A friend of mine, Thirdpartydreamer, who is also a specialist on the history of health and nutrition in China, pens an excellent review of the book, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman (2003):
I must confess that I picked up this book in an antagonistic spirit.
Aikman is a conservative evangelical who’s just been hired to teach at
Patrick Henry College (the new college designed to send home-schooled
Christian men into government service—women are admitted to the school,
but are not expected to pursue careers. Check out the school’s website, or see the recent New Yorker article
on PHC). Since he styles himself a China expert, and boasts an
impressive set of credentials (Ph.D. in History from the University of
Washington, former Time reporter in Moscow and Beijing), I thought his
take on Christianity in China might be worth checking out…even if his
oeuvre contains such dubious entries as the recent George Bush is the Messiah or whatever it’s called (okay, it’s Man of Faith: the Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush).Aikman’s
thesis here is that Christianity is spreading like a brush fire in the
People’s Republic today, especially in the form he considers the most
promising: the underground house church. House churches he contrasts
with the state-approved and state-controlled congregations affiliated
with the Three Self Patriotic Association (the government’s Protestant
outfit) and the Catholic Patriotic Association (the government’s
Catholic outfit). He relies for his information on the members of the
underground churches themselves, and participates uncritically in their
boosterism. One suspects that Aikman overestimates how pervasive
underground Christianity really is—not to mention how likely it is that
Chinese Christians will change the way the People’s Republic interacts
with the world (curbing its human rights abuses and bringing it in line
with American foreign policy, as Aikman assumes Christianity will
naturally do).
Read on….
