There’s no punchline here.

Via People’s Daily:

Recently a top US diplomat’s claim that China’s reclamation in the South China Sea violates the Feng shui of Southeast Asia is refuted by a Chinese Daoist, whose argument seems to be quite reasonable and makes him an instant online celebrity.

Daniel Russel, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said in a telephone interview with Washington Post that: “Reclamation isn’t necessarily a violation of international law, but it’s certainly violating the harmony, the Feng shui, of Southeast Asia, and it’s certainly violating China’s claim to be a good neighbor and a benign and non-threatening power.”

Daniel Russel’s explanation from the perspective of feng shui really can’t persuade the Chinese insiders. Liang Xingyang, secretary general of the Chang’an District Taoism Association issued a post on the Twitter-like Weibo, to defend China’s construction works at Nansha Islands in the South China Sea.

Pictured: Liang Xingyang, secretary general of the Chang’an District Taoism Association.

(H/T RFH)

It’s odd to imagine Jesus, in China, is more discussed than historic leaders, but Weibo chatter suggests precisely that.

An infographic published by Foreign Policy (non-paywalled version here) last month showed that discussion of Christian terms is several times more common than similar political phrases.

While the disparity may be exaggerated by attempts to create a healthy environment for discussion, it reflects a growing trend as young adults born in the 1980s and 1990s rediscover religion.

Wang Lin, a sophomore at Beijing Language and Culture University, spends most of her free afternoons on the streets near Sanlitun. But while many of her peers are there to window shop for luxury brands, Wang is preaching the Christian gospel.

Although raised as an atheist, Wang says she started to believe in Christianity after inspiring passages from the Bible offered her guidance in confronting life’s challenges.

Wang is one of millions of young converts.

Although the government’s “2010 Blue Book on Religion” says China has 23 million Christian adherents, Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, estimates the country may have 100 million believers: 7 percent of the population. Roughly 27 percent of them follow Catholicism.

By contrast, the country has an estimated 20 million Muslims, including the Uyghur, Kazakh and Dongxiang ethnicities, which are traditionally Islamic.

Christianity has spread rapidly during the past decade thanks to the proselytizing of young devotees on college campuses in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan. Most streets, shopping malls and restaurants have preachers out to offer improvised sermons to anyone willing to listen.

But China’s young Christians tend to pick and choose what parts to believe. Zhang, a pastor at Beijing Chaoyang Church, says that many young Chinese discover the religion while trying to escape from high-pressure jobs or disappointing marriages.

Recent Chinese generations have a profoundly narcissistic streak, she says. For many young adults, normal human troubles can be a great source of frustration. Christian teachings offer valuable lessons in tolerance, humility and compassion, she said.

Seven of the church’s eight full-time aides are in their 20s or 30s, said Zhang.

A long history

Zhang’s church is part of China’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the nation’s only registered Protestant church. The movement, formed after the communist revolution, is largely shaped by the teachings of Wu Yao-tsung, a Congregationalist proponent of the social gospel.

Christianity has a long history with China, arriving with Nestorian missionaries in the early years of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Although the Nestorian mission faded with the Church of the East, Jesuits returned in the late Ming Dynasty: over the next 200 years, they penned the first Chinese dictionaries in a European language and won positions in Beijing as science tutors to the Kangxi Emperor and court advisers.

However, a dispute with the Dominicans led the Qing court to ban Christianity, and through the 19th and 20th centuries most of China’s contact with the religion came by way of Protestant missionaries operating in Treaty Ports – a group that inspired Hong Xiuquan, the revolutionary better known as “God’s Chinese son.”

The religion survived in the Republican era, winning such high-ranking converts as Sun Yat-sen.

“The Jerusalem of China”

But in spite of its large and active community, Beijing is not China’s center of Christian worship.

While most associate Wenzhou with its fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs, China’s Christians know it as the “Jerusalem of China.” The southern city has more than 1,100 churches, most of which were built or rebuilt after the Cultural Revolution, says Ouyang Houzeng, vice president of the China Christian Council.

Wu Ruomiao, a teacher at Xiushan Junior High School in Wenzhou, says most of the city’s Christians are born into practicing families rather than recent converts.

Although the city has many young adults active in proselytizing, Wu says they do not have a persuasive influence. While her friends convinced her to read the Bible, Wu found little she could agree on aside from their Calvinist interpretation of Original Sin.

Wu says she believes life is less organized than religion makes it seem, and that death is certain. She also believes people do not require divine assistance to learn to do good.

Drifting between faiths

But in spite of Christianity’s growth, traditional Buddhism remains a strong competitor.

Xia Mingyuan, a graduate of the University of International Business and Economics, says he left Christianity for Buddhism when he found the religion’s values in conflict with his own. He was especially disturbed by the problem of evil.

Many believers in Wenzhou blindly follow Christianity because of their family, he says. Others merely copy the religion of their favorite business and entertainment idols like Bian Shuping and Yao Chen in hopes of emulating their wealth and success.

Those seeking inner peace seem to find their way to Buddhism, says Cai Bimei, editor of Nanfang Weekly.

Cai says she recites her favorite Sutras sometimes when she feels afraid, though she has not spent much time analyzing their meaning. “True believers” are people she associates whose lives are especially hard, she says.

Li Ang, a student at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, says Buddhism is more popular with his classmates than Christianity, though most have only a superficial understanding that involves ghosts and supernatural beings.

Few have explored its deeper teachings.

Disillusioned with political ideologies and promises, Li says most of his peers are searching for something to believe. But without a spiritual foundation or grounding in tradition, many end up merely going through the motions and bribing the divine to rain down favor.

Doing good for the sake of good, leaning from their mistakes and bettering society are rarely their goal, he says. But hearts and minds are evolving slowly.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Foreign Policy, that award-winning online magazine devoted to “analyz[ing] the most significant international trends and events of our times, without regard to ideology or political bias,” just gave an evangelical pastor 1,200 words to promulgate his religious propaganda. “Like most Chinese, I was educated an atheist,” writes Bob Fu to begin his panegyric to God in a piece titled “Jesus Loves China, Too” — and thus ends the last interesting words in his abortion of an editorial.

Here’s the lowdown: Fu encourages a slow simmer approach to proselytization, noting that while China is a big and complex place — “Missionaries should study China and it’s people, culture, and history” [sic] — its people are ripe for the taking: “Especially after 60 years of communism and wave after wave of class struggle, Chinese are desperate for trust.” That, in fact, is how Fu came to embrace Jesus: he approached American Christians when he was a student, and those Christians didn’t need much more of a signal from this wide-eyed Chinese boy to realize he was ready to be taken… taken by the hands of a holy man who bestows upon him that holy soul-healing light.

Fuck that.

Bob Fu is the worst type of Christian. Never mind, for a moment, what you think you know about his basic decency (which he might have plenty of, as someone who has experienced suffering and therefore wishes to relieve the world of pain). He is a bad Christian because his primary goal — at least as expressed through Foreign Policy — is to convert non-Christians. He believes conversion is an end to itself, that by thinking in a narrow, rigidly defined way — defined by the Gospel, if that isn’t clear — a person is able to acquire purpose and happiness.

There are Christians out there who genuinely derive strength from their faith and find meaning in God, and are generally outstanding people. And then there are people like Bob Fu, who believe life is meaningless unless there is God, who look around this beatific world and think, Such spiritual morass!

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Fu writing about his outlook following the Tiananmen student protests in 1989:

Man, I discovered painfully, has no power to change his own nature. No amount of slogans, science, democratic reforms, or self-determination can pull us out of our pit of immoral self-centeredness.

People like Bob Fu look upon a field of yellow cole flowers and don’t think, “How pretty,” but, “Thank you, Lord, for this gift, and hang on a sec, let me round up some other people and make them thank you as well.”

Everything Bob Fu does is for the purpose of converting Chinese people to Christianity, and if you don’t think there’s something wrong with that, I ask you to brush up on history. Go ahead, I’ll wait. But even setting aside the crusades, rebellions (e.g., Taiping) and clinic bombings, there’s just simply something smarmy and repulsive about Fu’s behavior, and something offensive about his priorities. An example: “ChinaAid, the organization I run,” he writes, “attempts to advance religious freedom and rule of law in China, softening the soil for the Gospel.”

(One more example: “Demonstrate a healthy marriage, build real trust in a friendship, and invite them to investigate the life and teachings of Christ for themselves.”)

And within the same article, Fu seems confused about his own thoughts on proselytization. He writes that in the early 1990s, he met “a famous American evangelist in a five-star hotel in Beijing” who asked him, “How many Chinese Christians have the spiritual gift of speaking in other tongues?”

First of all, that’s retarded. And I apologize to the mentally handicapped, but only a true cretin could ask “How many Chinese Christians have the spiritual gift of speaking in other tongues?” with a straight face. And only someone with a wrench in his skull could hear that question and not immediately back away, hands out in front, wary about falling hostage to this stupidity.

Bob Fu’s response?

While I don’t disapprove of this practice (and have even had this experience), it seemed that this secondary issue was his main concern.

Years later, he learned that this “famous American evangelist” – whom I imagine is a fecal cousin of Jabba the Hutt, plopping handfuls of shit everywhere he walks, and those little shits growing up to be bigger shits, who in turn spawn shits of their own — circulated tens of thousands of his book, How to Speak in Tongues, causing a divide among those who speak in tongues and those who don’t (imagine fucking that!). And now Bob Fu says this man’s ministry “deeply hurt the cause of the Gospel in China.”

Huh.

Instead of pausing to wonder about “the cause,” Bob Fu immediately contrasts that evangelist with “the two Americans who showed up at the doorstep of my in-laws in a remote village in Shandong, near where legal activist Chen Guangcheng used to live.” (This is the first of only two mentions of Chen Guangcheng in the article, by the way; one almost feels that Fu is using Chen to drive his own agenda.)

Writes Fu:

Those American teachers even learned how to share an outhouse with pigs!

Gasp! Atheists probably would have slaughtered those pigs with their bare teeth and dined on the entrails of all that is holy.

As a result, both of my in-laws came to Christ after my American teachers left.

Oh Jesus Christ On A Raft.

I’m not using the Lord’s name in vain because Bob’s in-laws went to Christ — I don’t care about that, or what people believe. Rather, there is a pathetic, hackneyed narrative here, a favorite amongst snake charmers like Bob Fu: the story of the unenlightened savages who live in drudgery and mud (or pigsties, as it were) in need of clean, upstanding men from first worlds to instruct them, to make them see the error in their ways, to give them light for they live in darkness, to release them into good for they are bound by the ignorance of evil. There is always that Manichean divide, isn’t there? Not that pagan yin and yang shit, no, we’re talking about angels and demons, heaven and hell, God and no God.

Fu, again:

In the Bible, the book of Romans says, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil and cling to what is good and always serve each other in love.” With this kind of message, Christianity will blossom. This is the only way freedom — both individually and nationally — will spread in China.

Even his use of the word freedom is obnoxious, implying that 1.4 billion people in China currently live like rats in cages. If only Bob Fu could experience the real world from the ground, where reality is a bit more complex, and colorful. If he ever learned to see beyond the chiaroscuro that is his conception of belief, he just might find a second way for Chinese people to achieve fulfillment. Would we be saved? No one can know. But we would at least be spared from Bob Fu.