Got a really interesting question in my comments today, that I’d like to answer in a way that more people see than if it was just down in the comment section. This was a question by Lily, and I’ve copy-pasted it in its entirety below, and I’m just gonna kinda go through and answer point by point.
I'm curious about the perception of Christianity. I have a friend from church who is from Wenzhou, and she told me her family has been Christian for like six generations, which made me do a double take... "Isn't Christianity lowkey not allowed in China?" (I know it's not illegal, but it seems like the CCP doesn't want it to proliferate.) She told me that in Wenzhou it's tacitly accepted just because so much of the city is already Christian (because that's where most of the early missionaries first landed).
I’m not sure that the CCP specifically doesn’t want Christianity to proliferate. I mean, sure, they obviously don’t want it to become an influential enough faction in China to pose any kind of problems, but that’s true for any religion, including Buddhism and Daoism. And this mostly takes the form that it’s very difficult to get permissions to build a new temple or church or whatever, or to get yourself qualified as a monk/priest. And you’re not allowed to be registered as a religion at all if you’re not one of the five religions that the CCP actually acknowledges (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Christianity). Yes. Somehow, they consider Catholicism and Christianity to be two different things. So you can’t quite have like 11,000 different flavours of Protestant like America has, and just kinda make up your own philosophy to preach.
And I’m not sure if it’s an outright ban or just a strong discouragement, but there’s zero Christian content on TV—no Christian characters, no Christian stories, certainly no televangelists. At most, you get a glimpse of a church at wedding scenes, and even picturing a western-style wedding is exceptionally rare. So Christianity has a really hard time spreading in China, I feel like. Compared to 2000, the average Chinese person knows a lot more about general American culture nowadays, for example. But I really don’t feel like the average Chinese person knows a lot more about Christianity over the last 24 years.
I've learned some stuff from her already, but I think my level of curiosity is higher than would be polite to keep asking about lol. And because she's immersed in it, it might be difficult or sensitive for her to explain how it's perceived outside of Wenzhou.
So my question(s) are basically the following: How is Christianity generally perceived in China? Not only the way foreigners practice it, but also when local people practice it. What are the stereotypes? What's the amount that people generally know? What is their opinion of the overarching themes of it (ex. love one another, forgive/repent, "turn the other cheek," wealth is bad, etc... even just thinking about life in terms of "sin" and "forgiveness")? Back when I lived in Beijing, the vibe I sensed was that people mostly just think (but ofc did not say to me), "lol that's weird but whatever (slash aren't those the weird people who hand out goofy flyers?)"
I’ll note that unlike your friend, I definitely come from an area of China that has, like, next to no Christians, so I’m not sure if the opinion changes a lot if you went to a part of China that has more believers or not. But generally, Christianity is just perceived as exotic and foreign and people don’t think too much about it. Not that different from how the average American might think about Buddhism.
Christians in China also don’t tend to be that fanatical, perhaps because most Chinese people just aren’t that fanatical about religion as a culture. People don’t tend to think much of practitioners when they do meet one. It helps that there aren’t any dietary prescriptions or strict daily ritual requirements in Christianity, compared to vegetarian Buddhisms or “pray five times a day” Muslims. So, they don’t tend to get in anybody’s way, and you don’t have to change your plans to accommodate them much.
As for the stereotype…well, because there’s no dress code or daily rituals or whatever, Christians aren’t that visibly Christians. So any time you’re finding out someone is a Christian in China, it’s because they’re outright telling you about it. So the stereotype is still that Christians tend to be really preachy and pushy about trying to convert you, but that’s probably because if you aren’t pushy, then no one would even know you’re a Christian.
The average person (at least round near where I live) knows nothing about the actual philosophy or theology of Christianity at all. It’s not taught in schools, and it’s never portrayed in TV shows or novels from China, and there’s not a whole lot of great Hollywood portrayals of religious people that’s actually made it over to China. As for the general tenets of love and forgiveness and charity and all that, it’s pretty universal among most religions. And all the subtle differences about how Christianity specifically views sin and guilt and repentance isn’t something you’re gonna learn about unless you’re, like, a specific scholar specialising in Christianity.
I've been reading your blog for awhile (love your work, tysm <3), and from what I read, I would predict that people in China would probably consider anyone who actually sincerely follows Christianity to be kind of a chump, not only for seriously believing in any religion in the first place, but also because the religion generally calls for making yourself vulnerable even if it means you get taken advantage of. It just seems so counter to many Chinese cultural values and incentives/constraints. Like, it's easy for me as a privileged American to say that wealth is bad, because at the end of the day, I'll always be okay; someone in rural China with close to nothing will justifiably have a very different perception of wealth as it relates to virtue.
But even if someone thinks Christians are chumps, is there any amount of respect for that? Like is there any sentiment like, "They're foolish, but it's nice that they care about [serving the poor, forgiving unforgivable things, doing something for someone else even if it harms you, etc--anything might be described as a "Christian virtue"]."
I think this has nothing to do with the specific tenets of Christianity, and more to do with the fact that normal, mainstream people in China have a lot of general distrust towards institutions in general, and that includes organised religion. They might not have a lot of encounters with Christianity in their life. But there are tons of Buddhist temples in China. And those are somewhat infamously corrupt. You have to pay money for the right to pray. Wealthy patrons get special privileges. The monks are sleeping around all the time. You have to pay them a small fortune for services like conducting a funeral or exorcising a ghost. They dodge taxes all the time. They embezzle donations. There’s been a lot of scandals in this nature.
It’s honestly not even temples. Every institution in China that’s at any scale has severe corruption problems. So people naturally assume the same is true for Christianity. I mean, there’s plenty of evidence for it. Look at how much money must go into building one of those giant cathedrals! Look at what the Pope wears!
So they kind of think anyone who sincerely follows a religion to be a chump, just because it’s kind of obvious that nobody else in your religion is doing it. Chinese people don’t *really* believe that anybody is actually doing it. Especially not after all the scandals in China of all the different charities that have turned out to be corrupt and just exploiting poor people for more donations.
They also don’t think that helping poor people is necessarily a virtuous thing to do. Like, in concept, sure, that sounds great. What kind of asshole thinks you shouldn’t feed someone who’s starving right in front of you?
But in practice, actually desperately poor people who have no social safety nets to rely on and live in an area too remote to have police? They’re never the kind of person that anybody really wants to help. They’re the people abducting women and buying wives. They’re the people drowning female babies in the river. They’re the people marrying their daughters off at 13 to the highest bidder. They’re the people who rob their neighbour’s entire sweet potato field and then beat up that neighbour when they dared to try to get the cops involved. They’re people who beat their wives and spend what little money they have on gambling and drinking.
And as far as a mainstream Chinese person is concerned, it’s a travesty that none of these behaviours lead to jail, because that’s where they belong. It’s even a saying in China that, “the poorer an area is, the more evil its people.” And there’s plenty of warnings to never feel too much sympathy, to not try to get involved, because you’ll just get taken advantage of.
And yeah, like you said, as an American, that’s not something you have to worry about too much, because in general, if you try to help a homeless person and they abduct you and shackle you to the bridge they’re sleeping under to have babies for the next 15 years, the cops will generally try to do something about it. That’s not the case in China. “Doing something for someone even if it hurts you” is a lot harder to justify depending on how much it hurts you.
I live in an area of rural China that’s filled with extremely poor rural villages. The kind of place where people die every year in the winter because they can’t afford basic winter coats. And at my sister’s suggestion, my family’s been organising efforts to donate coats in the area for several years now. And the reality is, if we were all Chinese citizens and my sister came up with the same idea, I would have shot her down outright. Because if she went out distributing coats and ended up abducted by someone to be his wife, I would actually have to go commit myself some murder, and I’d probably be sentenced to death for it, and that’s just too high a price for me to pay to save a stranger’s life.
Are there things people consider problematic in Christianity? It's difficult to separate "behavior of Christians" and "Christian theology" (ex. you're supposed to "love your neighbor" but historically Christians have been known for being racist), probably even more so in a place where it's rarely practiced, but if there's any amount where you see a distinction between the two, especially if they acknowledge that difference directly, I'd be so curious to hear about it!!
Christianity the way it’s commonly practiced in China doesn’t really draw much criticism, because they’re a whole lot less influential in China. Christians can’t actually band together and all vote one way to influence the country, so nobody really minds what they believe so long as they’re not too pushy about it. But people definitely think some of the stuff Christians push for in America is pretty problematic. Like, I’ve never met anyone in China who isn’t pro-choice. It’s such a default that it’s like they can’t conceive any other position exists. And people were pretty smug/horrified when America overturned Roe v. Wade, and there’s plenty of horror stories about abortion bans in red states on the Chinese internet, to discourage people from moving to America.
And of course, stories of all the weird Christian-based cults that have sprung up in American history and done crazy shit, as a, “See, this is why we don’t allow total religious freedom.”
A potential case study: After the racially-motivated shooting at a Black church in Charleston in 2015, during the trial afterward, the families had the chance to speak to the shooter, and they used their time to tell him that they forgive him and that they pray for him. When my friends and family talked about that after, the vibe was like, "That is so admirable, that's the way we should live even if it's hard, we should try to be like them." But would the same story be received the same way in China?
Even though I'm Christian, I'm really just super curious about this in an academic way. Not fishing for any particular answer, just would love to know more. I asked a bunch here, so feel free to only address whatever amount you want.
Yeah, that would definitely not go over well in China. You would be considered retarded at best, and straight up evil at worst for forgiving the person who shot your family. It would be considered a betrayal to the people you lost, to not seek justice/vengeance for them. And I think that’s just a cultural difference, in that Christianity puts much more of an emphasis on “forgiveness”, whereas Daoism and the Chinese-variant of Buddhism puts more of an emphasis on “karma”. That bad things happen to bad people, because if bad things didn’t happen to bad people, then why shouldn’t we all be bad? If he gets forgiven, why wouldn’t he shoot up another church? And if he does, then you would share a portion of that responsibility/karma for not stopping him when you could in the first place.
I think this might also have something to do with China’s general…complete unawareness of the lives of prisoners? Like, for the most part, barely anyone actually gets executed anymore in America. And there are plenty of documentaries you can look up that covers life inside prisons, life as a part of a gang, rehabilitated convicts, wrongfully imprisoned people, etc. Like, prisoners are already pretty invisible in American society, but if you’re interested in the topic at all, you could learn about them. There are efforts to humanise them.
The same isn’t true for China. The death sentence is used fairly liberally for much smaller crimes. And if people are dead, then you never see if they turn their life around. You can’t visit friends in prison unless you have specific connections there, so people don’t manage to keep their social connections on even relatively short prison stays. And having a criminal record impacts you even more in China than in America, so often times, you can’t even stay in a big city anymore after you get out, and a lot of ex-cons just end up disappearing into the countryside. And in order to uphold the image of police as being just and always right (because it’s really hard to justify a death sentence if there’s a possibility of the police being wrong), China media never humanises the criminal. Can’t pass the censors if they even try. So you never see the perfectly understandable factors that might drive somebody to turn to a life of crime. It’s never portrayed as a mistake, or a poverty trap—they’re just a monster.
Like, I want to write a PSA series to the Chinese internet about actual drug education, that it’s not actually helpful to demonise drug addicts as being irredeemably evil, because then they have no incentive to not become drug dealers. That the precise reason drugs are dangerous is because they’re addictive, and it’s hard to fight it, and it can turn any normal, upstanding human being into an addict if you make some small mistakes. That the reason America doesn’t just shoot all drug addicts in the face like China chooses to is because large numbers of them are just people who got a little bit too much of a painkiller prescription after a normal injury or doctors doing meth because they’re doing back to back shifts. Because I don’t think you can actually achieve any kind of progress at dealing with drug abuse if you only think of drug dealers as moustache-twirling card-carrying villains who sell drugs because they’re eviiiiil and they enjoy doing eviiiil things. But I don’t, because that kind of opinion gets you banned off of the internet permanently.
I hope that answered your question! If there’s any follow ups or anything you want me to go into more detail about, feel free to let me know!
Tangential question: Do you know if the Hakka are proportionally more Christian than average (in China or in general)? There's this channel that I watch about Hakka that happens to interview a lot of Christians, and I'm wondering if that's indicative of anything.
This is amazing!! I'm so appreciative; thank you so much for giving such a robust response. I'm busy so I only just read it quickly, but I'll mull it over and see if I think of any follow ups.