In search of the heart of a heartless world: Chinese youth, house-church Christianity and the longing for foreign Utopias

ABSTRACT

In this article I shed light on the phenomenon of Chinese young people’s conversion to Christianity and argue that it is often closely tied to a utopian longing for what is missing in their lives (Bloch 1907). Through a person-centered account of two young people, I explore their quests to escape the temporal predicament of endless striving 'fuzao' and search for a better life based autotelic values abroad. Paraphrasing Marx I argue that they are in search of ‘the heart of a heartless world’ and argue that they can be seen as individual quests to find hope through more fulfilling forms of human sociality. Arguing that human experience is transitory and illusory in the same way that selves are not stable bounded entities but rather multiple and unstable, I argue that utopia is never fully achieved since it is essentially ‘no-where’.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• subjectivity
• utopia
• Christianity
• migration
• China
• phenomenology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In order to protect the anonymity of informants, all names are pseudonyms.

2. In his study of the temporal experiences of Chinese students in Denmark, Anders Sybrandt Hansen has similarly argued that Chinese students tend to experience their stay in Denmark as a period in which they take a break from the temporal predicament of fuzao. He identified on the one hand what he has called ‘a PRC version of time-as progress’, as dictated by historical materialism (Hansen 2015, 52). Moreover, he contrasted this with a phenomenological approach to time and argued that Chinese students do in fact experience a slowing down of time in Denmark.

3. In Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students, I examined the existential dilemmmas experienced by students, who often found themselves torn between conflictual imperatives of self-sacrifice and self- realisation. During the fieldwork I carried out between 2005 and 2007, I got to know some young people, who were interested in Christianity in different ways and this led me to later investigate the role of house-church Christianity, in the lives of young people in China during a later post-doctoral project. Having cultivated confidential relationships to students and teahers at these universities made it possible to get access to religious house-church communities through a snow-ball method.

4. For Marx, ‘Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flowers' (Marx 1843).

5. Much scholarly work has focused on the vexed relationship between religion – especially Christianity – and the state in China, see (Feuchtwang 2001, 2002, Lozada 2001; Perry 2002; Madsen 1998; Valla 2009; Ashiwa and Wank 2009; Bautista, Khek, and Lim 2009; Cook and Pao 2011).

6. Catholic and protestant churches are administered and monitored by the ‘Catholic Patriotic Association’ and ‘The Three Selves Patriotic Association’, both of which fall under China’s Bureau for Religious Affairs.

7. This moral vacuum is variously filled out by new competing Utopias. My focus here is on young people who turn to Christianity and dream of going abroad, but it is worth pointing out that other young people for example attempt to escape China’s current predicament by placing their utopian longing in China’s imperial past. In his study of the Han Clothing Movement, Kevin Carrico describes young Chinese urbanites who long for an authoritarian harmonious past of courtyard houses, traditional gender hierarches, food security through eco-friendly farming and law-abiding citizens who do as they are told (Carrico 2017).