Christianity and China: A Complicated History
In 1601, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci was invited to the Forbidden City in Beijing. He was difficult to distinguish from the Chinese: he dressed in Confucian style, had a thorough command of the Chinese language, and had learned the rituals and customs of the imperial court. His goal of camouflaging himself among the learned elites was to convert China to Catholicism. But he failed. The Chinese were frightened by the figure of Christ crucified and tortured, which they saw as a kind of black magic; the Virgin Mary, similar to the Buddhist goddess Guan Yin, appealed to them much more. Nor did the Vatican approve of the syncretic and adaptive path advocated by Ricci.
In the following centuries, Christianity spread throughout China through missionaries, hand in hand with the European imperial powers. The majority were Protestants and evangelicals. The Chinese view of these missionaries was ambivalent: they brought modern education and advanced medicine, but at the same time—in many cases—they despised the local culture and received support from the Western powers that had semi-colonized China. At the beginning of the 20th century, a violent anti-foreign and anti-colonial popular movement, the Boxers, mercilessly killed missionaries and foreigners, only to be massacred by European imperial troops in China.
The Chinese republican era was a time when a Christianity with Chinese characteristics could have been created. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the country for both Chinese nationalists and communists, was a Christian. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was also a Christian, although with a kind of Confucian syncretism. Intellectuals such as James Yen and Lin Yutang also had Christian roots, which they blended with Chinese traditions and thought.
After the dark period that Maoism and the Cultural Revolution represented for all religions, the Christian movement has experienced a revival in China, as part of a growing spiritual interest in a materialistic, consumerist society. According to official dataIn China, there are around 44 million Christians. The majority are Protestants, but Catholicism (around 6 million) is more popular among young people and urbanites.
The Chinese government views "foreign" religions like Christianity and Islam with suspicion, in contrast to "native" ones like Buddhism and Taoism. However, the Communist Party views Catholicism more favorably than Protestantism. Protestantism's decentralized structure has led to the emergence of many more dissident Chinese pastors with anti-government messages. In contrast, the Vatican's authority makes relations with Catholics more predictable and structured. The late Pope Francis, in fact, had managed to reach an agreement to appoint bishops jointly with Beijing and facilitate the existence of the Catholic Church in China. Francis' Way had been the dialogue to reach agreements with the Communist Party, in a context of tensions between the United States and China in which geopolitics was – and is – rowing in the opposite direction.