China's Urban Christians an Unknown Quantity For Beijing

By Radio Free Asia
September 04, 2007

Christianity is gaining new converts in Chinese cities and towns, especially among the newly emerging and assertive professional class, and the trend is causing the ruling Communist Party some concern, experts say.

A prominent example of this phenomenon is rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been detained, kept under surveillance and sentenced to a jail term after he represented the underdogs in sensitive political cases. Gao is also a committed Christian, whose Beijing-based church has been raided by police on more than one occasion.

Gao's commitment to using the nascent Chinese legal system to fight unpopular civil rights cases--such as representing villagers who wish to indict local officials for graft, or representing members of the banned Falun Gong movement--are underpinned by his strong emphasis on morality and compassion, and bound up with the lawyer's Christian identity.

"The people who are taking the lead now in proposing not just political change in China, but moral change, are the Christian intellectuals--the lawyers, the professors, the writers," author David Aikman recently told an audience at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

Religion connected to rebellion

China's leadership, which always keeps a weather eye on the nation's history, appears to remember only too keenly that many anti-government movements--the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) against the highly corrupt Qing Dynasty, for example--have been inspired by religious teachings.

Such movements typically emerge at times of stark social division, which in today's China is evidenced by the thousands of protests and demonstrations across the country in any given year, frequently with land-rights disputes and allegations of official corruption at their core.

Thousands of petitioners try to get into the capital, Beijing, every year, to lodge complaints against official wrongdoing. Almost none win redress in return for years of queuing, form-filling, and further abuse from officials who object to their complaints.

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