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发帖数: 17544 | 1 Chinese Students Pushed to Find Jesus at U.S. Christian Schools
2011-12-20 21:00:01.0 GMT
By Daniel Golden
Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Haiying Wu’s family in Shandong
Province wasn’t religious. After a born-again Texan teaching
English in China advised her that Christian schools in the U.S.
are safe and academically strong, she enrolled at Ben Lippen
High School in Columbia, South Carolina.
Ben Lippen required her to attend church and chapel, take
Bible class, and join a Bible study group. At first, she didn’t
understand “why you need to believe in something you can’t view
or touch,” she said. Gradually, it began to make sense. When
the house parents in her dorm showed the 2004 film, “The
Passion of the Christ,” she wept. Shortly before her 2009
graduation, she was baptized.
Her parents were taken aback. “In China, I don’t think
there’s any chance I would have become a Christian,” said Wu,
21, a junior at Tulane University in New Orleans. “It takes a
lot to convert someone. Because Ben Lippen is such a strong
religious environment, it makes you feel you have to learn about
Christianity, and how come everybody around you believes.”
As evangelical schools capitalize on the desire of affluent
Chinese families for the prestige of an American education, many
Chinese students are learning first-hand how the Bible Belt got
its name.
While proselytizing is banned in China, Protestant -- and,
to a lesser extent, Catholic -- high schools are doing their
missionary work on this side of the Pacific Ocean. Through
placement agents and religious networking, they’re recruiting
growing numbers of students from China, most of them atheists,
and encouraging them to convert, in the hope that some of them
will spread the faith back home.
Little Preparation
Plunged with little preparation into an intense religious
environment, Chinese students often struggle to fit in. Some
shed their skepticism and become Christians, delighting school
officials and dismaying their families in China.
Eighty of Ben Lippen’s 108 international students come from
China, up from hardly any five years ago, said Emery Nickerson,
director of the boarding program. A “large minority” commit to
Christianity, he said.
“I’m pleased that so many of these kids come to Christ
while they’re here,” said Ben Lippen School Headmaster Mickey
Bowdon. “I’m not sure the Chinese government would be.”
China’s Ministry of Education and State Administration for
Religious Affairs declined to respond to written questions.
“The government is in a real quandary,” said Daniel Bays,
director of the Asia Studies Program at Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, who researches Christianity in China. “They
can’t forbid people from sending their kids overseas. They may
worry about these kids coming back, but they can’t do much about
it. These kids are just added to the crop of suspects that they
already have to deal with.”
Proselytizing Students
Teachers, classmates and host parents with whom Chinese
students stay are sometimes overly fervent in proselytizing
them, said former Ben Lippen Headmaster David Edgren.
“What we have are wonderful, sensitive, caring, committed
Christian people who want so much for this particular Chinese
student to come to know the Lord Jesus Christ the way they do,”
said Edgren, who now recruits Chinese students for Ben Lippen
and other evangelical schools. “There is sometimes a tendency
for the Christian student/host family/teacher to press for and
receive what appears to be a commitment.”
Non-believing Chinese parents choose Christian schools for
their moral values, college placement records, and lower tuition
than secular private schools, Edgren said. Because the U.S. is
regarded in China as a Christian nation, many parents see
Christian schools as part of mainstream American culture, said
Susannah Clarke, who taught in China for three years and helps
with a Bible study group at Ben Lippen.
Confucius Institutes
Religious schools are the latest entrant in the race by
American educational institutions to tap the lucrative China
market. About 57,000 Chinese undergraduates, most paying full
tuition, attended U.S. colleges in 2010-2011, six times as many
as in 2005-06. A Chinese government affiliate has contributed
millions of dollars to establish Confucius Institutes for
Chinese language and culture on 75 American campuses.
Limited to one year of attendance at U.S. public secondary
schools under federal law, Chinese students are flocking to
private high schools, where they diversify student bodies and
offset declines in domestic enrollment caused by the economic
downturn.
The number of Chinese students at U.S. private high schools
soared to 6,725 in 2010-11 from 65 in 2005-06, according to the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which doesn’t keep
separate statistics for religious schools.
Beijing Recruiting Fair
Religious schools boost Chinese enrollment by sending staff
members to China and using agents such as New Oriental Education |
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