Gerry Charlotte Phelps

China May Be New Center of Christianity

                                          (Image from lancs.ac.uk)

Ten thousand Chinese a day become Christians.  Currently there are as many as 111 million Christians in China (of whom 90% are Protestants.) 

Many are severely persecuted by the Chinese government.  But they also are zealous missionaries and evangelists.   Two Protestant seminaries in China are secretly training missionaries to the Muslims.

By 2050, there are expected to be some 200 million Christians in China.  That would make China the second nation in Christianity, behind only the United States.  (Brazil would be the third.)

So writes "Spengler," the pen-name of the esteemed journalist and thinker who writes anonymously at the Asian Times.  He suspects that:

...Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now.  China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and what America has been for the last 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelism.  If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it.  Islam might defeat the Western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East. 

People do not live in a spiritual vacuum, Spengler continues.

...where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Union, people simply die or fail to breed...When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant is now shown to be ephemeral.  Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia (church), which transcends race and nation.

The movement of the Chinese into Christianity is their greatest hope for democracy, writes Spengler.

China's network of house churches may turn out to be the leaven of democracy, like the radical Puritans of England who became the Congregationists of New England.  Freedom of worship is the first pre-condition of democracy, for it makes possible freedom of conscience.  The fearless evangelists at the grassroots of China will, in the fullness of time, do more to bring U.S.-style democracy to the world than all the blustering nation-building of President George W. Bush and his advisors.   

(For the effects of migration on the spread of Christianity, and more, read the whole fascinating article.)

CHINA & THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

One of the major concerns about China is this: as the Chinese economy grows and consumes more and more recources, will it consume too much of the world's resources?  If so, what will that do to prices and standards of living in other countries? To the environment?  And to world security?  China's economy is growing at a stunning 10% a year.  So concerns about future battles over oil and other scarce commodities are growing.

Agronomist Lester Brown (Earth Policy Institute) was a proponent of the notoriously-wrong prediction of a world-wide famine by 1976, so his predictions need to be taken with some caution.  Once again, he relies on straight-line predictions (i.e., presuming that present lines on a graph will continue in a "straight line" in the same direction into the future.)  Still, he provides some helpful current data and raises some thought-provoking issues in his new book, "Plan B 2.0", according to David Ignatius in The Washington Post.

Brown notes that "China has...replaced the U.S. as the world's leading buyer of basic commodities, consuming more grain, meat, coal and steel...than America does.  Only in oil does America remain the top consumer, using three times as much as China in 2004...as the Chinese economy grows...it's inevitable that living standards will push consumption toward American per capita levels...In other words, if the Chinese (come to) consume at current U.S. rates, there won't be enough of anything left for the rest of the world."

That is Brown's admittedly over-simple forecast.  But as global prices of commodities rise, the world "...will be driven into a different growth-path, where it takes a smaller input of energy to produce a given increase in output.  New technologies and food sources will alter the supply-demand picture.  Either that or the world will face an era of wars over resources."  Ignatius adds, "Some would add that the wars in Iraq and rumors of war with Iran are harbingers of the coming battle for control of resources, but I'm skeptical.  I wish Iraq were as simple as a war over resources."

He adds, "The commodities markets are already signaling what China's rise...will mean for the global economy...commodities have become the hot new play as investors look at the basic supply-demand squeeze and conclude that these raw materials are a safer and more lucerative bet than stocks or bonds."

Of course, China is not the only rapidly-developing large economy.  India, with its huge population, is close behind, as are the "Asian Tigers" which include Indonesia, also a very populous country.

Are these trends bad?  How could compassionate people take that position?  Capitalism and free trade keep on proving to be the very best, most effective ways to reduce world poverty.  They do vastly more for poor people than all the government programs and all the foreign aid in the world, combined.  We should stand up and cheer about how prosperity is growing in countries where most of the population has been poor since ancient times.

Meantime, it will create some problems, for the U.S. and the rest of the world.  How to handle them, and how to de-fang them or turn them into benefits will be one of the great challenges of the future.  Personally, I am betting that if enough of us keep our wits about us, work hard, study and think hard, and muster all the good will we can, we should be able to handle them.

CHINA, THE U.S. & THE WORLD

U.S. CHINA STRATEGY:

"...America's policy toward China is itself a long-run strategic calculation worthy of Sun Tzu," according to the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.  "Over several administrations, the U.S. has pursued a two-track strategy of engaging on trade and economics while pushing back on security when China muscles its neighbors or creates other trouble.  There have been strains along the way, such as the ill-advised U.S. textile quotas and the occasional foreign policy disputes.  But taking the long view, this strategy has worked well for both countries."

CHINESE FUTURE:

Millions of Chinese have risen out of poverty over the last decade.  China is doing better at accepting international legal and trading rules.  While China is a dictatorship with many abuses of human rights, it is expected that more liberalization in the future should be driven by the growth of the middle class.  Meanwhile, China is, at the minimum, avoiding the Russian disaster of attempting to change from a long-standing communist system to a capitalist system in a way that was arguably too abrupt to be managed.

CHINESE-U.S. ECONOMIC RELATIONS

Chinese production has greatly slashed prices of U.S. consumer goods.  Its booming economy has also benefited U.S. investors (with the pension plans and mutual funds they service) who poured in over $15 billion in 2004.  China invests its profits in  U.S. securities, keeping bond prices low.  This benefits economic expansion by the U.S. and the world.

The WSJ also says, "The hue and cry over America's trade deficit with China is...misleading. China runs a trade surplus with the U.S., but a deficit with the rest of Asia."  Also, "China's relative share of the U.S. trade deficit is shrinking as wages rise on the mainline and American businesses source cheaper goods from other countries."

Capitol Hill loves to "...claim that China artifically depresses its currency to boost imports.  But the truth is that China has merely pegged its exchange rate to the dollar, thus subcontracting its monetary policy out to the Federal Reserve.  The real problem is China's retrograde financial system...still dominated by political controls.  Yet here too, there's incremental, positive change." (WSJ)   

U.S. SECURITY CONCERNS ABOUT CHINA:

There are security concerns about China, which would not concern us if China were a democracy without global ambitions.  Some of this, however, is because China "...wants access to energy supplies to fuel continued growth."  (WSJ)  And "Talking up 'reunification' with Taiwan or posturing menacingly toward Japan are both politically popular in China."  (WSJ)

The U.S. bet: that "...sooner or later China's economic progress will create the internal conditions for a more democratic regime that will be more stable and less of a potential global rival." (WSJ)