Lausanne World Pulse – A Focus on Northeast Asia: 624 Least-reached People Groups Remain
According to a 26 August 2003 article in the New York Times,
There is also a dark underside of China’s economic success, which has been marked by annual growth of eight percent for more than a decade and exports to the United States growing so fast that they have surpassed Japan’s. In general these people [rural migrants] are vulnerable, pliable, cheap to employ and easy to suppress. The migrant workers number well over 100 million, staffing the factories of Asia’s export powerhouse. They work long hours in dangerous jobs for low salaries and no benefits. They are barred from forming unions. The Communist Party allows just one union, its own.
Some are forced into sex slavery and others have been physically abused by the police. But all in all, they would not come to the cities if the opportunities did not outweigh the dangers.
The government of China is facing its own dangers coming from the urban culture. They are finding out the hard way that loosening up the economy also brings pressure to loosen up in other ways. Even seven years ago there were an estimated ten million “netizens” or computer users in urban China. “I love the Internet because you have complete freedom to talk with people all over the world, hear music from any point on the planet and you never know where you’re going to end up next,” said one of these netizens to a Christian Science Monitor reporter in 2000. Such a situation may not work very well for tomorrow’s leaders of a totalitarian country.
China’s government is trying to keep some control over information, but it is a losing battle. According to a 5 February 2007 article in the New York Times, they are probably the ones responsible for blocking access to Chinese-language texts from the Marxist Internet Archive. Perhaps they see the past and realize that it did not work.
The Spiritual Void Deepens
Not only is the wealth gap widening, but the spiritual void is deepening. BBC News has printed two articles, one in October 2006 and another in February 2007, both of which show that there is a growing spiritual hunger in the Middle Kingdom. A poll of 4,500 people by East China Normal University professors found that 31.4 percent of the Chinese people over the age of sixteen consider themselves to be religious. That is triple the number that a government survey revealed. Although the survey demonstrated that the peoples of China are turning to spiritual answers from traditional sources like Buddhism and Taoism, Christianity is a big winner of spiritual adherents among the younger generation. Gone are the days when church is associated with those in their sixties and seventies.
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