Airing the Gospel: Christian radio broadcast and multiple narratives in early reform-era China

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the influential role that international Christian broadcasting enterprises played in the conversion of the Chinese during the transition from the Maoist to the Reform era. Despite being an official tool of propaganda and information dissemination, the popularization of radio offered an opening for the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) and the Seventh-day Adventists in the British colony of Hong Kong to air religious programs in Cantonese and Mandarin. These foreign radios created an invisible, electronic platform for Mainland Christians to form a listening community of believers, seeking spiritual or moral guidance from the outside world. Listening to Christian programs became part of the Chinese faith practice when the Maoist state closed places of worship and prohibited public religious activities throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Accessing valuable religious and secular information abroad emancipated the listeners from the confinement of socialist collectivism, especially when the Communist utopia lost its appeal in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consulting dozens of Chinese listeners’ letters, this study highlights the ways in which the believers navigated a changing social and cultural landscape, from one monopolized by the one-party state to a more dynamic domain semi-regulated by the government and the market. Because the letters are constructed source materials at a particular moment in history, it is important to treat the listeners’ accounts as indicative of their efforts to theologize personal struggle and faith experience and to seek new modes of self-expression.