Understanding authority from Rome to Beijing

As geo-political tensions between China and the West rise, K.K. Yeo explores authority and religion in China, finding complex questions and nuanced answers.

K.K. Yeo

K.-K. Yeo, a diaspora Chinese, lectures widely in majority world including China on cross-cultural understanding of civilization and religion.

Haidian Christian Church

Is the West Christian and China Confucianist? Or is the West secular and China communist? Binary understanding of our world in conventional terms, such as East versus West, or the sacred-secular divide, is superficial and confusing. Given the biases, divisiveness and, at times, toxic geopolitical reality today, the topic of government and Christianity in China today is more complex than meets the eye. A much better option is a meaningful cross-cultural perspective that enables constructive conversation, while honoring different contexts and nuanced understandings.

Does it surprise you that, an atheist, and at times anti-religion, ‘party-state’ China is the world’s largest Bible printer? Christianity in China has existed since the seventh century when the Syrian Church of the East had rigorous cultural, religious, and commercial exchanges with many nations as far as those in East Asia. Recently the regime in China has become concerned about the growth of the Christian population that might be outnumbering the Party’s members. There has been the suppression of believers, burning of crosses, and demolition of churches across the country. The Communist Party eliminated the State Administration for Religious Affairs in 2018, and the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party now has direct control on all religions.

Does it surprise you that, an atheist, and at times anti-religion, ‘party-state’ China is the world’s largest Bible printer?

Churches in China exist in a harsh reality similar to that of first century Roman Empire, so they inevitably find the teaching of St. Paul in the Bible to be of great interest. Chinese Christians have long had nuanced responses to their government. The house church remains committed to love Christ only - rendering to God the things that are God’s, and only then would they render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. This ‘separation of religion and government’ position (preservation of religious freedom from government intrusion) is considered to be politically subversive to the authoritarian rule of the Party. Therefore, the house churches have long distanced themselves from politics, while acknowledging that their Christian behaviour, such as loving their neighbor as a religious duty, is ‘the best politics’ for nation building.

By contrast, the Three-Self Patriotic churches—and also the current Vatican-China agreement on the appointment of Chinese bishops—do not find a serious discrepancy in loving Christ and the communist state. They seek to work with the government primarily in the matter of social welfare but have range of mixed views on the scope of combining patriotism with Christian belief. To maintain no or minimum separation of government and religion is becoming more and more challenging as the government centralises its control of all aspects of national and personal lives.

Christians in China are asking harder questions than those in churches outside China.

Can a Christian church adopt a state ideology or become a member of the Communist Party to support Christian identity and social harmony in China?

Are church attendance and participating in church activities politically subversive?

And what does it mean to say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ in that land?

I remember teaching at Peking University and seeing the students debate a scenario in the Bible in which the Thessalonian crowd was charging the apostle Paul and his colleague Silas for contradicting the decree of Caesar, for ‘saying that there is another king named Jesus’. Paul was surely preaching neither about insurrection nor subversion of the Roman Empire. However, Roman audiences then, and Chinese crowd or government today, are more likely to have perceived the belief in ‘Jesus as Lord’ as a political threat.

A case in point concerns Wang Yi, the pastor of the Early Rain Church in the city of Chendu, who preached Jesus as the Lord of lords - thus implying that the current political ruler is subsumed under Jesus Christ. Yi was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2018 ‘for inciting subversion of state power’. Cardinal Joseph Zen, a 90-year-old Catholic bishop in Hong Kong, was arrested in 2022 for criticizing the Vatican’s unwise deal with China, and for being an advocate of democracy in Hong Kong.

Christians in Hong Kong are treading similar water regarding their religious faith clashing with the politicized perception of such faith as treason, such as in the Umbrella Movement or the Occupy Central with Love and Peace that protest the will of the Chinese Communist rule in Hong Kong.

Can a Christian church adopt a state ideology or become a member of the Communist Party to support Christian identity and social harmony in China?

Using the teaching of St Paul in his letter to early Christians in Rome as a resource, the Chinese argue that he encourages these Roman Christians to critically reflect on government power so as to bring all nations to obedience of God’s justice. The popular reading of Paul as asking Roman Christians to ‘be subjected to the governing authorities’ for the reason that ‘for there is no authority except from God’ is a weak English translation. To the Chinese church, Paul admonishes Roman Christians to ‘subject themselves to the governing authorities’, and that is not a passive submission but a voluntary involvement as good citizens in the process of bringing about change to their government. The Chinese church sees that Paul challenges government politics, first by stating the principle that, ‘it is not an authority if not from God’, i.e., ‘unless from God’. In other words, there may be some governing authorities that are not appointed by God, thus begging the question: how does one know if governing authorities are from God and those not from God?

It seems that Paul is not concerned about whether a government or the head of state is Christian or not. What matters to Paul is not what the government says but the way the government or the head of state acts in accordance to the following principles:

Rulers are not to terrorize good conducts and good citizens; the rule of law is meant to approve the good-doers and punish the evil-doers;
Rulers are ‘ministers’ of God for the common good of the people, even though Roman Empire has its mythic origin from Jupiter, a Roman god;
Rulers are ‘worship leaders’ of God as they administer collected taxes not for their own concentration of power, but for the dignity and flourishing of the citizens, thus realizing God’s compassionate justice on earth, promoting the welfare of the city.

Churches outside China read Paul on government politics based on their assumed cultural context of Christian values. Yet, the Chinese church’s courage and humility to ask hard questions for themselves is an enlightening conversation. For those outside China, a cross-cultural and global understanding of government and religion can shed light on the promotion of a robust public life.

Back to the office! The suspect motives behind the bosses calling for it

Working From Home isn’t the end of the world.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An office wall displays a huge motto reading 'punch today in the face'

Really?

Johnson Wang on Unsplash.

If we’d been working from home in 1980, I wouldn’t have met my wife (as she, of course, then wasn’t). The slow demise of the office romance may not exclusively be driven by WFH, when a clumsy or unwanted speculative pass will likely precipitate a visit from the HR police. But it’s sure harder (I’m told) to chat someone up over Zoom than a water-cooler.

There are some things you just, well, have to be there for. And it’s not just a matter of curating the gene pool for the future of the human race, which is hardly the top priority for most employers. Much more immediate commercial demands are served by employees being bodily present at work. They can check colleagues’ body language, be mentored more spontaneously, gossip about work, read the room and go outside for a fag with a friend. None of that works on a laptop at the kitchen table.

And yet these aren’t aspects of working life that are much, if ever, cited by opponents of WFH. Yup, for these bosses, it’s always about productivity, which allegedly slumps like the shoulders of a college-leaver told to re-write their CV, when staff work from home. So companies as diverse as Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are demanding that their workers work five-day weeks at the office again.

Except, two things: One, that productivity point isn’t true. Professor Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, has demonstrated empirically that a hybrid working model of three days at the office, plus two at home, is every bit as productive as fully office-based work overall. And, two, bosses may be shocked to learn that it’s their job to manage productivity, which is just as measurable at home as in the office. But then you don’t get to shout as much.

And there I think is the real point. Bosses might not be shouty, but their motives for office work are more than suspect. They may be obsessed with control. They need to see their staff working for them for proof of productivity. They want to sit in a big glass-walled office watching them. And, perhaps most of all, if staff aren’t in the office then what’s the point of being a boss? It might bring their own productivity management and role into sharper focus.

People who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not.

Furthermore, it’s been a long time, if ever, since some of those with the loudest voices calling for a return to the office have ever worked an ordinary job themselves. Lord Rose, formerly CEO of Marks & Spencer and chairman of Asda, told BBC’s Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” (not true – see above).

And Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly business secretary (remind me, how did that go?), continues in opposition to fight the bad fight to get civil servants as well as the private sector permanently back at the office. Hilariously, he most recently did so in a video from the drawing room of his mansion in Somerset. Though, to be fair, having lost his seat at the last general election and seeing his investment company sliding down the pan, he’s not so much working from home as just... at home.

The serious point is that people who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not. They really don’t know – or have forgotten - what it is to have your life demanded of you from 9am-6pm from Monday to Friday in a location that is less than comfortable to work in. Is that so complicated to take aboard?

And there’s another very big thing here. To demand office slaves is to commoditise people, to make them chattels (and, if some of these bosses were honest with themselves, that’s what they want). Staff become just another asset, not unlike the freehold of the office building in which you put them and watch as they make you money every day.

To put it bluntly, that is a sin. To treat human beings as tradeable commodities is to debase their dignity. And for those of faith, that dignity is vested in each unique one of them bearing the image of God. As a good Catholic, Rees-Mogg should be familiar with the doctrine of Imago Dei.

So there’s a holy, as well as secular, work-ethic at play here. The worker is worthy of his/her wage. That scriptural phrase usually focuses on the material value of the wage. But it’s also worth registering that the worker is “worthy”.

To treat staff like they have an inherent worth, rather than simply a productive asset, has a value way beyond the money they are paid. And the dividends on that investment will be immense. Respect them. Let them work from home.

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