing...
...by David Aikman F rom the 20th-floor window of a new apartment block in the Wangjing district of Beijing, over-looking Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, a cold, winter’s afternoon looks especially bleak...
...is here, from Hooters to KFC, but if you want to spend a lot of money on entertaining privately over food, you can do so in the hundreds of private dining rooms in the city’s hotels...
...But now China’s urban churches have come into their own and are starting to occupy a curious no-man’s-land between legality and illegality...
...and appears to be renewed every week by the appear-ance of multi-story residential buildings...
...It’s unwise to open a window at night, because you’ll be breathing pure soot...
...Hu, according to one Beijing resident who came to know him well, is a slightly built, wholly inoffensive man, a Buddhist, devoted to environmental causes like the protection of rare Chinese antelopes...
...Perhaps if the Chinese government had known what would come into the country, they wouldn’t have competed so hard for the Olympics...
...In January 2008, Beijing officially admitted that six workers had died in various Olympic Games construction projects...
...The city’s smog hangs in the air like a sooty and chilly shroud, obscuring the view of anything more than a few hundred yards away...
...Personal ser-vices range from home delivery of bottled water and dry-cleaning to escort services for foreign busi-nessmen and culinary opportunities of enormous variety...
...By 2001, China quite specifically told the International Olympic Committee that the Games would help bring the country’s human rights policies closer to parity with DAvID AIkMAn the world’s free nations...
...As the largest, and fastest-growing, religion in China, Christianity poses significant challenges for the authorities, especially as the Olympics draw near...
...China knows that Beijing’s poor air quality has brought it constantly critical attention, particularly because of its promises ever since being awarded the Games in 2001 to reduce Beijing’s pollution...
...The Christian movement in China has now become an urban move-ment,” he explained...
...Beijing’s skyline today is completely unrecog-nizable to anyone who has not been back for 15 years, How does one measure if China is moving forward overall or backward on human rights...
...China has provided Sudan with $83 million in arms sales, not a huge amount, but enough, in conjunction with its political support of Sudan’s government, to prompt one Sudanese janjaweed mili-tia leader to express gratitude for the useful killing tools supplied by China...
...leTTeR fRoM beIJInG Trying to Catch Its Breath China struggles to keep up with Olympian expectations...
...It may not be beautiful, but Beijing is now a modern city...
...Road signs now abound in English (well, sort of English)—“keep distance,” “do not drive tiredly”—and when traffic shudders to a halt at red lights inside the city, entrepreneurial young men flit from car to car pushing fliers through driver’sseatwindowsfornewresidentialvillaestates on the outskirts of the city...
...Newcomers are asked to pro-vide names and e-mail contact points, and during the service to rise, identify themselves, and, if they want, provide a brief personal testimony...
...No permanent lung damage has been predicted by phy-sicians observing China’s preparations for the Games, but that will be small consolation for marathon run-ners and participants in other long-distance events...
...Arrests of Christian leaders in China’s provinces have, if any-thing, intensified as the Olympics come closer...
...They don’t quite know how to cope with us...
...Will “foreigners”—the favorite bugbear of the Com-munist Party—seek to use Christianity to destabilize Chinese politics and society...
...The general civic freedoms that ordi-nary Chinese enjoy today are as different—because they are so much more extensive—from freedoms available 30 years ago as China’s economy is differ-ent...
...In 2008 because of the Olympics all kinds of foreign influences will be coming into China, both good and bad,” he said...
...The government is not very well prepared,” Wang said...
...The general civic freedoms that ordinary Chinese enjoy today are as different—because they are so much more extensive—from freedoms available 30 years ago as China’s economy is different...
...Perhaps...
...Zhang said that he had been arrested or beaten or forced to vacate rented housing by police a total of 12 times since he became a Christian in 1986...
...But there have been few signs of any improvement...
...On Beijing’s concentric circles of ring roads or on the freeways that lurch their way out of the city in all directions on giant concrete buttresses, 1,000 new cars every day are turning the Chinese capital into the Los Angeles of Asia...
...But when you visit Zion Church in the Asian Games district of Beijing, you certainly don’t get the impression of persecution...
...In fact, foreign Christian missionary efforts to evangelize China are completely dwarfed by the rise of China’s own indigenous churches...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
