Abstract
The Catholic Church in China today (encompassing government-approved and non-registered churches) faces challenges as diverse as the local communities it seeks to serve. The Sacred Heart Cathedral in Guangzhou presents a particularly interesting case of a g overnment-approved church serving multiple communities simultaneously. Balancing the needs of these communities—the Chinese Catholic community, expatriate and immigrant groups, particularly African migrants, the Church leadership—and the requirements of the local Chinese government, calls for sensitivity, adaptability, and a measure of openness to new forms of community participation. Due to the paradoxes and ambiguities in China’s religious policy, Catholic churches in China today enjoy relative autonomy from government control. However, underground church leaders continue to be arrested and persecuted from time to time. As a government-sanctioned or open church, the Sacred Heart Cathedral (also known as the Yide Lu church) has to struggle to maintain a balance between religious autonomy and loyalty to the party-state. This chapter examines how the recent influx of African migrants in the church has both highlighted and obscured some of the tensions in church-government relations.
This project was generously funded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (HKBU 245512). I also want to thank Kelechi Nwadike for his wonderful research assistance.
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Notes
Adams Bodomo, Africans in China: A Sociocultural Study and Its Implications on Africa-China Relations (Amhert, NY: Cambria Press, 2012); Evan Osnos, “The Promised Land: Letter from China,” New Yorker, February 9, 2009, pp. 50–55.
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There might be a structural reason as well since the Chinese authority has been trying hard to insulate Christians in China from foreign influence; for more detail, see Cindy Yik-yi Chu, The Catholic Church in China: 1978 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Frank N. Pieke, “Immigrant China,” Modern China vol. 38, no. 1 (2012), pp. 40–77.
Knibbe, “‘We Did Not Come Here as Tenants, But as Landlords’”; Kristine Krause, “Cosmopolitan Charismatics? Transnational Ways of Belonging and Cosmopolitan Moments in the Religious Practice of New Mission Churches,” Ethnic and Racial Studies vol. 34, no. 3 (2011), pp. 419–435.
Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Knibbe, “‘We Did Not Come Here as Tenants, But as Landlords’.”
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© 2014 Cindy Yik-yi Chu
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Lan, S. (2014). The Catholic Church’s Role in the African Diaspora in Guangzhou, China. In: Chu, C.Yy. (eds) Catholicism in China, 1900-Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353658_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353658_12
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