Abstract
“Sister Yu Weiping’s husband, Bo Xiaolong,” read a middle-aged woman in Xiamen’s Bailu church out loud. “Amen,” the congregation of some ninety people responded.
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Notes
- 1.
All personal names and all church names in this chapter have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect the identities of research participants.
- 2.
“Family churches” (jiating jiaohui) are sometimes erroneously referred to by Western observers as “house churches. ” Family churches are not registered with local authorities as official religious institutions, and their meeting places (in Xiamen usually office spaces) and activities are carefully monitored by secret police for anything illegal or anti-establishment. The term “family church” is used by Protestants to distinguish themselves from state-sanctioned churches of the Three Self Patriotic Movement, usually referred to simply as Three Self churches (sanzi jiaohui). “Family church” may also indicate the smaller size these congregations usually have compared to Three Self churches, which can number into many thousands of members.
- 3.
Another exception is Mark McLeister (2012) who mentions Christmas as “by far the most significant festival in the church calendar” (107) in the Chinese city where he conducted fieldwork, before moving on to write about other topics.
- 4.
As a secular comparison, November 11 has recently become known as “Singles’ Day” in China. Although its origin is contested, the mainstream explanation is that a small group of students (all singles) in Nanjing started engaging in fun activities in the 2000s on the (Gregorian) date marked by four times the number 1 (11-11). While locally gaining in popularity, Singles’ Day suddenly rose to national prominence in 2011, when November 11 would have six 1s (11-11-11). Since then it is celebrated across China, mostly by young people who go shopping and partying. This example shows how the Gregorian calendar in China was a platform for the quick rise of a new nationwide festival.
- 5.
The recent harsh crackdown on Falun Gong is a good example of the party-state’s suspicion against large-scale, religiously motivated movements. This suspicion against subversive religious movements may stem from the nineteenth century’s Taiping Rebellion, which was so destructive and long-lasting that it arguably heralded the fall of the Qing dynasty and China’s imperial era.
- 6.
Newly built churches registered with the authorities typically unite a number of previous “meeting points” (juhuidian). Such meeting points are administered by registered churches but based in office spaces or in Protestants ’ homes. They can become sizeable communities of several hundred practitioners. Meeting points thus occupy a kind of temporary grey zone utilized by the authorities to thwart unregistered ministers from taking over such communities and turning them into unregistered family churches.
- 7.
Weiqian is also a leader of a funeral group (sangshizu) in Siming Church. About ten people on the trip to Lichun were also in Weiqian’s funeral group, but most were other Siming Church members who had joined this temporary Christmas group to sing and dance.
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News Article Sources
Al Jazeera English. December 25, 2014. “Chinese City Bans Christmas Festivities in Favour of National Traditions.”
Reuters. December 25, 2014. “Christmas Banned by Chinese University, Says It Is ‘kitsch.’”
South China Morning Post. December 28, 2014. “Does Christmas Really Pose a Threat to Chinese Culture?”
The Telegraph, UK. December 15, 2017. “China University Bans Christmas to Resist ‘Corrosion’ of Western Culture.”
UCA News. December 25, 2017. “The Chinese Christmas War.”
Funding
The fieldwork and development of this chapter were made possible with funding from the Faculty of Theology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam through the Sustainable Humanities programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I thank Chris White for his patience, helpful comments, and reading suggestions throughout the editing process. I am especially grateful for the primary sources about Christmas in early twentieth century Xiamen that he provided. My supervisors Marianne Moyaert, Pál Nyíri, and Peter Peverelli at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Adam Yuet Chau at the University of Cambridge have inspired and encouraged me throughout my PhD trajectory. I also thank professor Yi Lin, my supervisor at Xiamen University, for the great talks and get-togethers with his student group. Many generous interlocutors and gatekeepers in Xiamen cannot be named here in order to safeguard their anonymity; without their help and hospitality I could not have written this chapter.
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Colijn, B. (2019). Christmas Reverberations in Xiamen: Insights from a Grand Religious Festival in Contemporary China. In: White, C. (eds) Protestantism in Xiamen. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89471-3_8
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