The Emperor Far Away (37 page)

Like her pastor, Christina was dissatisfied with the prospect of an existence centred only on her material needs. ‘It was when I went to university that I realised I really wanted to believe in something. A lot of people don’t want to believe in anything, or they just believe in the CCP, but that wasn’t enough for me. I knew when I was eighteen that just studying, playing and going to karaoke didn’t make me happy or bring me any peace,’ she said.

For the CCP, the rise in faith among educated people like Christina, the daughter of a party member, is an unwelcome development. Not only are they the demographic it traditionally recruits its future leaders from, but their turning to religion is proof of a widening disillusionment with the party’s credo of the last two decades, which has been to allow people to make money as long as no one questions its right to rule. More disturbing still, the increasing number of Christians is a challenge to Beijing’s unspoken assertion that there is no need for God when the CCP already acts as if it is one.

Although Christina and her friends were breaking the law by attending a house church, it didn’t concern them. ‘Every church has its own vision and I was called to this one,’ stressed Mr Kim. ‘In this region there are lots of churches so Christians have a choice, but in many parts of China a house church is the only option. We don’t worry about the police because we’re not such a big church. If there are less than thirty of you meeting regularly, you’re normally OK.’

Far more dangerous is how Mr Kim and his congregation believe it is their duty to evangelise. It is one thing to be a Christian in China, but proselytising verges on what the CCP regards as organised dissent. Beijing has a longstanding antipathy to western missionaries – who are viewed as yet another example of outsiders meddling in China’s internal affairs – and is equally unhappy with its own citizens doing similar work. ‘It’s OK for me to talk to a fellow student about Christianity, but we’d get into trouble if we did it on a big scale and started handing out Bibles,’ said one of Christina’s friends.

Despite the risks, they still roam across Jilin Province trying to convert people. ‘We went to Tonghua for ten days earlier this year to spread the gospel. We just walked the streets, stopping people and trying to talk to them about God,’ said Christina. ‘We’d say “have you heard of Jesus Christ?” Lots of people said “no” or “I’m not interested” or “I don’t believe”. But a few people were prepared to stop and listen. It’s about spreading the word, sowing the seeds of faith.’

One of Christina’s classmates had gone as far as Ningxia, the Hui autonomous region in the north-west, to seek converts among the local Muslims. Mr Kim had come close to arrest when he travelled to Guizhou in south-west China to preach to people from the Miao minority. ‘I supported myself by teaching, and I’d meet some of my students after school and tell them about God. I got into trouble when the parents of one of the students found his notebook with his thoughts about the Bible. He was a policeman. Luckily, I’d already left Guizhou but now I can’t go back. I’ve been much more careful since then,’ he said.

Rather than traditional Catholicism or Protestantism, it is evangelical Christianity which is surging in popularity in China. Many house churches are similar to the Pentecostal churches found across the Bible Belt of the USA, where worshippers raise their hands to heaven, cry ‘Hallelujah’ during sermons and pray aloud for the Holy Spirit to enter them. It is a tradition that has also taken hold in South Korea which, along with the Catholic Philippines, is the most Christian of all nations in Asia.

But long before Seoul became known as a spiritual centre – the home of the extraordinary Yoido Full Gospel Church with its million-strong congregation – Pyongyang was the heartland of Korean Protestantism. The many missionaries who came to the north of the still undivided Korea in the late nineteenth century met with such success that in 1907 Pyongyang was dubbed the ‘Jerusalem of the East’. It was a city of churches, and almost a third of its population were Christians.

They included Kim Il-sung’s parents. His mother and father were both devout Protestants, and his maternal uncle was a pastor. But when Kim became president of the new North Korea he launched an all-out assault on Christianity. It was reviled as an American import, its ministers and priests no more than CIA-backed Fifth Columnists out to subvert his glorious regime. Soon after the end of the Korean War in 1953, North Korea’s churches were burned down and an estimated 100,000 Christians were imprisoned in the DPRK’s notorious gulags.

By then, many of the north’s Protestants had fled south to play a major role in turning South Korea into the stronghold of evangelicalism it is today. Now South Korea sends out more missionaries than any other nation apart from the United States. Yanbian is one of the principal regions they operate in. Not only is it home to almost a million ethnic Koreans but it is adjacent to the DPRK, the country whose people were once such fervent believers until their devotion was forcibly transferred to its new leader – a twisted exorcism performed by the state, one that mimicked the way Mao was presented as a godlike figure to the Chinese.

With so many Chaoxianzu working in South Korea, or having relatives who do, awareness of Christianity is far higher among Yanbian’s Koreans than elsewhere in China. But more often than not, it is missionaries who reel them in. Many work as teachers, just as Mr Kim did during his time in Guizhou. A high proportion of the members of his house church were converted once they started college. ‘Some of my lecturers at university are South Korean and they are all Christians,’ said Christina. ‘God and Christianity is a big part of South Korean culture now, and so we always talk about it.’

Around 10,000 South Koreans live in Yanji. ‘I’d say about half are missionaries,’ said Paul. He was one of them, a youthful forty-nine-year-old from Seoul in jeans and a check shirt with a broad face and bushy hair cropped close at the sides. Paul had followed his sister, a teacher and fellow missionary, to Yanji a couple of years before. Now he owned a restaurant popular with students, a way of disguising his real purpose in China.

‘Most of us in Yanji run businesses or teach because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,’ said Paul. ‘We do worry about the government’s attitude to us, but we’re not doing anything political. We think the Chinese understand that, but we also know they are watching us. You have to be careful. People who’ve been here a long time know what you can do and what you can’t. Officially, we don’t spread the gospel. But we try and show people what a Christian life is and introduce them to the Bible.’

Paul gave up his job as the manager of a foreign trade company to come to Yanji. ‘A lot of South Koreans feel the Chinese need faith as China develops. If they have no faith and a western economic system, then people will just become corrupt,’ he said. ‘It’s easier for us to spread the gospel here because the people are Koreans and we speak the same language. Then the Chinese Koreans can go on and spread the word to the Han Chinese.’

Sentiments like that ring alarm bells in Beijing. The very idea of South Koreans disseminating Christianity, a creed the CCP associates with its traditional enemies in the west, to Yanbian’s Koreans feeds Beijing’s belief that religion serves only to foster separatist tendencies among its minorities. Tibet and Xinjiang are glaring examples of how the power of faith unites the peoples of those regions against the Han. For the CCP, it is one small step from China’s Koreans being converted by South Koreans to them starting to regard their shared religion as proof they are part of a greater Korea.

South Korean nationalists believe that already and advocate the incorporation of Yanbian into one super-Korea along with the DPRK. They point to the way the Koguryo Kingdom, the most powerful of the three dynasties that ran ancient Korea until the seventh century ad, stretched into what is now Jilin Province. South of Yanji in Jian, the ruined pyramids and tombs of a former Koguryo city are a permanent reminder of how this part of Jilin was once Korean territory.

Reinforcing Yanbian’s claims to be part of a larger Korea is the way it is so culturally intertwined with South Korea. ‘I think there’s very little difference between Chinese Koreans and South Koreans,’ said Paul. ‘Actually I think Chinese Koreans get a more traditional Korean education in Yanbian than they do in South Korea. The family relationships are closer and more traditional too. The different generations of Korean families all used to live together, but nowadays in South Korea parents and children live separately. It’s not like that here.’

Almost sixty years of a divided Korea has drawn Yanbian and South Korea closer together, so they now have far more in common than the South does with the DPRK. ‘There’s a much bigger difference between us and the North Koreans. We still regard them as brothers – we are one nation – but there’s a wall between us and them now. They’ve been brainwashed and think their leader is a god, and breaking down those barriers takes a long time,’ said Paul.

Yet, despite their ties to South Korea, the overwhelming majority of Chinese Koreans are not Korean nationalists – at least not in the sense of wanting to be part of one Korea. But, for Beijing, the activities of missionaries like Paul are seen as bringing the day closer when the Chaoxianzu will no longer be content with just being culturally Korean. House churches can be found across all China now, but only in Yanbian does Christianity pose a real threat as a potential vehicle for separatism.

During my time in Yanbian, I encountered only one Chaoxianzu who regarded himself as Korean rather than Chinese. ‘Call me Piao, like
mai piao
,’ he told me when we met.
Mai piao
means ‘to buy a ticket’ and, as I got to know Piao, I came to think of his nickname as an astute, self-mocking comment on his sad life. He was in his early thirties: chubby-faced with longish hair, the beginnings of a pot belly and always dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. We were introduced by an acquaintance of mine from Beijing, a Han woman who had run a bar in the capital before returning to her hometown of Yanji to open a place there.

Her customers were mostly ethnic Koreans, proof perhaps of their reputation in China as party people. ‘We think differently from the Han,’ Christina said often. ‘Korean people like to play, to enjoy life. I think the Han just like to work and save money. They don’t have as much fun as we do.’ It is a common belief among China’s minorities. I never met one who wasn’t convinced they are more gregarious than the Han, and mostly they are.

Fun for Chaoxianzu men involves downing beers and
baijiu
. Even among the hard-drinking males of Dongbei, Chinese Koreans stand out for their love of alcohol. Their tippling was the reason Christina wanted to marry a Han man, and Piao spent his evenings traversing unsteadily across Yanji’s many watering holes. One night, I bumped into him as I was leaving a bar in the centre of town. Piao was already half cut. He put his arm around my shoulders and insisted I stay for another drink.

Other friends of his joined us and Piao got progressively drunker. It was then that he revealed his patriotic streak. ‘I am a Korean man,’ he kept telling me, ‘a Korean man.’ I asked if he meant he was Chinese Korean. He shook his head and started to draw a rough map in the beer spilled across our table. ‘This is the DPRK, this is Yanbian and this is South Korea,’ he said, slurring as he sketched the outlines of the borders. ‘We are the same people, whether you live in North Korea, the South or here. You know, a long time ago this was all one big powerful country, not two countries and a bit of China.’

Not even Piao’s friends agreed with him. They all defined themselves as Chinese Koreans, rather than as Koreans living in China. Piao ignored them and became increasingly aggressive and maudlin, repeating ‘I have no country’ over and over again. He perceived himself both as an exile in a foreign nation and as someone living in territory which rightfully belonged to Korea.

Later, I learned why he was so angry. He told me how six years before he had met and married a North Korean refugee. Most of those who escape the DPRK are women, with some sources claiming they make up around 80 per cent of all people who defect. The gender discrepancy in rural Jilin Province, where females are in short supply and farmers have always looked to North Korea as a source of brides, means some of the women are trafficked or tricked across the frontier. But many come of their own accord.

That is a direct result of the famine that gripped the DPRK for much of the 1990s. While men remain tied to their work units – the system by which Pyongyang regulates North Korean society – it was women who scrounged what food they could and set up tiny business operations in the makeshift markets that sprang up in place of the inert state economy. Out of necessity, North Korea’s females grew more resourceful than their husbands, sons and brothers, and that newfound spirit propelled many across the border in search of something better.

Piao and his wife had a son, now five. But soon she began pressing him for help to leave for South Korea. ‘It was too dangerous for her here. She was afraid of being caught and sent back,’ said Piao. Initially, China turned a blind eye to the refugees who started coming to Yanbian from the early 1990s on. Then, as food became scarcer, more and more arrived. Senior DPRK defectors have revealed that Pyongyang itself put the number who died during the famine at between one and two and a half million, or around 10 per cent of North Korea’s people. In the regions close to Dongbei, it may have been as high as 20 per cent of the population.

Faced with an ever-increasing influx of North Koreans, Beijing grew uneasy and began hunting down the refugees and returning them to the DPRK. They were seen as a threat to the stability of Yanbian, their presence redressing the decline in the number of Chinese Koreans caused by their low birth rate and emigration to other parts of Dongbei. The CCP feared also the impact of the migrants on Yanbian’s already precarious economy, as they were prepared to work for lower wages than the locals.