CHINA’S CHRISTIAN FUTURE. HOW CHRISTIANITY IS TRANSFORMING CHINESE SOCIETY.
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t the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the Communist party defeated the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic of China, Christians in China numbered half a million. Yet almost seventy years later, under the Chinese government’s harsh suppression, that population has reached more than sixty million, according to Fenggang Yang, a sociologist at Purdue University. The number grows by several millions each year, a phenomenon some have described as a gushing well or geyser. At this rate, by 2030, Christians in China will exceed 200 million, surpassing the United Sates, and making China the country with the largest Christian population in the world. Yu Jie. First Things, N. 265, August/September 2016.
in a sophisticated way longer than the West. But I think, philosophically, we have a lot to learn from the rich Chinese tradition in ethics. I think, similarly, they have a lot to learn about metaphysics, and my Chinese colleagues recognize that. For some time, there has been some kind of prejudice in China against Western thinkers who were religious but now there is more openness about Thomas Aquinas in many of these departments of philosophy and other departments in Chinese universities than is often the case in the West.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Jesuit missionaries trained in Thomistic philosophy and theology went to China. It was them, that introduced the thought of Thomas both implicitly and explicitly. They entered into some kind of dialogue with Chinese - To what extent is Western philosophy something they scholars, but not so much can relate to their philosophies? about philosophy, that - There are different views about it. But on both sides, there was important initially, is a belief that Western philosophy has its own principles but about science. and procedures, while the Chinese one has its own principles and traditions, and that therefore we really should not mix them. The philosophical reason why they cannot be mixed, and is that the philosophical systems or ways of thinking are embedded in long, cultural traditions. There is that general notion that you study Western philosophy as it were at a distance, and this is not so unusual for Western thinkers; we often have the same kind of view. Historically, the first interest in western philosophy was in German philosophy, German idealism, again, Marx, Engels, etc. And then, by studying Marx and Engels, discovering Immanuel Kant, and then after that coming forward
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