Last Christmas I received over 30 Christmas cards from my Chinese students. At the entrance to the Foreign Teachers Residence there was a brightly lit Christmas tree. All the shops were festooned with Santa Clauses. All this is new to China and it appears that where religious missionaries failed commercialism has conquered!
What an irony, but such is the power of capitalism. Having choked the spiritual meaning out of Christmas in the Western world, it now offers this blatantly commercial product to China and inadvertently causes the Chinese to ask, ‘What is the Christmas story about?’
I wrote an account of my first Christmas in China and I distributed this to the students before Christmas. I asked them to read it, discuss it and share their comments. I joined each small group in turn to listen to their conversation. One student said his mother was a Christian and so was his brother.
“They want me to become a believer also but I’m too busy studying to be a Christian,” he said. He also said he was afraid of the police as they as they made life difficult for Christians in his village. Another said that she learned from reading the account that people in China and the West were essentially the same as they both tried to find meaning in their lives through love. One student was fascinated by the description of the Christmas Mass in the local Catholic Church and asked if she and her friends could go.
On Christmas Day I mentioned this to some other teachers and they gave their experiences. One asked the students to tell her what they knew of the Christmas story. One piped up that it was about Mary, the mother of Jesus riding to Bethlehem on a turkey.
Another who was in a small discussion group asked her to tell the Christmas story and became excited as she told it. He said at the end, “How romantic!”
On Christmas Eve I was invited to a meal by the German couple, who are my neighbours and are Lutherans. We were joined by a Chinese teacher who began to ask us about Christianity.
He knew I was a Catholic and he said, “We Chinese know that Catholics pay special respect to Mary and we like that because it reminds us of Guanyin, a Buddhist female figure whom we respect greatly. We think Jesus, who is worshipped by the Protestants is a sad poor devil because he died on a cross. “Besides,” he said, “I have been in the Protestant Church and it is very ugly, I don’t know how anyone could pray in it! The local Catholic Church on the other hand is beautiful and I like it.”
The Catholic Cathedral was built by the French in the Gothic style at the end of the last century and has been restored after being used as a factory during Mao’s regime.
His comments were revealing as it was the first time any of us had heard a Chinese person express an opinion so clearly on the average Chinese persons attitude to Christianity. What a paradox that the commercialism that has submerged belief in the West is now bringing that same belief to the East, albeit in a contorted form.
Fr Teddy Collins is a teacher in China.
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