Maybe a Revolution Is a Dinner Party After All
The Nepalese Maoists are inching closer to their goal of winning state power.
The United Communist Party Nepal--Maoist controls something like 65 to 75% of the countryside.
I haven't been able to find a map showing the territory controlled by or under the military shadow of the UCPN-M.
Maybe a map that would be a gigantic red blob except for the ethnicly Indian Terai districts bordering India and the capital region is just too depressing.
It's one thing to establish a Maoist government in remote, impoverished, and underpopulated districts where government control, services, and security are non-existent.
Going into the populous Khatmandu Valley and cracking the urban insurrectionary nut while surrounded by suspicious, relatively prosperous city dwellers and the openly hostile Nepalese Army is another matter entirely.
For the time being, it appears that the Maoists have decided to maneuver themselves into the central government as an intermediate as opposed to final stage in their political struggle.
As a result, they have supplemented their usual street muscle with a round of dinner parties seeking to split their enemies and enlist domestic and international allies.
They are getting some love from the United States, the EU, and China. The Western powers don't particularly like the Maoists, but see little upside in continuing the existence of the current government, an ineffectual rump organization supported largely by India.
India appears to be on the outside looking in, while China has managed to boost its profile inside Nepal by canny political maneuvering with local and foreign actors.
I cover the current situation in an Asia Times article entitled China and the West step into Nepal crisis.
Friday, May 14, 2010
U.S. Shuts Down Turkey's Iran Initiative
The U.S. is apparently dead serious about shutting off Iran's avenues of negotiation.
Case in point: putting the kibosh on Turkey's initiative to midwife the LEU for fuel plates swap for the Tehran Research Reactor.
Courtesy of Hurriyet/AFP, the tick-tock is reproduced below.
I would think it would be difficult for the United States to justify discouraging Erdogan for going to Iran for more jaw-jaw.
What's the worst that could happen? A deal?
I'm interested in what nature of arguments and inducements were deployed to get Turkey's Prime Minister Erodgan to backtrack.
I expect that Secretary Clinton's position was that positive movement on the Turkish initiative would undercut the magnificent NPT Revcon now going on in New York.
The conference is supposed to reach its climax in a couple weeks with a nuclear-lions-lie-down-with-nuclear-lambs dogpile combined with a condemnation of Iran, hopefully with Israel doing more than just peeping at the keyhole.
Maybe Erdogan thought better of going up against President Obama's cherished global security strategy and promised to soft-pedal his initiative.
If this is the case, the U.S. will probably have to redouble its efforts for a successful NPT review.
After all, Turkey, in addition to being the author of the TRR swap idea and a neighbor of Iran, claims leadership of the Turkic Islamic bloc and a share in the business of ordering affairs in the Muslim world.
Also, it's a non-permanent member of the Security Council this year and a negative Turkish vote on sanctions--accompanied by some pointed questions on why Prime Minister Erdogan was urged to abandon a peace-making initiative that showed considerable promise--are embarrassments that the Obama administration might be keen to avoid.
May 13
May 14
May 14
Case in point: putting the kibosh on Turkey's initiative to midwife the LEU for fuel plates swap for the Tehran Research Reactor.
Courtesy of Hurriyet/AFP, the tick-tock is reproduced below.
I would think it would be difficult for the United States to justify discouraging Erdogan for going to Iran for more jaw-jaw.
What's the worst that could happen? A deal?
I'm interested in what nature of arguments and inducements were deployed to get Turkey's Prime Minister Erodgan to backtrack.
I expect that Secretary Clinton's position was that positive movement on the Turkish initiative would undercut the magnificent NPT Revcon now going on in New York.
The conference is supposed to reach its climax in a couple weeks with a nuclear-lions-lie-down-with-nuclear-lambs dogpile combined with a condemnation of Iran, hopefully with Israel doing more than just peeping at the keyhole.
Maybe Erdogan thought better of going up against President Obama's cherished global security strategy and promised to soft-pedal his initiative.
If this is the case, the U.S. will probably have to redouble its efforts for a successful NPT review.
After all, Turkey, in addition to being the author of the TRR swap idea and a neighbor of Iran, claims leadership of the Turkic Islamic bloc and a share in the business of ordering affairs in the Muslim world.
Also, it's a non-permanent member of the Security Council this year and a negative Turkish vote on sanctions--accompanied by some pointed questions on why Prime Minister Erdogan was urged to abandon a peace-making initiative that showed considerable promise--are embarrassments that the Obama administration might be keen to avoid.
May 13
Turkey is still considering whether its prime minister should go to Iran for joint talks with Brazil's president over Tehran's nuclear program, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Thursday.
Ankara's decision will depend on the outcome of contacts with Iranian and Western officials, including a planned telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Davutoğlu said on the Habertürk television channel.
"The matter is not to just hold a three-way meeting. We want to get results if such a meeting is to be held," he said.
May 14
Tehran is not cooperating with the rest of the world on its nuclear program and is merely seeking to delay international sanctions, the U.S. secretary of state told Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call is widely seen as an effort to fend off a Turkish-Brazilian call for more negotiations on Iran’s controversial energy program.
May 14
Turkey's prime minister said Friday he was unlikely to go to Iran for joint talks with Brazil's president because of Iran's failure to try to resolve the row over its nuclear program.
The United States, meanwhile, has warned Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's upcoming visit to Tehran may be Iran's last chance to engage the world over its nuclear program before new U.N. sanctions are imposed.
Turkey had expected Iran to confirm a commitment to a proposed deal to hand over its low-enriched uranium in return for processed fuel for research reactor, with Turkey as a possible venue for the swap, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters.
"It seems that a trip to Iran on Monday is no longer possible for me as Iran has not taken that step on the issue," he said. "If necessary my foreign minister may go, or I may go later," he added. Erdoğan said Turkey had "asked for a statement of determination" from Iran. "Together with Brazil, we wanted to make a contribution to the process," he said.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Pyongyang Pushes Back on Cheonan Sinking Story
Several people have pointed out that the Foal Eagle exercise officially ended March 18, well before the Cheonan sinking on March 26.
Not so.
According to the U.S.F.K. spokesman as reported by the Korea Times:
The "official" is a Pentagon official who was talking to Navy Times but "asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the situation involving North and South Korea".
Maybe some reporting glitches here, but Foal Eagle was still going on with the participation of three Aegis-class destroyers. The Navy Times article does confirm that the U.S. ships were not at their base in Japan and, with the phrase "already at sea", welcomes the reader to draw the inference that the ships were not in the area when the Cheonan sunk. It will be interesting if the report on the sinking describes the location of friendlies at the time of the incident. (CH, 5/9/09)
Asia Times published an article, Pyongyang sees US role in Cheonan sinking, by Kim Myong Chol, identified as "often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea."
He asserts that North Korea had nothing to do with the March 26 sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan off the west coast of the Korean peninsula and on the South Korean side of the NLL (Northern Limit Line), the de facto and frequently disputed maritime border between the two antagonists.
Kim makes the interesting point that the Cheonan was engaged in an annual joint US/ROK military exercise known as Foal Eagle 2010 and several Aegis destroyers were in the area. Presumably all this high-tech military hardware would be able to detect the presence of a North Korean intruder.
He also raises the possibility of the Cheonan being done in by friendly fire.
It's reported that the Cheonan's sister ship, the Sokcho, was also in the area and marked the incident by firing wildly toward North Korean territory at a flock of birds on its radar instead of steaming to the Cheonan's rescue.
So shaky fire discipline by the Cheonan's own team during a complicated multi-vessel exercise near hostile territory looks like a potential hazard/explanation.
With this context, conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this paragraph from the Korea Times on May 7:
The multinational investigation team is also closely looking into the possibility that a North Korean submarine fired a German-made torpedo used both by South Korean and American navies in an attempt to dodge its responsibility.
The report of the team is supposed to be out around May 20.
H/T to DJ for the tip.
Not so.
According to the U.S.F.K. spokesman as reported by the Korea Times:
Navy Times, also not known as a Nork mouthpiece, reported the incident thusly:
A U.S. Navy group of four ships― three warships and one salvage vessel ― have joined South Korea's rescue and recovery operations for its sunken frigate, the Cheonan.
...
Kim Yong-kyu, spokesman for the U.S. Forces in Korea (USFK), provided information on the U.S. Navy's participation in operation.
The spokesman said its participation was made at the request of South Korean authorities.
The four U.S. ships belong to the U.S. 7th Fleet, based just south of Tokyo.
"They were participating in Key Resolve/Foal Eagle Exercise, a joint Korea-U.S. military drill which will continue until the end of April," the spokesman added.
The Japan-based cruiser Shiloh, destroyers Curtis Wilbur and Lassen and the salvage ship Salvor — carrying a team from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 1 — were ordered to help with the search after the South Korean government asked the U.S. for help, a Pentagon official told Navy Times.
...
The U.S. ships were already at sea when the South Korean patrol ship Cheonan sank on Friday as part of the international exercise Foal Eagle, the official said. The cause of the sinking is still not clear.
The "official" is a Pentagon official who was talking to Navy Times but "asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the situation involving North and South Korea".
Maybe some reporting glitches here, but Foal Eagle was still going on with the participation of three Aegis-class destroyers. The Navy Times article does confirm that the U.S. ships were not at their base in Japan and, with the phrase "already at sea", welcomes the reader to draw the inference that the ships were not in the area when the Cheonan sunk. It will be interesting if the report on the sinking describes the location of friendlies at the time of the incident. (CH, 5/9/09)
Asia Times published an article, Pyongyang sees US role in Cheonan sinking, by Kim Myong Chol, identified as "often called an "unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North Korea."
He asserts that North Korea had nothing to do with the March 26 sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan off the west coast of the Korean peninsula and on the South Korean side of the NLL (Northern Limit Line), the de facto and frequently disputed maritime border between the two antagonists.
Kim makes the interesting point that the Cheonan was engaged in an annual joint US/ROK military exercise known as Foal Eagle 2010 and several Aegis destroyers were in the area. Presumably all this high-tech military hardware would be able to detect the presence of a North Korean intruder.
He also raises the possibility of the Cheonan being done in by friendly fire.
It's reported that the Cheonan's sister ship, the Sokcho, was also in the area and marked the incident by firing wildly toward North Korean territory at a flock of birds on its radar instead of steaming to the Cheonan's rescue.
So shaky fire discipline by the Cheonan's own team during a complicated multi-vessel exercise near hostile territory looks like a potential hazard/explanation.
With this context, conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this paragraph from the Korea Times on May 7:
The multinational investigation team is also closely looking into the possibility that a North Korean submarine fired a German-made torpedo used both by South Korean and American navies in an attempt to dodge its responsibility.
The report of the team is supposed to be out around May 20.
H/T to DJ for the tip.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
The Sweet, Sweet Side of Nuclear Weapons
As I write about the NPT Review Conference and nuclear disarmament, this image deserves--nay demands--its own post.
Readers may click on the picture to enjoy its full-sized magnificence.
It's been making the rounds of the Internet with varying attributions.
Fortunately, its provenance is documented in the on-line archives of Time Magazine from November 18, 1946:
In Washington last week, at the Army War College's sumptuous officers' club, two admirals and their wives gave a little party to commemorate the dissolution of Joint Army-Navy Task Force No. i, which staged Operation Crossroads at Bikini. An East St. Louis group of bakers sent a cake, made out of tiny angel-food puffs, in the shape of an atomic explosion. Vice Admiral W.H.P. ("Spike") Blandy, Crossroads commander, and Mrs. Blandy were photographed gaily cutting the cake, while Rear Admiral F. J. Lowry stood happily by .
The picture made the Washington Post's society page. It also made a lot of people indignant and unhappy...the Rev. Mr. Davies [pastor of a Unitarian church in Washington--ed.] thundered: "An utterly loathsome picture. If I spoke as I feel I would call it obscene.... How would it seem in Hiroshima or Nagasaki to know that Americans make cakes of angel-food puffs in the image of that terrible diabolical thing". . . .
Time concluded mordantly: These were probably the harshest words ever spoken of a dessert.
Operation Crossroads, by the way, represented the first two nuclear tests conducted after World War II, Able and Baker. It was something of a cock-up--and not just for the residents of Bikini Atoll, who saw their home atoll largely obliterated and totally irradiated, and its name applied to risque swimwear.
Wikipedia has a superb article on the Crossroads tests.
The U.S. Navy was apparently quite anxious not to concede any ground to its despised rivals in the Air Force, even though it seemed that strategic doctrine had permanently shifted away from big ships lobbing big shells to big planes dropping really big bombs.
The first Crossroads test was therefore run by the Navy as an experiment--and hopefully a demonstration--of the ability of a surface fleet to survive in a nuclear attack zone and continue to operate.
It was understood from the beginning that humans would not do well, but it was considered important to learn if carbon based life forms would be able to survive, at least for a while, and do their duty.
Patriotic livestock volunteered to stand in for human sailors during the tests.
Ships not in the immediate blast area survived, to the Navy's gratification.
However, the takeaway, especially after the spectacular and spectacularly dirty underwater detonation of the Baker test, was that the Navy's role in nuclear warfare would not involve blithely replacing the dead and dying with a fresh crew and continuing with its military business.
The ships were hopelessly irradiated and could not be made safe even after many dreary months of decontamination. Unless the sailors were to be outfitted in lead suits, the ships were unusable.
Fortunately for the U.S. Navy, submarine-based nuclear-tipped missiles emerged to guarantee the relevance--and budget--of the salty service into the 21st century.
The four photos of the Crossroads tests are from the Wikipedia article cited above. The goats were exposed during the Able (airburst) test. The second and third photos show stages in the Baker (underwater) test. The test flotilla is clearly visible in both pictures and gives an idea of the size of the blast. The final photo shows Navy crews during their unsuccessful attempts to decontaminate the Prinz Eugen, one of the ships in the flotilla.
Israel's Weapons of Mass Disruption
...and 2001: A Disarmament Odyssey
I have an article up at Asia Times entitled China in the catbird seat on Iran.
It looks at the state of play at the NPT Review Conference and opines that Beijing has done a pretty good job at positioning itself as the intermediary between the West and Iran.
I was lucky enough to interview a U.S. arms control expert and gain a valuable perspective on an important angle: Russia's expectations for the NPT process--getting on the right side (with the United States and India) of the isolate-China equation--and Beijing's steps to frustrate them.
In Moscow's mind, I think the recipe for success looked like this:
- Partner with the United States on the new START treaty and give President Obama's policy that successful multi-lateral sheen;
- Work with the U.S. to solve the Iran problem within the framework of the NPT, either through a definitive sanctions regime or rapprochement;
- Make common cause with the United States and India to gang up on China as the modernizing, weaponizing, destabilizing wild card on the Eurasian continent.
To date, the Iran problem hasn't been solved and the Obama administration, instead of fussing over China's new generation of nuclear attack submarines, has to get China's help with the non-aligned movement to make sure the NPT conference doesn't collapse into a Copenhagen-scale clusterfugue.
And the reason the Iran problem hasn't been solved is Israel, and resentment in the Muslim and developing world over the U.S. grotesque double standard of bullyragging NPT member Iran while non-NPT-member Israel with its nuclear arsenal gets a free pass.
For the time being, at least, the efforts of the U.S. and Russia are concentrated on armtwisting, cajoling, and public relations handjobberai to gut the Egypt-led initiative to demand negotiations for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, and force the focus back to creating the appearance of a united front on Iran.
The cornerstone of President Obama's non-proliferation-based consensual, multi-lateral global security regime is universal adherence to the NPT. For this system to work, Israel, India, and Pakistan have to participate.
Since May of last year, President Obama has issued several calls for Israel to join the NPT, thereby stripping Iran of the diplomatic defense of harping on its NPT membership and, perhaps, making it possible for moderate elements inside Iran to advocate a more conciliatory nuclear policy.
Joining the NPT shouldn't be too hard for Israel. The Bush deal with India--endorsed by the IAEA under ElBaradei and welcomed by the West--demonstrated that American allies with rogue nuclear programs are eligible for special consideration.
It doesn't look like Israel has too much downside in admitting it has a nuclear arsenal and joining the NPT subject to the same sweet setup that the U.S. and other declared nuclear weapons powers enjoy: a national security exclusion that keeps the IAEA out of all of their nuclear weapons facilities.
This is an accommodation that Israel has been, to date, unwilling to provide. In fact, Israel has told the United States to get stuffed on multiple occasions.
It's possible that Israel is only waiting for the strategically and psychologically opportune moment to announce its willingness to join the NPT and give President Obama a much-needed political gift.
However, I wonder if Israel has a lot of interest in giving President Obama this gift, whose primary utility would be to boost U.S. cred with the Muslim world--and provide Iran with some political cover internally to justify concessions on its program.
Israel has a vested interest in the current cats-and-dogs dynamic of U.S.+ Israel vs. everybody else in the Middle East. It is viscerally opposed to U.S. rapprochement with Iran and gains little from a ratcheting down of nuclear tensions that would allow Tehran to assume the role of a rational, independent, and useful interlocutor with Washington.
From this perspective, Israel's nuclear arsenal is useful primarily as an irritant hindering the resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis, serving--as I put it in the title--as weapons of mass disruption.
China Hand has a weakness for conspiracy theories, especially when regarding the dismal history of the Tehran Research Reactor fuel plate project, which started out as a confidence-building initiative and somehow morphed into an exercise in confidence-destruction and geopolitical paranoia.
I would not be surprised if France--which has pretensions to clout in the Levant and has hopes to replace America as Israel's strategic and utterly uncritical BFF--had a tete a tete with Israel and exploited its role as the fabricator of the fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor to insist on getting all the LEU first to incapacitate Iran's nuclear program, stretch out the delivery schedule to improbable lengths, and encourage suspicions of its sincerity to ultimately deliver the fuel plates, thereby helping pooch the deal.
If Israel ostentatiously declines to participate in the NPT regime and the current situation holds, the big loser would be Russia, which made a reckless jump to the U.S. side of the fence on the Iran issue, not only futzing on completion of the Bushehr nuclear power station and joining the sanctions chorus, but also holding up delivery of a anti-aircraft defense system that Iran, apparently, is rather keen to install.
The big winners are Israel, which retains its position as America's indispensable and embattled ally in the Middle East--and China, which gets to occupy the Iran's superpower patron slot previously occupied by Moscow.
Now, moving on to bones, bombs, and monkeys:
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is, to my mind, the apogee of his creative achievement.
It is also a movie about disarmament.
President Obama will perhaps be depressed or inspired to learn that, in the opinion of Kubrick and screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, true disarmament will be a process of finite but not brief duration--maybe 200,000 years.
In 2001's prologue, a pack of put-upon vegetarian apes learns, with the help of an alien monolith, to slaughter competitors and four-legged food opportunities with hand-held weapons.
The prologue ends with the savviest and most bloodthirsty ape, Moonwatcher, flinging his bone club triumphantly into the sky.
As it soars upward, the sky grows dark and--in what has been described as the "longest jumpcut in the history of cinema"--the bone morphs into a spacecraft orbiting Earth many millenia later (the picture at the top of the post).
As one should expect, given Kubrick's obsessive attention to artistic and narrative coherence, the cut is not just a cute, clever transition.
The elongated satellite recapitulates both the shape and function of the bone club: it's an orbiting nuclear weapon.
As Kubrick and Clarke envisaged the narrative (preserved in Clarke's novelization), Bowman--after his accelerated evolution into the godlike Starchild--would return to Earth and, as his first order of business, telekinetically detonate all the space weapons and usher the planet into a post-nuclear nirvana.
However, Kubrick--despite the exemplary forebearance of MGM, which gave him complete artistic control and was permanently barred from the set for its pains--ran out of time and money after three years.
So there is no spectacular explosion, perhaps with those Saturn rings that are so popular these days and, for that matter, no aliens--whose credible depiction was much desired by Kubrick and Clarke but abandoned as unattainable.
Instead, the film stands as a classic of hypnotic, seductive, open-ended ambiguity--much like the disarmament process itself.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
China Threatens U.S. Superiority in Satire
The Daily Show featured a very funny segment on Wham-O's decision to move production from China back to the United States.
Here's the clip:
I was amazed at the performance of a Chinese spokesperson, Li Daxi of the "Chinese Association of Business", who appeared a) in on the joke and b) completely comfortable setting up and trading punchlines with the Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi.
I felt a twinge of fear as well.
As the PRC's economic, diplomatic, and military clout has risen, we could still take comfort in the fact that America had the best humor system in the world, and official China had as yet proved itself unable to take--or make--a joke.
If that advantage had been lost--if indeed the Chinese had even mastered deadpan satire and mordant syntax, as the Wham-O clip implied--the Sinopocalypse was definitely at hand.
I was greatly reassured, however, when I Googled Li Daxi's biography:
Daxi Li was born in Puning, Guangdong of China. He graduated from South China Normal University in 1975, and received MS from Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China in 1980. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics from CUNY in 1985, and continued his research in McGill University, CCNY and NYIT as a Research Associate and an Assistant Professor from 1985 to 1991. His works in physics include dynamic symmetry breaking, quark mass difference, Superstring compactification, and Superstring models. ...Since 1992, his research interest has been in finance. He has 14 years of experience in investment banking and venture capital. He worked as a Senior Analyst and Assistant Vice President with major Wall Street investment banks Salomon Brothers Inc. and Lehman Brothers Inc. for over 10 years, and has been involved in many important IPO and VC investments...
Obviously, this guy is an outlier whose sense of humor was honed on Superstring compaction, VC pitches, and the Lehman collapse during thirty years in North America. We don't have to worry about the PRC marching an army of comics out of its clone farms to take over our comedy clubs and cable-TV satirical news shows ...yet.
In other news, the Communist Party Nepal (Maoist) is putting 500,000 cadres into Khatmandu in what might be the final stage in their push to topple Nepal's divided and impotent government and seize state power. India and the United States are not happy. Maybe something will turn up in the Western media about that.
Also, because of press o' business, I am only now getting around to posting notices on four articles I wrote for Asia Times:
China sees US as hedge for Taiwan, Tibet
I make the point that behind China's insistence on U.S. reaffirmation of the one-China policy in return for support on Iran sanctions is Beijing's awareness that it is facing a new generation and a new paradigm of resistance in its dealings with Tibet and Taiwan.
Say hello to Marjah...or "Little America"
This article draws on what I have found to be the best book on contemporary Afghanistan, Joel Hafvenstein's memoir of his year in Helmand, Opium Season. Betcha didn't know Helmand as we know it is the creation of a massive American infrastructure project from the 1950s. As U.S. military forces slog through Marjah, Hafvenstein's book should be required reading for students of our Afghan adventure. My piece is pretty good, too.
China has a Congo copper headache
The West is pretty sensitive to the appearance of neo-colonialism--except in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC and its young president are regarded as, and treated as, mere creations of the West as part of its effort to clean up the colossal mess it made in the Congo. Then China comes in and makes a gigantic copper deal with the DRC's nominal masters instead of the powers behind the throne and runs into a US/French/IMF buzz saw...
More than bribery: Wealth, power and Rio Tinto
This article links the Rio Tinto case to the Chinese government's efforts to take down a nettlesome and politically connected steel tycoon, Du Shuanghua.
Here's the clip:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Wham-O Moves to America | ||||
| ||||
I was amazed at the performance of a Chinese spokesperson, Li Daxi of the "Chinese Association of Business", who appeared a) in on the joke and b) completely comfortable setting up and trading punchlines with the Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi.
I felt a twinge of fear as well.
As the PRC's economic, diplomatic, and military clout has risen, we could still take comfort in the fact that America had the best humor system in the world, and official China had as yet proved itself unable to take--or make--a joke.
If that advantage had been lost--if indeed the Chinese had even mastered deadpan satire and mordant syntax, as the Wham-O clip implied--the Sinopocalypse was definitely at hand.
I was greatly reassured, however, when I Googled Li Daxi's biography:
Daxi Li was born in Puning, Guangdong of China. He graduated from South China Normal University in 1975, and received MS from Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, China in 1980. He received his Ph.D. in high energy physics from CUNY in 1985, and continued his research in McGill University, CCNY and NYIT as a Research Associate and an Assistant Professor from 1985 to 1991. His works in physics include dynamic symmetry breaking, quark mass difference, Superstring compactification, and Superstring models. ...Since 1992, his research interest has been in finance. He has 14 years of experience in investment banking and venture capital. He worked as a Senior Analyst and Assistant Vice President with major Wall Street investment banks Salomon Brothers Inc. and Lehman Brothers Inc. for over 10 years, and has been involved in many important IPO and VC investments...
Obviously, this guy is an outlier whose sense of humor was honed on Superstring compaction, VC pitches, and the Lehman collapse during thirty years in North America. We don't have to worry about the PRC marching an army of comics out of its clone farms to take over our comedy clubs and cable-TV satirical news shows ...yet.
In other news, the Communist Party Nepal (Maoist) is putting 500,000 cadres into Khatmandu in what might be the final stage in their push to topple Nepal's divided and impotent government and seize state power. India and the United States are not happy. Maybe something will turn up in the Western media about that.
Also, because of press o' business, I am only now getting around to posting notices on four articles I wrote for Asia Times:
China sees US as hedge for Taiwan, Tibet
I make the point that behind China's insistence on U.S. reaffirmation of the one-China policy in return for support on Iran sanctions is Beijing's awareness that it is facing a new generation and a new paradigm of resistance in its dealings with Tibet and Taiwan.
Say hello to Marjah...or "Little America"
This article draws on what I have found to be the best book on contemporary Afghanistan, Joel Hafvenstein's memoir of his year in Helmand, Opium Season. Betcha didn't know Helmand as we know it is the creation of a massive American infrastructure project from the 1950s. As U.S. military forces slog through Marjah, Hafvenstein's book should be required reading for students of our Afghan adventure. My piece is pretty good, too.
China has a Congo copper headache
The West is pretty sensitive to the appearance of neo-colonialism--except in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC and its young president are regarded as, and treated as, mere creations of the West as part of its effort to clean up the colossal mess it made in the Congo. Then China comes in and makes a gigantic copper deal with the DRC's nominal masters instead of the powers behind the throne and runs into a US/French/IMF buzz saw...
More than bribery: Wealth, power and Rio Tinto
This article links the Rio Tinto case to the Chinese government's efforts to take down a nettlesome and politically connected steel tycoon, Du Shuanghua.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Christian Fundamentalism--Made In China
It is, one would hazard, a little-known fact that a crisis in the overseas missionary endeavor in the 1930s, particularly in China, helped precipitate the split of the Anglophone Protestant movement into Modernist and Fundamentalist camps.
Fundamentalists--committed to a literal reading of the Bible as the inerrant word of God--and Modernists--employing the arsenal of critical scholarship developed in Germany to identify, explain, and justify the role of man in the Good Book's creation--had sparred for decades over doctrine, appointments, and sanctions for heretical or disobedient teachings.
Matters came to a head in the 1930s, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded an overseas study tour of distinguished Protestant academics to evaluate the state of the worldwide missionary effort which, in the key region of China, seemed to have stalled at a penetration of 400,000 or 0.1% of the population after 100 years of determined evangelism.
The scholars' report, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years, asserted that the traditional missionary approach--relying on dire warnings that the natives were headed straight to hell upon their demise unless they converted--was encountering growing resistance from a more sophisticated heathen audience increasingly drawn to nationalism, democracy, secularism, socialism, and Marxism as ideologies more relevant to their needs and aspirations.
The Modernists proposed to compete for hearts and minds overseas with a mushy syncretism that coexisted with the local religious and cultural values instead of trying to replace them. Pearl Buck, a missionary who declared it was not necessary to believe in the virgin birth or even the divinity of Christ to be a true Christian (it was only necessary to act in a Christian manner) typified the new dispensation.
In the resulting furor, Pearl Buck resigned, the Fundamentalists walked out, Modernism prevailed, and Fundamentalism became the virtually exclusive preserve of the U.S. Southern Baptists, who today occupy an outsized political space as the voice of militant Christian conservatives.
Unfortunately for the Modernist strategy, coexistence with the post-1949 Communist regime in China, let alone growing congregations, proved extremely difficult for the mainstream Protestant denominations.
Ironically, in recent years the CCP--which has acted for decades as the sole legitimate Chinese interlocutor with the foreign Protestant and Catholic religions-- has experienced its own problems executing its self-assigned role as the exclusive ideological and moral authority inside China.
Reliable data and statistics are of course non-existent, but it would appear that the Chinese Communist Party--like the old school Protestant missionaries before them--is having difficulty leading or guiding an increasingly informed, sophisticated, and skeptical Chinese popular opinion toward a potentially stabilizing post-Communist ideology based on authoritarianism and national unity.
State-promoted Confucianism--that reliable bulwark of social order and the status quo--may provide a viable alternative to liberal democracy. However, the government is going to have its hands full with groups that seek to draw their power from a higher authority than the common good.
Meanwhile, the doctrinal stepchild--Fundamentalism--has moved toward a central, independent role in Chinese Christianity.
Today, Chinese Christian observance--driven by indigenous Christian churches of a largely fundamentalist tinge-- is estimated to number anywhere from 50 to 100 million.
Christian optimism concerning the spiritual regeneration of China must be tempered by the awareness that Christianity will face a legion of domestic competitors in the spiritual marketplace. China is aboil with sects channeling and mashing up every extreme of Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Christian religious experience.
If the precedents of South Korea and Mongolia are representative, it is unlikely that Christianity will every command more than a vocal minority inside China.
Furthermore, mainstreaming and leveraging Christian practice in Chinese politics and society is going to be be difficult. On the Protestant side of the fence, the PRC is home to a bewildering melange of Christian sects, many that tiptoe very close to, if not over, the line separating religion from cult.
At one end of the spectrum, the Three-Self (state-approved churches) and ecumenical evangelical operations carefully render unto Caesar in order to maintain their legal foothold in China--and provide the anxious Chinese government with a window into the unnerving world of Chinese Christian observance.
Franklin Graham, son of the (Lianyungang-born) evangelical Billy Graham and grandson of the famous Presbyterian medical missionary in Lianyungang, L. Nelson Bell*, preached to over 10,000 people in Baoding last October under the arrangement of the Chinese government.
At the other end, the burgeoning Chinese "house church" movement (congregations that decline to register with the authorities) spurns any government attempts to direct or control its highly decentralized activities.
Reportedly, many of the house churches trace their roots to Watchmen Nee, a devout and idiosyncratic Chinese preacher and martyr who died in PRC incarceration in 1972.
In contrast to this indigenous inspiration, it is asserted that over half of China's house churches have aligned with the charismatic Pentecostalism preached by Dennis Balcomb of Bakersfield, California on his trips to China beginning in the 1980s.
Chinese Pentecostalism offers much for the orthodox Protestant and Marxist to chew on.
In one instance, Balcomb reports that one of his evangelists successfully raised a child from the dead, apparently without seeing the need to correct the misapprehension of the villagers that "Jesus of Henan" had performed the office.
One of my co-workers went up to Saan Xi Province to preach the Gospel. The people in that area are very superstitious and they worship many idols. He went and preached to the people saying, 'Our God is a great God. He is the one who created the universe. He is able to cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear even the dead to raise again, but what can your God do for you?'
After he preached, a man ran to the hospital where a boy has just passed away. He told the boys parents, 'There is a Jesus from Henan came who said he can raise people from the dead.'
So the mother took her dead child to my co-worker saying, 'Jesus from Henan please raise my son from the dead.'
My co-worker was shocked when he saw the dead child for he had never raised anyone from the dead before. There was nothing he could do but just cry out to God. At first he was very worried in his heart that if nothing happened, all the people would say he's a liar and they would not believe in Jesus. So he started to pray, but after a while, nothing happened so he prayed again and still nothing happened. Then he prayed to God, 'Lord, I don't mind to loose face, but I really don't want this to cause the people mock your name and not believe in you. Please show forth your glory in this place.'
As he was praying that prayer, the mother of the child said, 'Look, my child is alive again!'
He saw the child stand up and he ran throughout the house. Due to this miracle, many people in that area burnt all their idols and believed in Jesus.
In another instance, Balcomb, with no apparent appreciation of the absurd, reports on the titanic struggle of one of his Chinese evangelicals to get a middle-aged woman to maintain an adequately respectful demeanour in the frequently raucous environment of a Pentecostalist meeting:
There was a 40 years old lady who was demon possessed who came into the meeting. She was scolding and screaming at us while I was preaching. She was disturbing the whole meeting so that I could not continue to preach. I then asked the whole congregation to kneel down and pray. As we were praying, she came to the front and continued scolding and laughing at us.
I then stood up and said, 'In the name of Jesus shut up!'
Not only she did not shut up, but she said the same thing to me, 'In the name of Jesus you shut up!'
I then said, 'In the name of Jesus kneel down!' but she said the same thing back to me.
Whatever I said she would repeat the same thing. I had never experienced that before. I didn't know what to do but cry out to God desperately.
I prayed to God, 'I don't want to be defeated by the power of the devil.' I decided that no matter how long it may take or how hard it was, I was going to continue to pray until the demon was cast out.
At that time I knew that I could not pray in the understanding for she would repeat every word I said. So I laid my hands on her and started to pray in tongues. As I continued to pray I discovered that she wasn't saying anything and she was softening down. As she became weaker, I became stronger in the Spirit. Then the lady tied her hands together and put her head down to the floor. She cried out, 'Please don't pray anymore!'
I continued to pray in tongues. After a while, she felt on the floor like a dead person. Then after a few minutes, she woke up and was back to normal. Because of this miracle, many people believed in the Lord in that village.
To place the extremes of current Chinese Christian religious practice in perspective, it is instructive and perhaps inspiring to look at a previous bout of what might be characterized as "irrational spiritual exuberance"--the bloody collision between foreign Christian faith and nativist Boxer belief--that occurred during China's chaotic transition from empire to republic in the early 20th century, as reflected in incidents from the life of Jonathan Goforth.
Dr. Goforth was one of the most famous Christian missionaries in China.
He was also an unwavering fundamentalist.
It is easy to understand why.
It is difficult to believe that Mr. Goforth would have borne the sacrifices and suffering he endured in China--or exposed his Chinese converts to mortal peril--for the sake of the Bible if he considered it simply a collection of recycled Mesopotamian myths, strange tales, extravagant genealogies, and Pharisaical special pleading shot through with occasional and ineffable divine inspiration.
The Goforths lost five of their eleven children to sickness and misadventure in China. The entire family was nearly wiped out during the Boxer rebellion as they evacuated their Henan mission.
Jonathan Goforth's wife, Rosalind, described the scene as their caravan of oxcarts was attacked by a mob outside Xindian, a village on the outskirts of Nanyang:
One blow from a two-handed sword struck [Goforth] on the neck with great force...but the wide blunt edge struck his neck leaving only a wide bruise...His left arm which was kept raised to protect his head, was slashed to the bone in several places. A terrible blow from behind struck the back of his head, denting in the skull so deeply, that, later, doctors said it was a miracle the skull was not cleft in two. This blow felled him to the ground...Struggling to his feet, he was struck down again by a club...he saw a horse coming down upon him at full gallop. Upon regaining consciousness, he found this horse had thrown his rider and fallen on smooth ground, close beside him, and kicking furiously, the animal had formed a barrier between him and his attackers till he was able to rise...
Thanks to a combination of inferior swordsmanship, equine misadventure, and a mad rush for plunder that Mrs. Goforth deemed miraculous, the Goforth party was able to escape the mob and stagger across the fields to a nearby village, where they unexpectedly found shelter.
Mrs. Goforth recounts the kindness of their rescuers in the unnamed village, and provides a coda that some might find ironic:
"Why were they so kind?" one man was asked. He replied, "We are Mohammedans. Our God is your God and we could not face him if we had joined in destroying you."
Dr. Goforth's search for answers in the wake of the Boxer catastrophe led him to embrace the Protestant revival movement as the only religiously viable alternative he saw to the recruitment of cynical "rice Christians" by the well-heeled Catholic church and the defensive, accommodating syncretism increasingly practiced by Protestant missionaries in China.
The revival movement--an emotional approach to Christian faith that relied on charismatic preaching and the dramatic public confession of sin-- had exploded in Wales and spread throughout the world,achieving one of its greatest successes in Korea in 1907.
Readers of this blog, if not the general public, know that as a result Pyongyang--now identified in the Western mind simply as Kim Jung Il's playground of Stalinist delusion--was known before World War II in evangelical circles as "the Jerusalem of the East".
Goforth investigated the lessons of Korea and applied them to Christian evangelism in Manchuria.
He achieved remarkable results, at least in the localities where his titanic energy and conviction could be brought directly to bear.
It is interesting to note that the Christian revival movement achieved signal success in Korea and Manchuria--two regions suffering the tremendous cultural and political dislocations of Japanese occupation. Manchuria, in addition, was dealing with the stress and disruption of an entirely new social order founded on the mass movement of millions of Han emigres into the Manchu homeland.
Today, evangelical Christianity has deep roots in South Korea, and has also achieved striking gains in Mongolia, which suffered a similar trauma, the virtual collapse of its economy and society in the aftermath of the withdrawal of Soviet aid in the 1990s.
Goforth, in his struggle against "the Modernist menace", labored to demonstrate that China was a fertile field for his brand of Fundamentalist evangelism.
Goforth composed a pamphlet describing his revival activities in China entitled "By My Spirit", as part of his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convince a skeptical Protestant establishment of the religious truth and practical efficacy of his approach.
Nevertheless, he may have been on to something, as the rise of charismatic and revivalist observance inside China indicates.
Students of history, religion, popular movements, thought reform and self-criticism, the Cultural Revolution, Falun Gong, charismatic cults in general, and modern mainland Chinese Christianity in particular can profit from Goforth's descriptions of the intensity of the revival movement in China.
Goforth quotes the recollections of Dr. Walter Phillips, a self-styled skeptic, who attended the revival meetings in Jinzhou:
"The people knelt for prayer...The voices grew and gathered volume and blended into a great wave of united supplication that swelled till it was almost a roar, and died down again into an undertone of weeping. Now I understood why the floor was so wet - it was wet with pools of tears! The very air seemed electric -- I speak in all seriousness - and strange thrills coursed up and down one's body.
"Then above the sobbing, in strained, choking tones, a man began to make public confession. Words of mine will fail to describe the awe and terror and pity of these confessions. It was not so much the enormity of the sins disclosed, or the depths of iniquity sounded, that shocked one. . . . It was the agony of the penitent, his groans and cries, and voice shaken with sobs; it was the sight of men forced to their feet, and, in spite of their struggles, impelled, as it seemed, to lay bare their hearts...Never have I experienced anything more heart breaking, more nerve racking than the spectacle of those souls stripped naked before their fellows.
"So for hour after hour it went on, till the strain was almost more than the onlooker could bear. Now it was a big, strong farmer grovelling on the floor, smiting his head on the bare boards as he wailed unceasingly, 'Lord! Lord!' Now a shrinking woman in a voice scarce above a whisper, now a wee laddie from the school, with the tears streaking his piteous grimy little face, as he sobbed out: 'I cannot love my enemies. Last week I stole a farthing from my teacher. I am always fighting and cursing. I beseech the pastor, elders and deacons to pray for me.' And then again would swell that wonderful deep organ tone of united prayer. And ever as the prayer sank again the ear caught a dull undertone of quiet sobbing, of desperate entreaty from men and women, who, lost to their surroundings, were wrestling for peace."'
Goforth presided over these orgies of self-abasement--which evoke the extremes of self-criticism during the Communist era and included awkward and less edifying aspects such as casting out of devils and anonymous denunciations of "hindering" church elders--with a watchful humility.
One 1908 revival focused on an crisis that must have affected Goforth very strongly--the lasting hurt carried by a Chinese Christian community near Mukden (Shenyang) in the aftermath of the Boxer massacres.
Goforth relates the event in By My Spirit:
The Christian community in Shinminfu had been terribly persecuted during the Boxer uprising of 1900. Fifty-four had suffered martyrdom. The ones who were left prepared a list, containing 250 names in all (of those who had taken part in the massacre). Some day, it was hoped, the way would be opened for them to wreak on these full and complete revenge.
...one of the evangelists came and knelt down in front of the platform. .."I haven't confessed the worst sin of all," be cried brokenly. "I won't forgive. ...In the Boxer year a man came and murdered my father, and ever since then I've felt that it was my duty to avenge his death. ... I simply can't forgive that man. I must destroy him." ...
...as many as nine boys got up in that way and told how their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had been murdered before their very eyes...But they all confessed that they were utterly miserable, and asked us to pray for them that they might have grace to forgive those who had wronged them.
...all the time the evangelist was kneeling there by the platform, weeping. At the conclusion of the meeting he finally rose to his feet and faced the congregation. His face was drawn and haggard. "My mind is made up," he cried. "I will never rest until I have killed the man who murdered my father."
I thought that that would be the last that I would see him. But when I entered the church next morning there he was standing by the platform [and proclaimed his change of heart. Addressing the nine boys who had lost family members to the Boxers, he stated]...
"I have bought these nine hymn books and I am going to present one to each of you, in the hope that every time you open it to praise God from its pages you will recall how that I, an evangelist, received from Him grace to forgive the murderer of my father."
Just then the list containing the names of those upon whom the Christians had planned to take revenge was brought up to the front and torn into bits and the fragments trampled under foot.
To some observers the inspiring element in these anecdotes from Goforth's life is perhaps a human impulse towards compassion that transcends theology and religious boundaries.
The transcendent struggle between the impulses toward revenge and foregiveness that Goforth witnessed contrasts markedly with Balcomb's vaunting of his disciple's ability to outshout and outwrestle a heckler in his church.
There is every reason to believe that, if and when the governments of China and North Korea liberalize religious observance, Protestant evangelism will claim significant numbers of adherents.
It would be nice if, when the post-Communist dispensation emerges, China obtains the spiritual harmony it needs, instead of the antagonism the government merits for its largely crude and unsuccessful attempts to control and exploit the beliefs of its people.
But, as Ross Macdonald wrote resignedly in The Long Goodbye, "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."
* In the first version of this post, I misidentified Billy Graham as born in Lianyungang. Actually, his wife, nee Ruth Bell, was born in Lianyungang when her father, L. Nelson Bell served there as as surgical chief and administrative superintendent at Love and Mercy Hospital in Tsing-Ksiang-Pu, as Lianyungang was then known. Sorry for the error and thanks to reader SR for catching it and pointing it out to me.
Ruth Bell Graham attended high school at the Pyeng Yang Foreign School in Pyongyang--an alma mater few can claim--and hoped to become a Christian missionary in Tibet. She abandoned her dream when she met and married Billy Graham at Wheaton College in Illinois. Instead she kept the home fires burning for decades in North Carolina as he crisscrossed the world building his ministry.
Interestingly, she did not abandon her Presbyterian faith even though she was married to one of the world's most famous Baptists.
Bell Graham encouraged her husband's engagement with Asia and was able to return to Pyongyang in the 1990s at the invitation of Kim Il Sung. The Graham evangelical organization has tended to its relationship with North Korea. Franklin Graham has visited North Korea three times to deliver humanitarian aid, preaching on one occasion in 2008. For its part, Pyongyang has apparently attempted to use the Graham family as a communications channel in its so far unsuccessful attempts to negotiate directly with the United States.
The Gardener is never so near as when He is pruning
MLL:RIP 1921-2010
Fundamentalists--committed to a literal reading of the Bible as the inerrant word of God--and Modernists--employing the arsenal of critical scholarship developed in Germany to identify, explain, and justify the role of man in the Good Book's creation--had sparred for decades over doctrine, appointments, and sanctions for heretical or disobedient teachings.
Matters came to a head in the 1930s, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded an overseas study tour of distinguished Protestant academics to evaluate the state of the worldwide missionary effort which, in the key region of China, seemed to have stalled at a penetration of 400,000 or 0.1% of the population after 100 years of determined evangelism.
The scholars' report, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years, asserted that the traditional missionary approach--relying on dire warnings that the natives were headed straight to hell upon their demise unless they converted--was encountering growing resistance from a more sophisticated heathen audience increasingly drawn to nationalism, democracy, secularism, socialism, and Marxism as ideologies more relevant to their needs and aspirations.
The Modernists proposed to compete for hearts and minds overseas with a mushy syncretism that coexisted with the local religious and cultural values instead of trying to replace them. Pearl Buck, a missionary who declared it was not necessary to believe in the virgin birth or even the divinity of Christ to be a true Christian (it was only necessary to act in a Christian manner) typified the new dispensation.
In the resulting furor, Pearl Buck resigned, the Fundamentalists walked out, Modernism prevailed, and Fundamentalism became the virtually exclusive preserve of the U.S. Southern Baptists, who today occupy an outsized political space as the voice of militant Christian conservatives.
Unfortunately for the Modernist strategy, coexistence with the post-1949 Communist regime in China, let alone growing congregations, proved extremely difficult for the mainstream Protestant denominations.
Ironically, in recent years the CCP--which has acted for decades as the sole legitimate Chinese interlocutor with the foreign Protestant and Catholic religions-- has experienced its own problems executing its self-assigned role as the exclusive ideological and moral authority inside China.
Reliable data and statistics are of course non-existent, but it would appear that the Chinese Communist Party--like the old school Protestant missionaries before them--is having difficulty leading or guiding an increasingly informed, sophisticated, and skeptical Chinese popular opinion toward a potentially stabilizing post-Communist ideology based on authoritarianism and national unity.
State-promoted Confucianism--that reliable bulwark of social order and the status quo--may provide a viable alternative to liberal democracy. However, the government is going to have its hands full with groups that seek to draw their power from a higher authority than the common good.
Meanwhile, the doctrinal stepchild--Fundamentalism--has moved toward a central, independent role in Chinese Christianity.
Today, Chinese Christian observance--driven by indigenous Christian churches of a largely fundamentalist tinge-- is estimated to number anywhere from 50 to 100 million.
Christian optimism concerning the spiritual regeneration of China must be tempered by the awareness that Christianity will face a legion of domestic competitors in the spiritual marketplace. China is aboil with sects channeling and mashing up every extreme of Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Christian religious experience.
If the precedents of South Korea and Mongolia are representative, it is unlikely that Christianity will every command more than a vocal minority inside China.
Furthermore, mainstreaming and leveraging Christian practice in Chinese politics and society is going to be be difficult. On the Protestant side of the fence, the PRC is home to a bewildering melange of Christian sects, many that tiptoe very close to, if not over, the line separating religion from cult.
At one end of the spectrum, the Three-Self (state-approved churches) and ecumenical evangelical operations carefully render unto Caesar in order to maintain their legal foothold in China--and provide the anxious Chinese government with a window into the unnerving world of Chinese Christian observance.
Franklin Graham, son of the (
At the other end, the burgeoning Chinese "house church" movement (congregations that decline to register with the authorities) spurns any government attempts to direct or control its highly decentralized activities.
Reportedly, many of the house churches trace their roots to Watchmen Nee, a devout and idiosyncratic Chinese preacher and martyr who died in PRC incarceration in 1972.
In contrast to this indigenous inspiration, it is asserted that over half of China's house churches have aligned with the charismatic Pentecostalism preached by Dennis Balcomb of Bakersfield, California on his trips to China beginning in the 1980s.
Chinese Pentecostalism offers much for the orthodox Protestant and Marxist to chew on.
In one instance, Balcomb reports that one of his evangelists successfully raised a child from the dead, apparently without seeing the need to correct the misapprehension of the villagers that "Jesus of Henan" had performed the office.
One of my co-workers went up to Saan Xi Province to preach the Gospel. The people in that area are very superstitious and they worship many idols. He went and preached to the people saying, 'Our God is a great God. He is the one who created the universe. He is able to cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear even the dead to raise again, but what can your God do for you?'
After he preached, a man ran to the hospital where a boy has just passed away. He told the boys parents, 'There is a Jesus from Henan came who said he can raise people from the dead.'
So the mother took her dead child to my co-worker saying, 'Jesus from Henan please raise my son from the dead.'
My co-worker was shocked when he saw the dead child for he had never raised anyone from the dead before. There was nothing he could do but just cry out to God. At first he was very worried in his heart that if nothing happened, all the people would say he's a liar and they would not believe in Jesus. So he started to pray, but after a while, nothing happened so he prayed again and still nothing happened. Then he prayed to God, 'Lord, I don't mind to loose face, but I really don't want this to cause the people mock your name and not believe in you. Please show forth your glory in this place.'
As he was praying that prayer, the mother of the child said, 'Look, my child is alive again!'
He saw the child stand up and he ran throughout the house. Due to this miracle, many people in that area burnt all their idols and believed in Jesus.
In another instance, Balcomb, with no apparent appreciation of the absurd, reports on the titanic struggle of one of his Chinese evangelicals to get a middle-aged woman to maintain an adequately respectful demeanour in the frequently raucous environment of a Pentecostalist meeting:
There was a 40 years old lady who was demon possessed who came into the meeting. She was scolding and screaming at us while I was preaching. She was disturbing the whole meeting so that I could not continue to preach. I then asked the whole congregation to kneel down and pray. As we were praying, she came to the front and continued scolding and laughing at us.
I then stood up and said, 'In the name of Jesus shut up!'
Not only she did not shut up, but she said the same thing to me, 'In the name of Jesus you shut up!'
I then said, 'In the name of Jesus kneel down!' but she said the same thing back to me.
Whatever I said she would repeat the same thing. I had never experienced that before. I didn't know what to do but cry out to God desperately.
I prayed to God, 'I don't want to be defeated by the power of the devil.' I decided that no matter how long it may take or how hard it was, I was going to continue to pray until the demon was cast out.
At that time I knew that I could not pray in the understanding for she would repeat every word I said. So I laid my hands on her and started to pray in tongues. As I continued to pray I discovered that she wasn't saying anything and she was softening down. As she became weaker, I became stronger in the Spirit. Then the lady tied her hands together and put her head down to the floor. She cried out, 'Please don't pray anymore!'
I continued to pray in tongues. After a while, she felt on the floor like a dead person. Then after a few minutes, she woke up and was back to normal. Because of this miracle, many people believed in the Lord in that village.
To place the extremes of current Chinese Christian religious practice in perspective, it is instructive and perhaps inspiring to look at a previous bout of what might be characterized as "irrational spiritual exuberance"--the bloody collision between foreign Christian faith and nativist Boxer belief--that occurred during China's chaotic transition from empire to republic in the early 20th century, as reflected in incidents from the life of Jonathan Goforth.
Dr. Goforth was one of the most famous Christian missionaries in China.
He was also an unwavering fundamentalist.
It is easy to understand why.
It is difficult to believe that Mr. Goforth would have borne the sacrifices and suffering he endured in China--or exposed his Chinese converts to mortal peril--for the sake of the Bible if he considered it simply a collection of recycled Mesopotamian myths, strange tales, extravagant genealogies, and Pharisaical special pleading shot through with occasional and ineffable divine inspiration.
The Goforths lost five of their eleven children to sickness and misadventure in China. The entire family was nearly wiped out during the Boxer rebellion as they evacuated their Henan mission.
Jonathan Goforth's wife, Rosalind, described the scene as their caravan of oxcarts was attacked by a mob outside Xindian, a village on the outskirts of Nanyang:
One blow from a two-handed sword struck [Goforth] on the neck with great force...but the wide blunt edge struck his neck leaving only a wide bruise...His left arm which was kept raised to protect his head, was slashed to the bone in several places. A terrible blow from behind struck the back of his head, denting in the skull so deeply, that, later, doctors said it was a miracle the skull was not cleft in two. This blow felled him to the ground...Struggling to his feet, he was struck down again by a club...he saw a horse coming down upon him at full gallop. Upon regaining consciousness, he found this horse had thrown his rider and fallen on smooth ground, close beside him, and kicking furiously, the animal had formed a barrier between him and his attackers till he was able to rise...
Thanks to a combination of inferior swordsmanship, equine misadventure, and a mad rush for plunder that Mrs. Goforth deemed miraculous, the Goforth party was able to escape the mob and stagger across the fields to a nearby village, where they unexpectedly found shelter.
Mrs. Goforth recounts the kindness of their rescuers in the unnamed village, and provides a coda that some might find ironic:
"Why were they so kind?" one man was asked. He replied, "We are Mohammedans. Our God is your God and we could not face him if we had joined in destroying you."
Dr. Goforth's search for answers in the wake of the Boxer catastrophe led him to embrace the Protestant revival movement as the only religiously viable alternative he saw to the recruitment of cynical "rice Christians" by the well-heeled Catholic church and the defensive, accommodating syncretism increasingly practiced by Protestant missionaries in China.
The revival movement--an emotional approach to Christian faith that relied on charismatic preaching and the dramatic public confession of sin-- had exploded in Wales and spread throughout the world,achieving one of its greatest successes in Korea in 1907.
Readers of this blog, if not the general public, know that as a result Pyongyang--now identified in the Western mind simply as Kim Jung Il's playground of Stalinist delusion--was known before World War II in evangelical circles as "the Jerusalem of the East".
Goforth investigated the lessons of Korea and applied them to Christian evangelism in Manchuria.
He achieved remarkable results, at least in the localities where his titanic energy and conviction could be brought directly to bear.
It is interesting to note that the Christian revival movement achieved signal success in Korea and Manchuria--two regions suffering the tremendous cultural and political dislocations of Japanese occupation. Manchuria, in addition, was dealing with the stress and disruption of an entirely new social order founded on the mass movement of millions of Han emigres into the Manchu homeland.
Today, evangelical Christianity has deep roots in South Korea, and has also achieved striking gains in Mongolia, which suffered a similar trauma, the virtual collapse of its economy and society in the aftermath of the withdrawal of Soviet aid in the 1990s.
Goforth, in his struggle against "the Modernist menace", labored to demonstrate that China was a fertile field for his brand of Fundamentalist evangelism.
Goforth composed a pamphlet describing his revival activities in China entitled "By My Spirit", as part of his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convince a skeptical Protestant establishment of the religious truth and practical efficacy of his approach.
Nevertheless, he may have been on to something, as the rise of charismatic and revivalist observance inside China indicates.
Students of history, religion, popular movements, thought reform and self-criticism, the Cultural Revolution, Falun Gong, charismatic cults in general, and modern mainland Chinese Christianity in particular can profit from Goforth's descriptions of the intensity of the revival movement in China.
Goforth quotes the recollections of Dr. Walter Phillips, a self-styled skeptic, who attended the revival meetings in Jinzhou:
"The people knelt for prayer...The voices grew and gathered volume and blended into a great wave of united supplication that swelled till it was almost a roar, and died down again into an undertone of weeping. Now I understood why the floor was so wet - it was wet with pools of tears! The very air seemed electric -- I speak in all seriousness - and strange thrills coursed up and down one's body.
"Then above the sobbing, in strained, choking tones, a man began to make public confession. Words of mine will fail to describe the awe and terror and pity of these confessions. It was not so much the enormity of the sins disclosed, or the depths of iniquity sounded, that shocked one. . . . It was the agony of the penitent, his groans and cries, and voice shaken with sobs; it was the sight of men forced to their feet, and, in spite of their struggles, impelled, as it seemed, to lay bare their hearts...Never have I experienced anything more heart breaking, more nerve racking than the spectacle of those souls stripped naked before their fellows.
"So for hour after hour it went on, till the strain was almost more than the onlooker could bear. Now it was a big, strong farmer grovelling on the floor, smiting his head on the bare boards as he wailed unceasingly, 'Lord! Lord!' Now a shrinking woman in a voice scarce above a whisper, now a wee laddie from the school, with the tears streaking his piteous grimy little face, as he sobbed out: 'I cannot love my enemies. Last week I stole a farthing from my teacher. I am always fighting and cursing. I beseech the pastor, elders and deacons to pray for me.' And then again would swell that wonderful deep organ tone of united prayer. And ever as the prayer sank again the ear caught a dull undertone of quiet sobbing, of desperate entreaty from men and women, who, lost to their surroundings, were wrestling for peace."'
Goforth presided over these orgies of self-abasement--which evoke the extremes of self-criticism during the Communist era and included awkward and less edifying aspects such as casting out of devils and anonymous denunciations of "hindering" church elders--with a watchful humility.
One 1908 revival focused on an crisis that must have affected Goforth very strongly--the lasting hurt carried by a Chinese Christian community near Mukden (Shenyang) in the aftermath of the Boxer massacres.
Goforth relates the event in By My Spirit:
The Christian community in Shinminfu had been terribly persecuted during the Boxer uprising of 1900. Fifty-four had suffered martyrdom. The ones who were left prepared a list, containing 250 names in all (of those who had taken part in the massacre). Some day, it was hoped, the way would be opened for them to wreak on these full and complete revenge.
...one of the evangelists came and knelt down in front of the platform. .."I haven't confessed the worst sin of all," be cried brokenly. "I won't forgive. ...In the Boxer year a man came and murdered my father, and ever since then I've felt that it was my duty to avenge his death. ... I simply can't forgive that man. I must destroy him." ...
...as many as nine boys got up in that way and told how their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had been murdered before their very eyes...But they all confessed that they were utterly miserable, and asked us to pray for them that they might have grace to forgive those who had wronged them.
...all the time the evangelist was kneeling there by the platform, weeping. At the conclusion of the meeting he finally rose to his feet and faced the congregation. His face was drawn and haggard. "My mind is made up," he cried. "I will never rest until I have killed the man who murdered my father."
I thought that that would be the last that I would see him. But when I entered the church next morning there he was standing by the platform [and proclaimed his change of heart. Addressing the nine boys who had lost family members to the Boxers, he stated]...
"I have bought these nine hymn books and I am going to present one to each of you, in the hope that every time you open it to praise God from its pages you will recall how that I, an evangelist, received from Him grace to forgive the murderer of my father."
Just then the list containing the names of those upon whom the Christians had planned to take revenge was brought up to the front and torn into bits and the fragments trampled under foot.
To some observers the inspiring element in these anecdotes from Goforth's life is perhaps a human impulse towards compassion that transcends theology and religious boundaries.
The transcendent struggle between the impulses toward revenge and foregiveness that Goforth witnessed contrasts markedly with Balcomb's vaunting of his disciple's ability to outshout and outwrestle a heckler in his church.
There is every reason to believe that, if and when the governments of China and North Korea liberalize religious observance, Protestant evangelism will claim significant numbers of adherents.
It would be nice if, when the post-Communist dispensation emerges, China obtains the spiritual harmony it needs, instead of the antagonism the government merits for its largely crude and unsuccessful attempts to control and exploit the beliefs of its people.
But, as Ross Macdonald wrote resignedly in The Long Goodbye, "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."
* In the first version of this post, I misidentified Billy Graham as born in Lianyungang. Actually, his wife, nee Ruth Bell, was born in Lianyungang when her father, L. Nelson Bell served there as as surgical chief and administrative superintendent at Love and Mercy Hospital in Tsing-Ksiang-Pu, as Lianyungang was then known. Sorry for the error and thanks to reader SR for catching it and pointing it out to me.
Ruth Bell Graham attended high school at the Pyeng Yang Foreign School in Pyongyang--an alma mater few can claim--and hoped to become a Christian missionary in Tibet. She abandoned her dream when she met and married Billy Graham at Wheaton College in Illinois. Instead she kept the home fires burning for decades in North Carolina as he crisscrossed the world building his ministry.
Interestingly, she did not abandon her Presbyterian faith even though she was married to one of the world's most famous Baptists.
Bell Graham encouraged her husband's engagement with Asia and was able to return to Pyongyang in the 1990s at the invitation of Kim Il Sung. The Graham evangelical organization has tended to its relationship with North Korea. Franklin Graham has visited North Korea three times to deliver humanitarian aid, preaching on one occasion in 2008. For its part, Pyongyang has apparently attempted to use the Graham family as a communications channel in its so far unsuccessful attempts to negotiate directly with the United States.
The Gardener is never so near as when He is pruning
MLL:RIP 1921-2010
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