Month: October 2007

From the difficult to navigate but very fascinating Tuku historical photo archive:

This six billion yuan banknote was issued in 1949 by the nominally Guomindang government of Xinjiang. Inflation was pretty bad. A few people on the Chinese ‘net seem to think this is the largest numerical banknote ever issued in the world, but I know their wrong because I own one of these from the last days of Yugoslavia:
After the Communists took over Xinjiang, alot of people weren’t using cash. They were the scrip issued by the Bingtuan, the military veterans who were mobilized in Xinjiang to develop agriculture (and secure the borders).

Watching the transition of power in China, October 1907:

THE CHANGES IN CHINA.

October 13, 1907, Sunday

Predictions have been freely made of late that the approaching abdication of the Dowager Empress would be the signal for internal commotions in China amounting to a revolution, and possibly the breaking apart of the empire through the effort of the Chinese race to unseat the ruling Manchus. For this reason, it is inferred, and indeed proclaimed by the highest authority, the throne is bent on dissolving the distinctions, superficial and fundamental, between the two races, and resolved upon liberal reforms that will modernize China. The imperial decree of October 1 declared that preparations should be made to give China a constitution. Secretary Taft, in his speech at Shanghai, spoke in warning of “radical and sudden reforms”, but he advocated a reform along lines of internal development, education, the enlargement of trade, and predicted that this would increase commerce and advance friendly relations with this country.

The gradual reform programme of the Dowager Empress and her advisors is China’s hope in the impending crisis. A sudden cleavage from the past would bring into powerful antagonism the adherents of traditional power and the more zealous forces of reform. There is no question that civil war is feared by the reigning family…

The fleet of the United States will remain in Pacific waters during the months preceding the abdication of the Dowager Empress, which is set for the Chinese New Year. Whether our warships are sent merely on a “practice cruise” or in view of complications with Japan, or because of coming events in China, it is certain that they will be in a position of advantage should anything happen to conflict with the American policy of the “open door”…

Our Secretary of War refused to speculate upon the probable action of the United States in case the interests of American merchants were placed in jeopardy, but he did say:

“It is clear that our merchants are being roused to the importance of the Chinese export trade and they would view with deep concern any and all political obstacles to its maintenance and expansion. This feeling is likely to find expression in the action of the American government.”

From Asia Times Online, today, Multinationals Fear US-China Trade Wars:

The US Congress is about to enact legislation that would levy punitive duties on Chinese goods. This could lead to unintended consequences for both American consumers and the wider US economy.

Some 119 leading multinational companies agree – including Boeing, Citigroup, General Motors, and Microsoft. They have called on Congress to reject protectionist legislation against China, arguing that “imposing unfair barriers to trade in the name of currency valuation or product safety is not a solution to the underlying concerns”. It was “a vote for free trade”, reported the state-owned China Daily, which, as so many other Chinese observers do, argues that rising protectionism among some US lawmakers “seriously threatens the interests of China, the United States itself and the world at large”.

Again, in October 1907:

A REFORMER IN CHINA.; Achievements of Yuan-Shih-Kai Attracting Wide Attention.

October 29, 1907, Tuesday

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28. — Another Li Hung-Chang has arisen in China and his achievements are attracting attention throughout the civilized world. He is Yuan-Shih-Kai, formerly Viceroy of Chih-li, now President of the Wei-Wu-Pu, or Board of Foreign Affairs at Peking. He assumed the reins of Government in Chih-li at a time when chaos and disorder prevailed in the province… During Mr. Yuan’s term as governor, Mr. Ragsdale [American Consul-General] says he established the best of relations with foreigners, and by sturdy honest efforts won the goodwill of the natives as well. His advice, even then, was sought by Peking, and the best edicts were the result of his suggestions. Notable among these were the promises of efforts toward Constitutional government, and those relating to the suppression of the opium traffic.

Yuan Shikai, six years later*, would dissolve the national assembly, and in 1915, declare himself emperor. Today, Will Hutton wonders if one of Hu Jintao’s successor will be China’s Gorbachev.

In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s readiness to question communism was intertwined with his membership of the Soviet Union’s fifth generation of leaders. He did not champion perestroika and glasnost alone; much of the nomenklatura had decided that the Soviet economic and social model was dysfunctional, corrupt and endemically inefficient and had to change.

Will one of Hu Jintao’s two ‘Lis’, as the frontrunners to succeed him, Li Keqiang and Li Yuanchao, are popularly known, feel the same way as they walk out in front of the cameras in the Great Hall of the People on Friday? Will one prove to be China’s Gorbachev?

*In 1913, the New York Times also reported that Yuan Shikai’s brother was growing opium illegally.

Some child beggars are intentionally crippled by pimps to elicit sympathy [photo from PCPop]

Shanghaiist mentioned a couple of weeks back that the Chinese government was protesting a British documentary on Chinese child trafficking. Opposite End of China made a great catch a few months ago: an article in The Australian entitled Stolen ethnic minority kids victims of Chinese `Fagins’. Fagin refers to the leader of a gang of pickpockets in Oliver Twist, and for years, many Uyghur pickpockets and thieves have been pimped by adults much like Charles Dickens character. The article is entirely based a report from Hong Kong’s Phoenix Weekly (凤凰周刊), which also gave significant coverage to the Xiamen PX controversy in the lead up to major protests. The article (in Chinese) is available in full thanks to Li Mazi over at Douban. In The Australian’s summary, the government 4000 children are missing, while the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences says 90% of them are forcibly abducted or tricked from their homes. Phoenix Weekly is quick to point out far more than 4000 are likely missing, as many abductions would go unreported. Some parents actually sell their children to these bosses, not to mention these children are found in practically every major Chinese city. Money from these thieving rings is often sent back to villages in Xinjiang, among the poorest in the entire country, and local officials sometimes turn a blind eye. The Phoenix Weekly article describes two children, Anwar and Nurguli. Anwar, a 10 year old boy who had been a top student in primary school, was kidnapped from his home in Yecheng and taken all the way to Guangzhou to work as a pickpocket. Nurguli, a 12 year old girl, was sold to traffickers by her stepfather and repeatedly raped.

The Phoenix Weekly article is quite thorough and The Australian only gives passing mention to Chinese netizens actions, some of whom are “vigilantes regularly post photos of Uighur child thieves online, calling on the police to crack down on them. Others seek to help the children only to see them handed back to traffickers parading as relatives.”

The website Uyghur Online, a BBS forum, has a whole section devoted to aiding Uyghur street children. Phoenix Weekly quotes one founder stating they would like to turn the forum group into a function NGO, but it is difficult to get government approval. Nonetheless, an administrator named Ali, who claims to be a student at a Peoples Security Bureau University, posted a manifesto on several other sites declaring their desire to start a Xinjiang Uyghur Street Childrens Aid Association to act as a bridge between the PSB, the Xinjiang government and the children themselves, facilitating their return to some sort of family life.

Other articles of relevance: Uyghur blogger Qaghan points out the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which China is a party to, emphasizes the importance of family, but the relevant government departments tend to criticize families instead of assisting them. He also points out that hardly any Uyghur community organizations exist. The most likely reason for this, which he does not mention, is that greater restrictions are placed on Uyghur organizations due to fears of separatist activity. Qaghan also points to a study that found more than 85% of Uyghur street children come from rural areas, where unemployment is a major problem. This matches with my personal experience; in early 2003, I visited a friend living in a village near Hotan, which is mentioned in the Phoenix Weekly article as a common place where families receive a cut of the earnings their children make. The night arrived, he mentioned that recently a child trafficking ring had been caught in his community. He was deeply shocked and embarassed about it. You could count the phones in his town on one hand.

Two other articles point out that at least 150,000 street children, of any ethnicity, are known to exist. Moreover, 40% have ended up on the streets more than once, suggesting that simply sending the children home is ineffective.

One other personal anecdote: in 2004, I remember seeing heavily armed police officers patrolling Zhongshan road, where many crippled street children beg. An article at the time claimed the tear gas and automatic weapons were to discourage pickpockets. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Below are excerpts from a 1911 book review of Joseph King Goodrich’s book “The Coming China”. I’ve sprinkled it with links to current events I consider similar:

CHINA’S ILL-TIMED STIR; The Ignorance of Her Vast Population Too Dense to Permit the Establishment of an Enduring Republican Government
November 12, 1911, Sunday
Section: Review of books, Page BR709, 1646 words

SURELY he would be a rash man who, in the present condition of affairs, should attempt to prophesy what the China of next year, or even of next week, will be. And therefore Joseph King Goodrich’s book on “The Coming China,” notwithstanding the apparent promise of its title, recommends itself the more because it attempts so little to predict definite outlines for the future path of the ancient empire. Almost the only matter of importance upon which its author ventures to be entirely sure about the future – his book seems to have been written in the early months of this present year – is that a republic is impossible in China at least for a long time. And already, at such daily accelerated and upsetting speed have events been moving, a republic is not only the hearts desire of the Young Chinaists but a highly probable outcome of the revolution.

Mr. Goodrich, who first went to China as a lad in 1866, has lived there many years and has also been a professor in the Japanese Imperial College at Kyoto, does not deny to the Chinese those traits of character necessary in a people before a real republic is possible. But he thinks the masses of ignorance in the huge population are too vast and too dense to be permeated, at least for a goodly while, by the enlightenment and understanding before an enduring form of republican government can be established. He admits that “There are now so many newspapers published in China, and facilities for sending them to every nook and corner of the realm are now so adequate, that the power which comes with knowledge has attained proportions that surprise Chinese leaders themselves and would amaze all foreigners who were accustomed to conditions a score of years ago.”

…The ten or twelve years following the war with Japan were years of steady though slow growth in modern ideas, but Mr. Goodrich counts the real birth of the new China from the close of the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Since then the development of energy and ambition, of the desire for Western knowledge, and the purpose to apply Western methods to their own life has gone on with a speed more amazing, Mr. Goodrich declares, then is known even to those outsiders who have watched at a distance China’s progress. To the Occidental the successive manifestations of these seven-leagued strides that have “come up like thunder out of China”, have been bewildering, unexplainable, to a degree that makes them seem to border close upon the impossible.

…Mr. Goodrich does not believe that China can achieve a stable position among the great nations of the Earth until her populace shall have cast off the superstitions of their religion, for he declares most of them are still under the domination of polydemonism.

…Have the other nations, and, in particular, our own country, anything to fear from that coming China? he asks, and gives in reply a decided no. “If,” he says, “there are to be railways, inland navigation, post offices, factories, and all the concommitant of advanced life, the blessings must be paid for; the standards of living must be raised, so that the dreaded competition either disappears entirely or fades away into a dim future, when China has raised herself at home quite up to our standard.”

So I’ve just come across this Mitt Romney ad via ESWN. Steve Benen, Matt Yglesias of the Atlantic and Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly all seem to be in agreement that this is, as Benen puts it, the dumbest. ad. ever.

I swear this commercial is cobbled together using deleted scenes from Starship Troopers.

Evangelicals have Xinjiang in their sights

Over at Opposite End of China, Michael has had a couple of posts about missionaries working in Xinjiang. Namely, that they keep getting kicked out, and he doesn’t find them to be very sociable. In my time in Xinjiang, I also found missionaries to range from distant (I got the impression I didn’t know the secret password/handshake) to outright batty. One character was a young man with Coke-bottle-bottom thick glasses who many of us ran into occasionally. He was always armed with a clipboard listing the gospel in Chinese and English and always seemed to be in a great hurry for an appointment. I once said hello to him after watching him ask a cigarette shopkeeper if she had heard the Word and she just ignored him. His side of the conversation consisted entirely of two topics: 1) his impending appointment and 2) had I heard the Word. Rumor has it he finally got an appointment with a provincial official, asked him if he heard the Word, and was sent back to the United States.

While missionaries in Xinjiang didn’t really bother me, I was kind of spooked by what I call the “Super Spies for Jesus” phenomenon. I don’t just mean the subterfuge of coming as English teachers because missionary activities are restricted. A great deal of missionaries who go to Xinjiang tend to be charismatic Pentecostals who subscribe to the concept of “strategic level spiritual warfare”, a concept I first read about over at No Fear of the Future.

While I’m no expert on the matter, I have been able to piece together some of the theory behind SLSW and the related idea of spiritual mapping. Note that alot of these sources tend to be from various Christian sects, since SLSW is a bit of a controversial topic – many Evangelicals seem to believe it more or less means incorporating the occult into Christianity. Its roots lie among the British charismatic revival of the 60 and 70s, according to Mennonite magazine Direction, while the Miller Avenue Baptist Church claims it started in 1989 with John Dawson’s book “Taking Our Cities for God: How to Break Spiritual Strongholds”. Dawson claimed that “satanic forces manifest themselves in the culture of the city”, and one must study the history and character of a city in order to cast out the demons that rule it and convert its inhabitants. Direction points out that in 1987, “Prior to the March [for Jesus, in London], a woman named Barbara Pymm reported being given a vision of two angels, swords raised and crossed over the city, “waiting for us to give the word to release them and their armies to fight against the principalities and powers over London.” The language of principalities, powers and strongholds come from bits of the New Testament, and SLSW interprets its somewhat literally – namely that there are spiritual battles between the forces of God and, well, other Gods.

One of the biggest proponents of SLSW has been C. Peter Wagner, of Global Harvest Ministries, who has written books such as Warfare Prayer and Breaking Strongholds in Your City. In Confronting the Powers, Wagner argues that spiritual warfare has been going on for centuries, and points to such major battles as St. John versus the Temple of Artemis, St. Benedict versus the Temple of Apollo, and St. Boniface versus the Tree of Thor (the Nordic guy with the hammer). In every case, some really strong praying essentially exorcises these demons – other peoples religions – from a place. In this Christian Science Monitor article, an example of a Nigerian preacher who goes after a local fortune teller:

Pondering the message of Eph.6:12 (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world…”), they prayed to identify the source of Kiambu’s spiritual oppression, Mr. Muthee says. Their answer: the spirit of witchcraft.

Their research into the community revealed that a woman called “Mama Jane” ran a “divination clinic” frequented by the town’s most powerful people.

After months of prayer, Muthee held a crusade that “brought about 200 people to Christ.” Their church in the basement of a grocery store was dubbed “The Prayer Cave,” as members set up round-the-clock intercession. Mama Jane counterattacked, he says, but eventually “the demonic influence – the ‘principality’ over Kiambu – was broken,” and she left town.

The atmosphere changed dramatically: Bars closed, the crime rate dropped, people began to move to the area, and the economy took an upturn. The church now has 5,000 members, he says, and 400 members meet to pray daily at 6 a.m.

In some ways, spiritual warfare resembles (to a non-believer like myself, anyway) a sort of Dungeons and Dragons approach to the world. Some believers even mime putting on “God’s armor”, in another biblical reference taken rather literally, before engaging the enemy. There’s lots of swords and demons and, well, magic.

Wagner’s close associate, George Otis, ran with some of these ideas and came up with spiritual mapping. Spiritual mapping, for Otis, meant determining the location of “satanic command and control centers”, which are invisible and not to be confused with visible sacred sites, namely churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. At least, so says this blog on heresies run by Discernment Ministries (they consider spiritual warfare heretical). An interesting point the blog does bring up is that spiritual mapping focuses on ethnicity and “unreached peoples”. Indeed, a major project along these lines is the Joshua Project, a sort of CIA World Factbook for Pentecostals, which lists the “Unreached Ethnic Peoples” of the world with colorful maps and statistics. Wagner has more recently espoused the idea of identificational repentance and corporate sin. In other words, Wagner argues that people should repent “national sins”:

Identify the national sin. This is no place for vagueness. We must be specific, not evasive. For example, the principal sin of my nation, the United States, is clearly racism and our corporate sins which have established the spiritual strongholds are clear. The broadest and most pervasive sin that our nation ever committed was bringing Africans to our shores as slaves ­ human merchandise to be bought,
sold and used for any conceivable purpose to satisfy the desires of their white masters. But beyond this, the deepest root of national iniquity, and also, as I see it, one of the primary causes of our subsequent lust for slaves, was the horrendous way we white Americans treated our hosts, the American Indians. What does the breaking of over 350 solemn treaties say about U.S. national integrity?

The writer behind this new doctrine? John Dawson again. Wagner’s example doesn’t mention what this means for new converts in the “40/70 Window”, which is the name for the area of the Eastern hemisphere between 40 degrees and 70 degrees north of the equator, or Europe and everything above, say, Pakistan and Iran, slicing nicely between Xinjiang and Tibet. Previously the campaign was the “10/40 Window“, which focused more on India and Africa. Another example of identificational repentance is this one, when a Chinese convert confessed the corporate sin of the People’s Republic of China invading India in 1962 to Punjabi attendees.

Brother Peter Xu initiated an act of identificational repentance on behalf of his homeland China. It was directed to the many Indian delegates that were in attendance. Historically, the 1962 China—India Border War, which began 43 years prior to the week of the Asian Summit (October 10–14), was a dark spot on the relations between these ancient civilizations. This public repentance was a deeply emotional time as delegates from Taiwan and Hong Kong joined in solidarity with these Chinese leaders to humbly cry out to our Heavenly Father for mercy and forgiveness on behalf of their motherland.

The Christian Science Monitor also reported of the Windows and Joshua projects back in 1999, giving us some idea of the number of participants (allegedly):

Praying Through the Window began in October 1993, when some 21 million (according to AD 2000) prayed for the 62 nations in the window, and 188 prayer-journey teams took 257 journeys to pray on site, visiting each of those nations. During October 1995, some 36 million followed a prayer calendar targeting 100 “gateway cities” in the region, along with more prayer journeys. And in October 1997, prayers focused on the 1,739 unreached-people groups. The final effort is planned for October, targeting 3,000 “strategic towns.”

To support this and “Joshua 2000” – the church-planting project – research and mapping organizations have created databases, people profiles, and maps to give intercessors tools to make prayers specific.

The developer of the Joshua Project, Ralph Winter, was involved with both the Fuller School of World Missions and the AD2000 project, both of which were founded by C. Peter Wagner. Wagner himself is heavily involved with the Lausanne Movement, started by Billy Graham, and was doing many co-projects with Ted Haggard, of gay sex and Jesus Camp fame. And the language of SLSW is used elsewhere as well:

Q. I live in an area where drugs, alcoholism, immoral behavior and despair are a way of life. Since moving here, I’ve begun drinking and lying to the woman I love. My business and personal life have declined. Do you believe there are areas under demonic strongholds? What can we do? Should we move away?

Pat Robertson: You ought to move as fast as you can. Yes, there are demonic strongholds, without question. There is no doubt about it. There are certain areas where demon princes hold sway. And this thing has obviously got hold of you. Get away from there as fast as you can. Confess and recommit to the Lord. Absolutely. But get away from there. Flee.

The AD2000 movement, Global Harvest and the Lausanne Movement all involve an interchangeable cast of characters. Global Harvest and C. Peter Wagner, however, emphasize the 40/70 Window and, curiously, Xinjiang. Under the auspices of the Strategic Prayer Network, which Haggard was involved in, Wagner went to Germany for “Target Germany” in 2001. At Target Germany, Wagner introduced Pastor Kim Sam Seeong (google cache of DOC file) outlining their Silk Road strategy:

“He is one of the two major apostles of the 40/70 Window. Roger Mitchell is the apostle of Target Europe. Kim Sam Seong is the apostle of Target Silk Road.”

Kim then said:

Obstacles of the gospel in the Silk Road are about worship. Do we have true worship or false worship? Through history in every territory over this Silk Road area, every kind of idol worship, curse, and power came in and spread out. From the West came humanism to this territory, Hellenistic Humanism. From the East the Babylonian worship system and also the Indian worship system with all kinds of things mixed in. It is very difficult to identify what is stronger and what is weaker. Nowadays, we can identify the strongest one, two, or three. The first is the spirit of Moon Goddess or Islam. Because the Silk Road area is Turkic, most of them speak Turkish. They understand each other. Some of them speak the Tajik language but for the most part they speak Turkish. This is a time to raise up the Turkic people. Turkic is the key Hindi people [sp]. From the Silk Road we can evangelize all of the world. If we can identify the spirits in the Turkic people, we can destroy Satan’s wells… The Chinese government has a ten year project to develop northwest China, the Xinjiang Province which belongs to the Turkic language group. It is the only Muslim area in China. God is preparing the way to go out through the Silk Road area. The border will be open very wide through the economy. They are going out right now.

So let’s get this straight: the adherents of Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare see a strategic, uh, harmony, with the PRC’s Western Development Strategy.

In 2000, as the 40/70 Window campaign started to warm up, Wagner said:

Wagner: The greatest challenge facing the global mission movement in the coming decade is to evangelize the 40/70 Window, the only major region of the world, with the exception of the Arab Muslim bloc, where the movement of God is virtually at a standstill. The two major segments of the 40/70 Window are post-Christian Europe and the Silk Road/Turkic Belt. As examples, there are proportionately fewer born-again Christians in Poland than in Nepal. There are proportionately fewer born-again Christians in Spain than in Japan. And I believe that the significant breakthrough that we have been praying for in the entire Muslim world, including the Middle East, will begin among non-Arab Muslims from Turkey to the Xinjiang Province of China.

Probably my favorite example of spiritual warfare in Xinjiang is from this 1993 newsletter from Revival Chinese Ministries International, a Pentecostal outfit in Hong Kong. A gospel reading team in Xinjiang kept getting beaten up, perhaps because they were doing this:

According to the leader of this dare-to-die gospel team, team members had been conducting prayers of spiritual warfare outside the mosques for some years now. Of late, the team has sensed a change in the spiritual atmosphere there.

The Lausanne Movement has a long, long article on the intricacies of spiritual warfare that I can’t be bothered to read by Paul Hiebert, another advocate of these theories. More interesting is the Lausanne Movement’s Chinese case study which is supposedly by one “Luke Shao”, who spent ten years studying Qi Gong, only to realize after he became Christian that he had been in contact with a demonic power:

From Luke’s ten year experience in qigong, he divided the practice of qigong into three stages. The first stage is physical exercise through a method of breaking so as to move the “air” (qi) into the interior parts of the body for health reasons. The second state is when one desires to have supernatural power, such as the ability to heal illness or extr-sensory perception. That supernatural ability, according to Luke, comes from demonic spirits. The third stage is when one becomes so bound to various demonic spirits that he become totally enslaved by these spirits. During this last stage, one can even experience one’s spirit leaving one’s body to hover around.

Remember, these are not the doctrines of some whacked out fringe. These are movements connected to most of the major leaders of the Evangelical communities, and they preach what more or less seems to amount to a form of religious imperialism. While they deserve the right to practice their beliefs openly, I find nothing innocent or sweet about them. At least the Jesuits brought their science gear.