Chinese Christianity as a New Agent to Remake Sino-Western Relations

Over the past four decades, Christianity has arguably grown faster in China than anywhere else in the world. Tens of millions of Chinese now identify as Christians, and the number has been growing rapidly. Professor CAO Nanlai, Associate Professor of CityUHK’s Department of Chinese and History, is a sociocultural anthropologist concerned with the intersection of religion, culture, and political economy in the Chinese world. His latest research focuses on Chinese diasporic communities and economic zones along the Belt and Road. He recently published a research article “Contextualizing Transnational Chinese Christianity: A Relational Approach” in Religions journal. The research seeks to put the current rapid development of Chinese Christianity in Europe into a social relational context by focusing on its role in negotiating a sense of place and a moral discourse on family, marriage, and social relations in the Chinese diaspora.

From 2014 to 2019, Professor Cao’s research team conducted in-person field research in Europe, mainly focusing on Chinese Christian diasporic communities in France and Italy. Field research involves participant observation on Chinese Christians’ religious practices in church settings and in their everyday lives. In addition, the team conducted informal interviews, both with Chinese Christian church leaders and members in Europe, to understand their immigrant experience and religious interpretations in specific social contexts. The online church activities held during the COVID-19 pandemic were also observed to know how Chinese Christians in Europe understood and responded to the global health crisis.

According to various estimates from insiders of Chinese immigrant churches, there are about three hundred Chinese churches in Europe. Chinese churches in France are mainly composed of Wenzhou immigrants, and are concentrated in Paris, a commercial center. Professor Cao noticed that Chinese Christians in Europe live in an acquaintance society like that in China. After migrating to Europe, they maintain this same way of raising business funds in the diaspora. Young Chinese immigrants receive their first business start-up capital from wedding cash gifts (hongbao). It is not uncommon to see several Chinese churches in Italy raising capital to help another Chinese church purchase a church property, and this church later raises money to help those churches back when they need fund for purchasing new church property. Chinese Christians in Europe extended physical congregational spaces to virtual congregations to expand their transnational and trans-local networks. The church communities established through WeChat meet the social needs of Chinese Christians in Europe and fulfil their religious needs in daily life, providing an intimate social network for them to integrate their Christian faith with their connections to their homeland, especially with their hometowns in China.

Family ties and cultural belonging are also enforced through the development of Chinese Christianity. Christian belief helps overseas Chinese Christians justify why they preserve certain Chinese traditions when it comes to mate selection, marriage, and family relations. Chinese Christian identity is often passed down from generation to generation in highly controlled community and family environments. Both traditional Chinese culture and Christian morality contribute to a conservative ideology on gender and sexuality among Chinese Christians, shaping their moral rules in economic practice.

Benefiting from the strong economic ties between China and Europe, Chinese Christians have gained greater visibility and relevance in Sino-Europe relations. Engaging in church charity in the host society is an essential way for Chinese Christians in Europe to demonstrate their sense of community, moral identity, and social mobilisation. At the height of the pandemic in Europe, Chinese churches took practical actions to practice their faith and help improve the international image of overseas Chinese, especially of Chinese businesspeople. When the whole of Italy lacked masks and other epidemic prevention materials, many ethnic Chinese churches began to donate masks, medical scrubs, gloves, and so on to police stations, medical personnel, and those in need. These philanthropic outreach efforts carried out during the pandemic have gradually weakened the ethnic enclave model of Chinese churches and developed into a more inclusive cosmopolitan style of global religion.

Discussions on immigrant religions in Europe usually take the secularisation of Europe into account. But in Professor Cao’s research, it is found that a highly sinicised and localized Christianity provides a moral discourse and value system that is adapted to a globalised market economy for the Chinese diaspora communities. This investigation draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Europe among overseas Chinese entrepreneurs to seek an alternative conceptual framework for understanding the transnational spread of Chinese Christianity. While lamenting the moral degeneration and gradual departure from Christian faith of Europeans, these immigrant churches seek to position themselves as the new center of global Christianity. The case of Chinese Christianity in Europe has important theoretical significance for understanding religious modernity globally. It refutes the dichotomous ordering of the Western global and the Chinese local and shows how non-Western Christians engage Western modernity on their own terms.

Achievement and publication

Cao, N & Lin, L 2024, ‘Contextualizing Transnational Chinese Christianity: A Relational Approach’, Religions, vol. 15, no. 4, 510. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15040510