It wasn’t so long ago that the Clinton administration talked about getting Congress to extend MFN to China permanently, to avoid this bruising annual debate. Those hopes are long gone. It’s hard for Republican free traders, who might have signed on to such a deal, to ignore a human-rights lobby that includes the Christian right wing. And in a partnership that’s extraordinary even by Washington standards, the AFL-CIO has joined forces with Bauer’s group on China to put the squeeze on Democrats. Clinton announced his support for MFN on May 19, and now Congress has until Sept. 3 to try to repeal it over his certain veto. Few people think that could happen, but the anti-MFN coalition hopes to get a majority in the House. And there’s always next year. ““The China debate has been changed forever by the participation of the religious people,’’ says a labor lobbyist in Washington.
A domestic-policy adviser in the Reagan administration, Bauer has never been to China, or indeed anywhere outside the United States except Canada and Mexico. ““I’m not a world traveler,’’ he admits. While abortion has been Bauer’s bread-and-butter issue, he’s currently downplaying that divisive theme in order to broaden his coalition. He thinks Americans have forgotten Ronald Reagan’s great lesson: ““While we love commerce, it is not our highest value.’’ Other human-rights activists, who are mostly left of center, decline to back Bauer, and suspect that his own motives are partly mercenary. ““We’re laying hands on tortured Christians; send your money now!’’ says one wryly.
The question is whether Christian groups accurately portray the state of religious freedom in China. Human-rights workers concur that the government has clamped down on Christians since 1994, when Prime Minister Li Peng issued a decree requiring all religious organizations to register with the state or be destroyed. Police in recent years have cracked down on openly defiant groups, razing churches, beating parishioners and rounding up priests and bishops to be sent for ““re-education.''
But China is a big country. At the same time that persecution is growing, the number of believers is growing rapidly, too, and Christianity is thriving in many areas. In Dazhai, Chairman Mao’s ““model village’’ of the 1960s, the communist slogans of SERVE THE PEOPLE are fading from the village walls. But when NEWSWEEK visited a year ago, Christian slogans - LISTEN TO GOD and COME TO CHRIST AND YOU WILL HAVE PEACE - had been freshly painted, in bright red characters two feet high.
Some Hong Kong missionaries say their work in China is booming. The Hong Kong Christian Council has helped rebuild 70 churches in southern China since 1993. The Rev. Bill Teng, an American working in Hong Kong, says that even local Communist Party cadres offered an official welcome at the dedication of a new church in northern Guangdong province last November. Hong Kong Christians say they think China views them as ““indigenous,’’ and therefore less threatening than Western proselytizers, who recall the ““gunboat evangelism’’ in China a century ago. ““If Christianity becomes linked again with Western capi- talism and political posturing, Christian persecution will rise,’’ warns Philemon Choi, head of a Christian youth center in Hong Kong.
For the Chinese government, Roman Catholics are a particular affront. A Chinese citizen who loves the pope is challenging the government’s authority over its subjects - especially since the Vatican still recognizes Taiwan. So the Chinese government appoints its own bishops in its own Catholic Church, and doesn’t maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. But John Kamm, a human-rights campaigner with close knowledge of the Catholics, estimates that about 70 percent of the official bishops have secretly sworn fealty to the pope.
Back in the States, the evangelical movement is split over how best to nurture its Christian brethren in China. ““It seems that these groups [such as the FRC] are the experts on China now,’’ says Brent Fulton, managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Illinois. ““But they’ve gotten involved in China overnight. They miss the historical context in which they’re working.’’ Fulton, who’s finishing a Ph.D. in Chinese studies at the University of Southern California, claims that despite some obvious setbacks, religious freedom generally has been growing in China over the last 25 years. Teng in Hong Kong e-mailed his congressman last month to object to the religious right’s China crusade. ““It’s very important to get firsthand experience in China,’’ he says, ““or talk to someone who has.''
Some Christians in China don’t agree with the American right’s hard-line approach either. ““The most-favored-nation question has to do with politics,’’ says Yuan Xiangchen, whose one-room apartment in Beijing has become a popular underground ““house church.’’ ““It has nothing to do with religion. My friends ask me how they can help the Chinese church, and I answer them with just one word: “Pray’.’’ Last year the government told Yuan he would have to register his services officially, or they would be deemed illegal and shut down. Yuan spent 21 years in prison for refusing to join the official church, but he also wanted to follow the law, so he told his parishioners to stop coming. The next Sunday they came anyway. Now he limits his congregation to 70 people, so they don’t spill out into the street. Meanwhile, 10 more house churches have been set up in nearby suburbs. ““The situation with Christianity in China is like the time of the apostles,’’ Yuan says. ““Persecution is very good for the church.’’ It works pretty well for political careers in Washington, too.
Christians represent a tiny portion of China’s population of 1.2 billion.
AFFILITIAN PERCENTAGE Nonreligious 59.2% Folk religions 20.1 Atheism 12.0 Buddhism 6.0 Islam 2.4 Christianity 0.2 Other 0.1
