Human Rights, Religious Freedom, and Chinese Christians
By Daniel H. Bays, Professor of History, Calvin College

[This lecture was delivered at Yale University Divinity School on February 19, 2004.]

In thinking and reading about the issues of human rights, religious freedom, and Chinese Christians, trying to find an angle of approach that would yield fresh insight, of course I soon realized that each of the three subjects in the title could be the topic of a lecture series, not just a single lecture. But sometimes enforced brevity or condensation can facilitate understanding; let us pray that it will tonight.

First, human rights. For well over two decades, since the abortive democracy (or "democracy wall") movement of 1978-79 that first propelled Wei Jingsheng into the spotlight—and then especially after the even more dramatic and tragic Tiananmen democracy movement of spring 1989, which culminated in the June 4 military suppression—there has been widespread discussion of, and in the West nearly universal condemnation of, the Chinese government's behavior with regard to human rights. During the 1980s this discussion in the West, especially in the U.S., was somewhat muted by the fact that China and the U.S. were "strategic partners" against the Soviets in the Cold War. But after 1989, with both the collapse of the Soviet Union and what was almost universally considered the outrageous behavior of the Chinese government and Communist Party at Tiananmen, public criticism of what most observers agreed was China's abysmal human rights record mounted. Richard Madsen, in a book that has not received nearly the attention it deserves, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (1995), recounts vividly the shock of the shattering of what he calls the American "liberal myth" about China. That myth was full of assumptions about China's presumed trajectory towards modernization and democratization, accompanied by—basically—American values. At any rate, an extensive discussion of China's poor human rights record continued steadily through the 1990s. The period from the mid- to late 1990s, and down to the present, has seen the publication of many dozens of articles and more than 20 major books by social scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and historians on issues relating to Chinese—or, sometimes, more broadly, East Asian—human rights. Heavyweights in the field of Chinese thought such as William Theodore de Bary and Tu Wei-ming, among others, have thrown themselves into the fray. I had no idea how extensive this literature was until I dug into it for this presentation. It ranges from the extremely present-minded to the historically reflective, i.e., from—on the one hand—studies focused on how to induce or coerce compliance of the Chinese government with so-called international standards of human rights (often meaning Western standards), to—on the other hand—those looking at Chinese history and traditional culture seeking keys to explain, and again, generally to deplore, Chinese concepts and practices relating to human rights. (e.g., a book titled The Tyranny of History).

In the 1990s, in the arena of the world press and in political maneuvering in international organizations, such as at regional meetings of neighboring Asian states, in meetings of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, or in other special conferences on human rights—in all these settings China actually was very effective in avoiding the passage of resolutions or public manifestoes critical of its actions. The Chinese government achieved this successful outcome (successful to its mind) with a three-pronged strategy. First was a claim of the historical relativity of human rights standards. As the head of China's delegation to the 1993 UN human rights meeting in Vienna put it (as quoted by Stephen Angle in his excellent 2002 book): "The concept of human rights is a product of historical development. It is closely associated with specific social, political, and economic conditions and the specific history, culture, and values of a particular country. Different historical development stages have different human rights requirements” (p. 1). Very straightforward. And the corollary, of course, is that it is therefore wholly inappropriate for any country to insist that another country comply with human rights concepts different from its own. Moreover, in addition to differing stages of historical development, it was claimed that some Asian societies, because of certain ''Asian values" that intrinsically differed from Western values, would always have different, but equally legitimate, concepts of human rights. (This Asian values theme was also extensively used by the leaders of Malaysia and Singapore and a few other countries to justify practices considered by many to be undemocratic).

The second strategy was related to the first. It was to stress that China does recognize the sanctity of human rights, but that economic and social human rights, especially the "right to subsistence" (shengcun quan), takes precedence over political rights at this stage of China's development. An occasional further elaboration of this "human right" of subsistence is that in order to procure it, there must be an effective sovereign state or regime to provide the stable environment necessary for economic growth and a higher standard of living—so that by providing a stable authoritarian political system, China's government actually meets a human rights need. A very convenient argument, you'll agree.

The third strategy by the Chinese government to avoid public relations embarrassment was to attack the alleged hypocrisy of China's critics, especially those in the U.S., and to point out deficiencies in the human rights record of Western countries. For example, in response to the U.S. State Department's annual report on China, containing the usual criticism of China in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the Information Office of China's State Council has taken to issuing its own direct rebuttal in the form of a report titled (in its latest version) The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002. (Apparently, the 2003 version of both of these reports has not yet appeared).

Now, it seems to me that few Western participants in human rights discussions on China take seriously the Chinese arguments that at this stage of its history subsistence or economic development, much less state sovereignty, are more important than political freedom. Most of us instinctively see this line of argument as a specious cover-up for political repression. But if one gives it no credence at all, even hypothetically, there isn't much basis for dialogue. "Fine," say human rights hard-line defenders, "there shouldn't be dialogue on such bedrock issues—rather, unremitting criticism and denunciation, and sanctions as well, to induce a change in Chinese behavior." However, it isn't immediately obvious where such sanctions or pressures can effectively be brought to bear, in light of both 1) China's rapidly mounting world economic importance (just consider the transformation of the Pearl River delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou; or China's "Silicon Valley" between Shanghai and Suzhou) and 2) China's increasingly indispensable diplomatic role as broker of a deal to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula. One could identify other obstacles to putting outside pressure on China.

Are we thus left with no way forward? Not at all. The path perhaps lies partly within Chinese tradition itself. When one takes a step back and views historically the evolution of concepts of human rights (renquan) in China, one actually discovers a very interesting pattern, to which I will now devote a couple of minutes because it does seem to point the way forward to the possibility of dialogue, not just denunciation and rhetorical confrontation.

I am glad to admit that for several of the insights and claims I am about to share with you, I am substantially indebted to the recent work of Stephen C. Angle, a student of Chinese thought just a few miles north of here in the philosophy department of Wesleyan University (esp. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry, 2002). I am also indebted to the work of Marina Svensson, of Lund University in Sweden, who likewise has a 2002 book, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History, concentrating on the period since about 1900. And the two authors collaborated on a 2001 sourcebook, The Chinese Human Rights Reader, with translations of and commentary on 63 documents between 1900 and 2000. In my view Angle and Svensson have taken the scholarship on human rights in China to a higher and more nuanced level.

In a nutshell: Angle, in tracing the threads of some little noticed but persistent themes in Neo-Confucian thought from the sixteenth century on, finds in the Neo-Confucian debate about "legitimate desires," which is in turn based on the concept of benefit (li) and its legitimacy, a recognition by some thinkers of "legitimate interests," and recognition of a form of "rights" as representing those legitimate interests. All this precedes the nineteenth century. Then he describes the introduction in the nineteenth century, partly through foreign missionary influence and partly by Japanese example, of concepts and terms for "rights" (quanli) and "people's [political] rights" (minquan). Then, soon after 1900, as covered in different ways by all three books, the term we now most use for human rights, renquan, began to come into use. One of Angle's major conclusions is that there are substantial continuities between the late traditional/early modern Chinese discourse on rights/human rights and more recent discourses, including those of today. These continuities center on 1) rights as means to desirable ends (not ends in and of themselves) 2) rights as closely linked to interests, and 3) a joint recognition of political and economic rights. The lesson that Angle draws is that indeed there exists an authentic and distinctive (though not unique) Chinese human rights tradition, one that it would be unfair and unwise to reject as mere window dressing for thugs. He states his case carefully and judiciously, well aware of the political passions on all sides; but the upshot is that for him, at least (and I'm also convinced), dialogue is both feasible and desirable (and the corollary is that pressure without dialogue smacks of arrogance and rhetorical imperialism [that last is not his word, but mine]).

We could go on with human rights in the Chinese context, but I want to bring in the issue of religious freedom. Freedom of religious belief, along with the freedoms of speech, assembly, publication, and so forth, are, in the minds of many human rights advocates, basic civil liberties, part of the foundation of a solid human rights edifice anywhere. There is much to be said for that view, of course. Chinese human rights discourse of the past century, however, including the past few years down to the present, has been more ambiguous on the issue of religious freedom being a legitimate "human right." Freedom of religious belief has in some way been included in every Chinese constitution of the past century, beginning with the constitutions of the early Republic in 1912 and after. This was especially important to Chinese Christians, who, until the Republic, possessed legally recognized freedoms of belief and worship only derivatively, through certain clauses of the unequal treaties signed between the Qing or Manchu court and the various Western powers. This made the status of Chinese Christians operating outside the foreign missionary "umbrella" theoretically uncertain—though this does not seem to have been a disability for them in the last years of the Qing dynasty, before 1912. At any rate, a degree of separation of religion from the state—indeed, a promise of freedom of religious belief—seems implied by these constitutions.

However, counter-currents to full rights of religious freedom also occurred in the first decades of the last century. In 1915 there was a failed attempt to make Confucianism the "official religion" of China; active opposition by Chinese Christians as well as missionaries helped to defeat this. A few years later, in the era of the "May 4th movement" beginning before 1919 and running to the mid-1920s, although one of the general themes of the era was intellectual emancipation and freedoms of all kind, at least one of the major leaders, Li Dazhao, thought it was appropriate to restrict freedom of religious belief because, by definition, religion was non-rational, superstitious, and a threat to more important freedoms of thought and expression. Here, Li represented an important thread of continuity with the pre-modern intellectual scene, one wherein the educated elite were usually disdainful, even contemptuous, of what they considered the superstitious beliefs of their countrymen. This censorious attitude applied to Buddhism, Daoism, popular sectarian religions such as the White Lotus, as well as to Christianity. During these same years, (i.e., the 1920s) Christianity became a particular target of patriotic political denunciation by student movements and by the two major political parties, the Guomindang and the Communists. It was attacked on the twin grounds of being backward or superstitious (a liability it shared with native Chinese religions) AND for being dominated by foreigners—allegedly a prime example of "cultural imperialism" (this liability was its alone, and with the most important parts of the unequal treaty system still intact, it was a heavy liability). Moreover, it must be said that there was actually much truth in this accusation of imperialism; most Protestant missions and, even more, the Catholic missions, as late as the 1930s, had still made only token progress toward real sharing of institutional power in the mission, especially budgetary authority, with Chinese Christian leaders—much less going further and turning over real power irrevocably to Chinese colleagues. As for the other criticism leveled at Christianity by many leftist intellectuals in the May 4th era—that of it being superstitious and pre-modern—if I may jump ahead to a point perhaps better suited to the conclusion of my talk but that also fits here—it seems ironic that in China today a substantial number of intellectuals are seriously interested in Christianity because they see in it historically precisely the opposite identity and role. That is, they see Christianity as constituting the very scaffolding of the entire Western construction of modernity, including civil society and democracy, as well as capitalist economic development. (It's true: the theory of the Protestant ethic helping to create capitalism is alive and well in China.)

There is yet one more legacy of the not-so-distant imperial past with regard to religious freedom issues that needs to be mentioned, and that is the state's deeply ingrained compulsion to register, monitor, and control all organized religious activity, and its urge to suppress religious movements that cannot be thusly bureaucratically registered and monitored. This well-established traditional stance of the government toward religion was based on the twofold reality that 1) the dynastic state itself was a religious entity, with religious claims buttressing its legitimacy; and 2) some popular religious movements in Chinese history did, in fact, occasionally erupt in political rebellion (indeed did so with alarming frequency, in the view of officials). We could discuss this pre-modern pattern more, especially the state as a sacralized entity or a theocracy, but my point is simply that this old pattern of state supervision or even direct management of religious affairs fell into abeyance in the first half of the twentieth century, when there was no state strong enough even to make the attempt—and, of course, theoretically that would have been in conflict with the religious freedom provisions in the modern constitutions anyway.

There was very little discourse on human rights or religious freedom in the chaotic decades of the 1930s and '40s; people were preoccupied with unification, Japanese invasion, and civil war. The situation, of course, changed drastically in the 1950s, with the establishment of the PRC —a powerful regime with ambitions to control and reshape all of Chinese society to its vision. What was not so much remarked upon at the time but seems so obvious now, in retrospect, is that the new regime, unlike the GMD in the first half of the century but very much like old dynastic authorities, sacralized itself and at the same time set up mechanisms to—in the dynastic pattern—register and monitor all other religious activity. For Protestants, this mechanism was the Christian three-self patriotic movement, headed in the 1950s and 60s by Wu Yaozong, and from the end of the 1970s down to the very recent past or even the present by (formerly Anglican) Bishop Ding Guangxun (K. H. Ting). For Catholics, this mechanism was the Catholic Patriotic Association; Buddhsts, Moslems, and Daoists all had their equivalents. At the same time, in seeming contradiction, the state constitution guaranteed the right of every citizen to religious belief (not practice or behavior, but belief). In fact, the new Communist state went further than registration and monitoring, much further than any dynasty had done. Because it was Marxist, it assumed that religion, as a retrograde and historically obsolete social phenomenon, would disappear as socialism advanced. This led the state, and leaders such as Mao Zedong, to escalate from a policy of toleration with monitoring and restrictions to a policy of active eradication of religion as part of some of the traumatic campaigns of the 1950s through the mid-1970s. In some of these campaigns religious believers of all kinds were persecuted, but Christians, still bearing the stigma of association with foreign imperialism, were often specially targeted for harassment, imprisonment, or worse. At any rate, as historians look back on the period before the late 1970s, there is no shortage of human rights or religious freedom issues to document.

Although circuitously, we have come back to where I began, the democracy wall period of 1978-79, Wei Jingsheng's clarion cry for the "fifth modernization" (i.e., democracy), and the first wave of books by Western journalists to document the courageous Chinese activists working for free speech, democracy, accountability of government, and so forth. With very few exceptions, religion and Chinese Christians were not on the radar scope of either journalists or academic observers of China in the early 1980s. This is perhaps understandable, though not entirely excusable. Christian churches and other religious venues were just being reopened in the early 1980s, most of the observable worshippers were old, and the style of Christian worship seemed Western (as it does in many urban churches today). In short, it was easy to see the evidences of Christianity as interesting historical vestiges or artifacts—but not as signposts into the future. John Fairbank, dean of American China scholars, who for years had been a voice crying in the wilderness—harping at his colleagues that the Christian experience in modern China, which for him centered on the foreign missionaries and their role, was much understudied, and was singularly unsuccessful in the early 1980s in convincing his fellow China specialists to mount a major research project to elucidate this and related questions. Most China scholars, especially those in the social sciences, thought that religion was not a major part of what was going on in China at the time. It so happened that this same year, 1984, I was in Taiwan doing research on the history of Christianity in modern China. Fairbank knew this—he knew the research agenda of everyone in the China field, often better than we ourselves did—and he wrote to me, urging me to take up this project in a size that could be administered by one person—me. He pointed me to the Henry Luce Foundation and its new program officer, Terry Lautz, as a source of funding. Fairbank did this, please note, even though I was not a Harvard person. Now—John was not an orthodox religious believer—he always said that his religion was Harvard. So it was an act of real ecumenism to pass this project over to me, a product of the University of Michigan. But … what would become of it?

Happily, just at this time in the mid-1980s it was becoming obvious to almost all observers of China that religion, including Christianity, had not disappeared from China at all, and that all religions, including Christianity, in fact were spreading like wildfire, especially in the countryside. This, in effect, legitimized the work of the historical research project I was directing, which indeed had been funded by the Luce Foundation, and I had no trouble attracting the participation of excellent scholars in the late 1980s. That was good. But this realization of the important role of religion did much more for the contemporary scene. Suddenly (well, perhaps not really suddenly, but steadily over a short span of years) issues relating to religion became salient on the contemporary China-watching scene, not just consigned to the purview of historians of religion and thought. Moreover, whereas in the early 1980s many China scholars would have questioned the proposition that Christianity had become a Chinese religion, still instinctively seeing it as Western, by the end of the 1980s it was more typical, though by no means universal, to include Christianity in surveys and academic discussions of "Chinese religions."

It's been awhile since I've mentioned human rights. Have we lost our way? I'm glad you asked. The same process I've been describing for how religion, including Christianity, was being brought into the discussion of sectors of change in China—that same process was at work in expanding the boundaries of human rights discourse, and human rights advocacy concerning China, to include religion and Christianity. Discussions and publications of human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch/Asia, which for most of the 1980s took little or no notice of religious, much less xtian, human rights cases, by the 1990s were giving substantially more coverage to such issues, and began putting out some reports focused directly on religious/Christian prisoners of conscience or similar human rights issues. Likewise, Chinese émigré dissident organizations that were products of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement, (e.g., HRIC, whose first instincts in the early 1990s were to focus solely on political human rights issues and abuses, such as the arrest and detention of democracy activists) by later in the decade were including substantial coverage of religious human rights cases, including Christianity, in their literature (e.g., the latest issue of Ren yu renquan [the journal of human rights in China] is subtitled China's spiritual revival, and includes several articles on topics such as Falungong, Christian prisoners of conscience, "cultural xtians" [intellectuals interested in/advocating adoption of xtian values/practices for improvement of Chinese society], etc.).

My own guess is that this adoption of—well, let's call it religious freedom/"persecuted church" issues—by some China human rights organizations derives partly from an honest assessment and appreciation of the important role played by religious issues on the China human rights scene. In fact, in the more than a decade since many Chinese democracy activists fled the country after Tiananmen and settled overseas in exile, a significant number of them (though a minority of the total) have converted to Christianity; and a few have become pastors. In North America, Hong Kong, and China itself, Ian Buruma, in doing the research for his 2001 book Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, found that a puzzling number of the dissidents he interviewed had become evangelical Christians. So the coverage of religious issues in human rights forums reflects reality. This is good. And yet I also have a hunch that this conflation of issues—human rights and Christianity—may also derive partly from a calculated recognition that highlighting such issues, especially allegations of persecution of Christians, dramatic portrayals of the "suffering church," and so forth, will appeal to and win political, financial, and moral support from the substantial body of conservative Christians in the U.S. who are less moved by cases of free speech than by cases of persecuted house churches in China.

Discussion of human rights is often closely linked with discussion of civil society. If we add civil society to human rights and religious freedom as part of our subject, what happens? I think that one thing that may happen is that we may see the possibility of Chinese Christians, especially Chinese Protestants, playing a major role in the creation of elements of a civil society in the next 20 years or so. The topic of our meeting tonight is not Chinese Protestants, but let me just say the following (in fact, quoting from a recent article I wrote): "the size, resources, and virtually nationwide presence of the Protestant movement makes it one of the most important of non-governmental entities in China today. This is true despite the divisions and tensions that exist within Protestantism, and despite the failure so far of its leaders and institutions to make more than a faint contribution to public discourse on national issues." Consider:

• There are a lot of Protestants, several tens of millions, and although 20 years ago they were overwhelmingly rural and poorly educated, today many of them look rather different.

• China is becoming urbanized rapidly, and a lot of Christians are moving to the cities. Incomes and education levels of Protestants are increasing, as they are for many Chinese. Protestants may constitute a special subset of the growing Chinese urban middle class

• Traditionally poor in leadership resources, both registered and unregistered Protestant groups are developing those resources steadily; some of the unofficial seminaries (or "training schools," perhaps) of the autonomous church networks in China (sometimes called 'house churches'), as recounted in David Aikman's recent book Jesus in Beijing are truly impressive. In addition, more members of the registered church leadership are receiving some training overseas, in the West.

• Finally—some of the unregistered Protestant networks to whose seminaries I just referred are themselves well organized, skilled in communications, and increasingly interested in activities such as social services, which will edge them more into the public sphere and potentially to seek a public voice. There have already been a couple of joint public statements on religious affairs by a coalition of house church groups; perhaps other issues will be addressed in future.

Of course these thoughts about Protestants and civil society are mostly speculation, and depend on the regime refraining from a major crackdown and from attempts to suppress unregistered Christian groups. This would give these Protestant groups a chance to develop skills in working in the realm of civil society. Richard Madsen in his recent book on China's Catholics is not very sanguine about their contributing to the emergence of civil society. I am more optimistic about Protestants, I will admit.

It's time to wind up and see what questions and comments you have. I hope that I have given you at least a few ideas to consider on China and human rights—in particular, issues relating to religion and Christianity, and even the possibility of "sprouts" of civil society coming from the Protestant sector. Thank you for your attending, and for your attention.