Understanding authority from Rome to Beijing

As geo-political tensions between China and the West rise, K.K. Yeo explores authority and religion in China, finding complex questions and nuanced answers.

K.K. Yeo

K.-K. Yeo, a diaspora Chinese, lectures widely in majority world including China on cross-cultural understanding of civilization and religion.

Haidian Christian Church

Is the West Christian and China Confucianist? Or is the West secular and China communist? Binary understanding of our world in conventional terms, such as East versus West, or the sacred-secular divide, is superficial and confusing. Given the biases, divisiveness and, at times, toxic geopolitical reality today, the topic of government and Christianity in China today is more complex than meets the eye. A much better option is a meaningful cross-cultural perspective that enables constructive conversation, while honoring different contexts and nuanced understandings.

Does it surprise you that, an atheist, and at times anti-religion, ‘party-state’ China is the world’s largest Bible printer? Christianity in China has existed since the seventh century when the Syrian Church of the East had rigorous cultural, religious, and commercial exchanges with many nations as far as those in East Asia. Recently the regime in China has become concerned about the growth of the Christian population that might be outnumbering the Party’s members. There has been the suppression of believers, burning of crosses, and demolition of churches across the country. The Communist Party eliminated the State Administration for Religious Affairs in 2018, and the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party now has direct control on all religions.

Does it surprise you that, an atheist, and at times anti-religion, ‘party-state’ China is the world’s largest Bible printer?

Churches in China exist in a harsh reality similar to that of first century Roman Empire, so they inevitably find the teaching of St. Paul in the Bible to be of great interest. Chinese Christians have long had nuanced responses to their government. The house church remains committed to love Christ only - rendering to God the things that are God’s, and only then would they render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. This ‘separation of religion and government’ position (preservation of religious freedom from government intrusion) is considered to be politically subversive to the authoritarian rule of the Party. Therefore, the house churches have long distanced themselves from politics, while acknowledging that their Christian behaviour, such as loving their neighbor as a religious duty, is ‘the best politics’ for nation building.

By contrast, the Three-Self Patriotic churches—and also the current Vatican-China agreement on the appointment of Chinese bishops—do not find a serious discrepancy in loving Christ and the communist state. They seek to work with the government primarily in the matter of social welfare but have range of mixed views on the scope of combining patriotism with Christian belief. To maintain no or minimum separation of government and religion is becoming more and more challenging as the government centralises its control of all aspects of national and personal lives.

Christians in China are asking harder questions than those in churches outside China.

Can a Christian church adopt a state ideology or become a member of the Communist Party to support Christian identity and social harmony in China?

Are church attendance and participating in church activities politically subversive?

And what does it mean to say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ in that land?

I remember teaching at Peking University and seeing the students debate a scenario in the Bible in which the Thessalonian crowd was charging the apostle Paul and his colleague Silas for contradicting the decree of Caesar, for ‘saying that there is another king named Jesus’. Paul was surely preaching neither about insurrection nor subversion of the Roman Empire. However, Roman audiences then, and Chinese crowd or government today, are more likely to have perceived the belief in ‘Jesus as Lord’ as a political threat.

A case in point concerns Wang Yi, the pastor of the Early Rain Church in the city of Chendu, who preached Jesus as the Lord of lords - thus implying that the current political ruler is subsumed under Jesus Christ. Yi was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2018 ‘for inciting subversion of state power’. Cardinal Joseph Zen, a 90-year-old Catholic bishop in Hong Kong, was arrested in 2022 for criticizing the Vatican’s unwise deal with China, and for being an advocate of democracy in Hong Kong.

Christians in Hong Kong are treading similar water regarding their religious faith clashing with the politicized perception of such faith as treason, such as in the Umbrella Movement or the Occupy Central with Love and Peace that protest the will of the Chinese Communist rule in Hong Kong.

Can a Christian church adopt a state ideology or become a member of the Communist Party to support Christian identity and social harmony in China?

Using the teaching of St Paul in his letter to early Christians in Rome as a resource, the Chinese argue that he encourages these Roman Christians to critically reflect on government power so as to bring all nations to obedience of God’s justice. The popular reading of Paul as asking Roman Christians to ‘be subjected to the governing authorities’ for the reason that ‘for there is no authority except from God’ is a weak English translation. To the Chinese church, Paul admonishes Roman Christians to ‘subject themselves to the governing authorities’, and that is not a passive submission but a voluntary involvement as good citizens in the process of bringing about change to their government. The Chinese church sees that Paul challenges government politics, first by stating the principle that, ‘it is not an authority if not from God’, i.e., ‘unless from God’. In other words, there may be some governing authorities that are not appointed by God, thus begging the question: how does one know if governing authorities are from God and those not from God?

It seems that Paul is not concerned about whether a government or the head of state is Christian or not. What matters to Paul is not what the government says but the way the government or the head of state acts in accordance to the following principles:

Rulers are not to terrorize good conducts and good citizens; the rule of law is meant to approve the good-doers and punish the evil-doers;
Rulers are ‘ministers’ of God for the common good of the people, even though Roman Empire has its mythic origin from Jupiter, a Roman god;
Rulers are ‘worship leaders’ of God as they administer collected taxes not for their own concentration of power, but for the dignity and flourishing of the citizens, thus realizing God’s compassionate justice on earth, promoting the welfare of the city.

Churches outside China read Paul on government politics based on their assumed cultural context of Christian values. Yet, the Chinese church’s courage and humility to ask hard questions for themselves is an enlightening conversation. For those outside China, a cross-cultural and global understanding of government and religion can shed light on the promotion of a robust public life.

The 50-year injustice at the heart of women’s football

Now we need to do these two things to put right decades of disparity

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A victorious women's football team celeberate.

It came home.

The Football Association.

I don’t normally like men’s international football. I spend all season wishing Bukayo Saka and Jordan Pickford nothing but misfortune and now, suddenly, I’m expected to cheer them on? Not for me, thanks. I’ll stick to revelling in scouse Schadenfreude when football, inevitably, does not come home.

By contrast, I find the Lionesses much easier to support. That’s probably because, to my shame, I don’t really follow the Women’s Super League as much as I should. I don’t watch them with any petty grudges lingering in my mind. It does mean, however, that I can happily join the 12.2 million other people tuning in to watch Chloe Kelly hop, skip, and volley England to another European Championship.

It also helps that they seem to keep winning in the most implausible ways possible. There’s a stat going round social media at the moment that, across all the knock-out games of this Euros, England were only ahead for 4 minutes and 52 seconds. Incredible.

The Lionesses have – yet again – managed to show their nation the joy and drama of football and look set to inspire yet more women and girls to get involved in grass roots football. Women’s football, it would seem, is in rude health. But, look beneath the surface a little, and there are still significant disparities between the women’s game and the men’s game.

In May, Chelsea effectively sold their women’s team to themselves: they sold the team to BlueCo (Chelsea’s parent company) for a reported £198.7m. This is not the first time Chelsea have engaged creative accounting. In April. 2024, the club revealed it had sold two hotels it owned to one of BlueCo’s sister companies (a move later upheld by the Premier League itself). A whole women’s football team – a good one, at that! – being leveraged for accounting purposes.

Elsewhere, Liverpool Women’s Team sold their star player – Canadian forward Olivia Smith – to Arsenal for a world record fee of … £1m. To put that into context, Liverpool’s men’s team have already bought Florian Wirtz for roughly £116m this summer. They may add to that by buying Alexander Isak for anywhere up to £150m. And that’s to ignore the purchases Hugo Ekitike (£69m), Milos Kerkez (£40.8m), or Jeremie Frimpong (£35m). Moreover, the first male player to be sold by an English club was Trevor Francis, sold by Birmingham City to Nottingham Forrest. The year? 1979. 46 years ago.

In purely financial terms, then, the women’s game seems to be about 50 years behind the men’s. And yet, there are the Lionesses. They have just retained the European Championship. They have made three finals in a row, winning the Euros twice and narrowly losing the World Cup final in 2023. By contrast, the men’s team famously haven’t won a major trophy since 1966.

And so why does women’s football exist in an alternative financial universe about 50 years behind the men’s game? Well, I think a big part of it is making up for lost time.

The FA banned women from playing at FA-affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971. Did you know that? It’s one of the UK’s greatest sporting shames and yet it’s hardly common knowledge. How like this country to front up to its institutional mistakes with silence.

For 50 years women were effectively unable to participate in the sport in any meaningful and professional way. 50 years. Where have we heard that number before?

Prior to this, women’s football had been rather popular. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC regularly attracted matchday audiences of thousands. In 1920, the year before the FA ban, 53,000 fans went to Goodison Park to watch they play against St. Helens. For context, this is a crowd so big the vast majority of Premier League stadiums would not be able to accommodate it. It would fill Brentford’s stadium three times over, and there would still be people queuing up outside.

For 50 years, men’s football was able to accelerate and grow while women’s football matches simply weren’t possible. Who knows where women’s football would be now, if it had been allowed to continue with the successes it had won for itself.

The success of the men’s game is built, in part, upon the enforced stagnation of the women’s game. People watched men’s football because it was the only football it was possible to watch. Men’s football owes its success in part to this. I don’t see how we can say otherwise. In response to this, I wonder if there are two things the sport might do to attempt to rectify this somewhat: one big, one small.

First, the big change. I wonder if there does need to be some form of reparations instituted to restore parity and to right the wrongs of the past? I know this won’t be popular. I love football, and I love it when my football club spends loads of money on players. I love that Liverpool (men’s team) might spend over £100m on two separate players this summer. I probably shouldn't be rubbing my hands at this, but if I’m honest, I am.

But at least some of this money ought to be diverted away from the men’s game and funnelled towards the women’s game. If men’s football is built in no small part on the enforced cessation of women’s football, then this seems only to be right. It’s not about punishing men’s football or paying a penalty for wrongdoing. It’s simply about restoring back to women’s football that which rightfully belongs to it.

Second, the small change. We should start calling men’s football teams ‘Men’s Football Teams’. When I talk about Liverpool Men’s Team, I just say ‘Liverpool’. I know, and anyone listening to me knows, that I mean the men’s team. I then add ‘Women’s’ when I’m talking about the Women’s Team.

The effect of this is that the ‘Men’s Team’ becomes the ‘default’ way of thinking about football. It is the ‘normal’ way of engaging with the sport, and this is then qualified or relativised by my talking about ‘Women’s football’ elsewhere. ‘Women’s Football’ becomes a smaller sub-category of the bigger category of ‘football’ as a whole, which is implicitly linked to ‘Men’s football’ specifically.

By taking the time to specify ‘Men’s Football’, we remind one another that football needn’t be played by men at all. That it, too, is just one way in which the sport might be engaged with or played. Not the ‘default’ or ‘correct’ way the sport exists. It’s a small change that, with time, may have a big effect on the way the sport as a whole of perceived.

50 years of injustice cannot be repaired overnight. There is a lot of work to be done to undo the wrongs of football’s historic treatment of women. But the sooner men’s football starts, the sooner justice will be restored.

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