VI. Ongoing China Research
… We also love bringing over
six or seven post-docs a year from China to study at Baylor – a couple of them
senior, the rest of them junior. And now I'm an honorary professor of social science at Beijing University. We've got all this stuff going on with
China – it's marvelous.
China's my primary field, so that's very interesting
to me.
Now we're trying to figure out how
to correct it for the number of Christians. The problem is, there's a big bias in surveys in China. A lot of people won't be
interviewed. The Christians are, we
believe, among the most likely to refuse, and the most likely to not admit it if
they do take part in the thing.
The difficulty is getting people in the countryside ….
It's true, but it's also the case
that smart people don't tell strangers that they're Christians!
Well, maybe it depends on how you approach it ….
Yeah, but if you're a stranger who
comes in, they don't know if you're government ….
When I've taken surveys there, I've found people
pretty up-front ….
Yeah, but this isn't some kind of
national poll, it's much more informal and you've got a relationship with
them.
What we’re doing right now is, we
have obtained names of people who belong to a house church. And we are mixing them in with a random
sample of their community. And we're
sending the interviewers – the interviewers have no idea that anything like
this is going on, they're just going out, doing an interview – seeing whether
the people we know to be Christians – what's the bias, how much less likely
they are to take part, and how much less likely, how many of them don't fess up
to being Christians. That way we
can do a correction.
What are you finding?
I don't have any idea; it's just
starting. It'll be crude, but at
least it'll be a lot better …. One
thing that's very clear, is that party members are much less likely than
non-party members to have faith in communism. (Laughter) Isn’t that funny?
Well, I imagine that people who have just graduated
from college or in college would tend to say they believe in communism more
than people …. [5]
The more educated you are, the less
likely you are to believe in communism. The belief isn't really widespread.
I wouldn’t think so. But I asked people, who do you think is going to be helpful
for the future development of China, then I give a few names, including Karl
Marx. And so far, students have tended
to check that one off ….
Well, sure! But there is some suggestion that
campuses are more Christian than anywhere else in the country.[6] The proportion of
Christians at Beijing University is enormous.
[5] It was foolish of me to include graduates in this question; I know better. Stark was incorrect, however, in surmising that I had any relationship with the people I surveyed.
[6] It’ll be interesting to see survey results; I am skeptical of this claim. About 20% of residents of Wenzhou claim to be Christian in some sense; I doubt that so high a percent of university students believe at any major university in China.