The Fat Years (20 page)

Later on, officials from the Bureau of Religion had come to the church and asked them about their activities. But the officials’ attitude was not at all antagonistic; they didn’t say much, and after they’d gone, nothing more was heard from them. Over the last two years, the government had been keeping a very low profile.

Gao Shengchan was a graduate of the provincial university. Before going to prison, he’d been a middle-school teacher and an avid reader of the
Reading Journal,
right up to the moment he came to believe in Jesus Christ. He was an intellectual, not from a peasant background like Li Tiejun and the others, and so he worried a lot more than they did. He was particularly concerned that the government’s lenient policy might not last long, because the number of believers in the whole country was growing very fast, especially in the terms of the membership of Buddhist organizations and Protestant churches. Gao Shengchan had a number in mind: 150 million. Most of them had joined in the last two years, and the so-called home churches accounted for 80 percent of them. Ever since Liberation, except for the worker and peasant classes, there had never been an interest group that made up such a large proportion of the national population. During past crackdowns on the landlords and rich peasants, on the capitalist class and Rightists, it had always been the great majority against a small minority—but now a divided majority of 1.3 billion was faced by a united minority of 150 million religious believers. Surely the Communist Party could not suppress Christianity the way they had the Falun Gong movement? But how could the Communist Party not be apprehensive about so many Christian believers? Gao Shengchan both hoped that the number of Christians would continue to increase rapidly and feared that the Communist Party might turn on them. He prayed to God to give the Christian churches another ten years of peace in which to develop, and swore that he would work in those ten years to see that the number of Christians reached 350 million. That would equal one-fourth of the population, a critical number that he thought would ensure the security of the church.

In order to protect their long-term development, Gao proposed that each Christian order or sect attend to its own affairs only. The Evangelicals, the Liberals, the Fundamentalists, and the Charismatics should not meet together, and churches within the same sect should not come together too often. He didn’t want the government to have the impression that the home churches were developing into province-wide or even nationwide organizations. Many people who attended the churches didn’t understand his concern, and they criticized him for being insufficiently open, or caring too much for his own church group, or even for trying to set himself up as a supreme leader. Gao Shengchan told them, however, that the main thing was to communicate directly with God and not to communicate with each other.

Another thing that Gao Shengchan himself could do, however, was to write articles and circulate them to the various believers; this was actually a way of sending information to the government. His most important theme was “God is God and Caesar is Caesar.” He wrote that the Christian church did not seek secular political power; it was a force for social stability, and thus the secular government should not interfere with religion. His hope was that he could influence the government to change its usual policy and accept the idea that politics and religion were separate realms. He wanted to erect a firewall between the political regime and his religion, and that would be of great assistance to the development of religion at this point in time. He also wrote blogs under several names to support those Beijing scholars who advocated the desensitization of religion.

However, Gao Shengchan didn’t advocate putting extra pressure on the government during the desensitization process, and he was opposed to the demands of urban radical Christian intellectuals for official recognition of the home-church movement and for the legalization, open operation, and free publication of formerly underground churches. He believed that the government could not officially recognize the home churches; desensitization was their bottom line. After desensitization, the best thing would be for the government to act as though it were unaware of the underground churches, and for the Bureau of Religion to act as though it had never heard of any home churches outside of the Three-Self Patriotic denomination. The home churches should not do anything to embarrass the government. If they didn’t cause any trouble, everybody could save face and everybody could function well.

Gao Shengchan thought that later generations would probably look back and say that this was the purist age of Chinese Protestant Christianity. Because it operated outside the Three-Self Patriotic Church, Protestant Christianity still retained its underground character, and there were very few secular benefits to becoming a member of the church. So most of the new members joined the church with a pure heart; they were practicing faith for the sake of faith. If some church leaders or volunteer workers became corrupt, they were the exception and not the rule. People in China who were genuinely ambitious for fame, profits, or power joined the Communist Party, the so-called democratic parties, commercial-interest groups, organized-crime gangs, or the entertainment industry; comparatively few would choose the religious arena. Even if they did, they would join the government-recognized religious organizations or found a sect of their own; they would not be very likely to join a Protestant denomination. On the other hand, in a country like the United States, where Protestant Christianity was the mainstream religion, the churches could hardly avoid being associated with fame, profit, power, and interest groups. Gao Shengchan hoped that Chinese Christianity could continue to develop underground for a long time so that ambitious characters would not be interested in the home-church movement and Chinese Christians would be able to remain as pure-hearted as they were now.

The Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground had quite a good reputation in Chinese Christian circles, and, since all its leaders had spent time in prison, many foreign Christians came to see them. Li Tiejun and the others were particularly happy to associate with foreigners, but Gao Shengchan was quite wary of this; he was afraid that the Communist Party would charge them with the crime of collaborating with foreign powers. From his exchanges with visitors from abroad, Gao Shengchan realized even more clearly that, although the Christian churches didn’t aspire to secular power, they could still be drawn into politics as in America, where the Evangelical Christians frequently worked on issues with the Republican Party and its right-wing factions that supported the interests of big capitalists. Some Americans had actually come to Henan to see Gao Shengchan and urge him to oppose the Chinese government’s birth-control policies, but he had refused to do so. To this day American Christian church groups have never invited this excellent Chinese Christian intellectual and charismatic leader of the underground church movement to visit the United States, not to mention visit the White House and meet the president.

What Gao Shengchan was able to do was to insist that the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground should not accept monetary contributions from abroad, nor receive Bibles illegally smuggled into China, nor invite non-Chinese pastors to preach in their churches. Some people had actually accused Gao Shengchan of promoting a “No No No” Patriotic Church. Fortunately, up to this point, Li Tiejun and the others had agreed with Gao Shengchan on these important policies; the main reasons being that the Chinese economy was very strong, church members donated a considerable amount of money, and the church had no need of foreign donations and even less need of foreign Bibles.

There was one sort of positive development that sometimes, however, gave Gao Shengchan a major headache. After joining the church, the faithful had a natural cohesion based on their common identity, and they wanted to express Christ’s spirit of universal love by collaborating on common goals and mutually protecting one another. If some brother or sister in the Lord was in trouble, they felt duty-bound to rush to his or her aid. Gao had heard that there had already been many occasions when collusion between businesspeople and government officials had infringed the rights and well-being of the common people, and when members of the underground churches were among those ordinary victims, their brothers and sisters in the faith organized themselves to resist the business and bureaucratic interest groups. In the mind of the government officials, these incidents could easily be regarded as a confrontation between the believers and the regime. Some local officials already regarded the home churches as a thorn in their flesh and they had put a great deal of pressure on the Bureau of Religion to do something about them. If these incidents kept occurring, they might cause the government to reverse its present relatively lenient policy.

This was precisely why the appearance of Little Xi caused Gao Shengchan both joy
and
anxiety. His face became flushed. The Lord must have guided her to them, thanks be to the Lord.

Ever since the Warm Springs fellowship had been established, he had stood in the yard and guided many lost sheep back into the Lord’s embrace. The difference was that as soon as he saw Little Xi he knew she was not local; she had a certain air of culture about her; she was an intellectual like himself.

After Little Xi had been in Warm Springs a while, Gao Shengchan saw that she read the Bible quite seriously, and that the questions she asked were very sophisticated and not at all trivial. What she most wanted to understand was why they all believed in God and why the church members, after being suppressed and forced underground, didn’t harbor any hatred—on the contrary, they were even happier than anyone else.

“Because we have love in our hearts, because we have the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Gao Shengchan in his sermons.

Little Xi appreciated the mutual concern the brothers and sisters of the fellowship had for one another; it was much more sincere than the class solidarity she had been taught since childhood. This kind of loving friendship recalled to her the intellectuals she’d met in the Wudaokou restaurant during the 1980s. They had also had a similar sort of kindred spirit. Now it was all gone with the wind.

She could not help wondering to herself, If they didn’t have religious faith, could good people in China still keep on being good? In China’s current conditions, with this political system and prevailing social mood, it’s not at all easy to “guard one’s own virtue alone,” as the Confucian philosopher
Mencius advised. What kind of moral and spiritual power can make one want to be good? Without religious faith, it’s just too difficult to be a good person.

Little Xi didn’t, however, have the urge to believe in religion. All her life she had been a faithful disciple of materialism and atheism and she could not change her mind. Her reason made her resist the claims of theistic religion.

The only person in the fellowship with whom she could have a high-level discussion was Gao Shengchan, but as the main preacher for all four fellowships, he couldn’t stay in Warm Springs all the time. So Little Xi decided that wherever Gao Shengchan went, she would go with him, listen to his preaching, and ask him further questions.

There was something else about the fellowship that Little Xi was only vaguely aware of. Those humble and devout disciples of Christ also exhibited a mild form of dogmatic self-satisfaction—we alone know the truth—that made her feel somewhat uneasy. Although Gao Shengchan was very enthusiastic when he preached the gospel, in everyday life he seemed to carry a great load of care and a certain melancholy; he also had to cope with his lameness, and Little Xi felt it was very easy to communicate with him. She decided to get closer to him.

Little Xi had no romantic notions, but Gao Shengchan certainly did and was even thinking that it was about time for him to take a wife. But Little Xi was not yet a Christian, and all those posts she put on the Internet under the name of
maizibusi
might cause trouble.

It was at this stage in their relationship that the Zhang Family Village incident occurred.

Many peasant families in Zhang Family Village were members of the Christian fellowship. A short while earlier the township government, in collusion with a business interest group, had violated their rights and enclosed their land. When the other brothers and sisters in the fellowship discussed this situation, Little Xi was particularly enthusiastic. She explained many legal concepts to them and urged them to defend their legal rights. When everybody learned that she had studied law, they greatly admired her knowledge. They planned out a three-part strategy. First, they would go to the county court and file a suit against the township government; second, they would stage a protest demonstration in front of the township-government headquarters; and third, they would make a real-time record of the demonstration and put all the evidence of the township government’s corruption on the Internet for wider distribution. This last move was because Little Xi told them, “The Internet is
the people’s Central Discipline Committee and virtual Public Security authorities.” But some were worried that if they acted this way, the church would be drawn into the peasants’ rights defense movement, with hard-to-predict consequences.