The Nod

/ Jim
People in era dress in a public square in China, autumn 1980
Photo: Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

In 1980 I was twenty-five years old, traveling in China with a tour group, in a country four years out of the Cultural Revolution — where religion had spent a decade being beaten down in public. Every church in the country had been closed. Worship, where it survived at all, survived indoors, in private, in whispers: in homes, among family, behind doors that could be closed quickly. By 1980 a few church buildings were creaking back open, one here, one there, and the state was rebuilding the machinery that would supervise whatever faith it decided to permit. But permission was new, thin, and nobody with any sense trusted it yet.

Foreigners saw the country in groups, or not at all. There was no wandering off. A tour moved on an approved itinerary through the handful of cities open to visitors, and attached to every group were the translators: young, well-educated Chinese men and women assigned to interpret, to guide, and — though nobody put it quite this bluntly — to keep the visitors on the permitted path and report what needed reporting. They were courteous, capable, and careful. Carefulness was the national condition.

One of them was a woman a couple of years younger than me, in the plain standard dress of the era, educated well beyond what her job required. Over the days of the tour, in the margins — a walk between stops, a pause nobody was filling — we fell into conversation. It was ordinary on its surface. Traveler’s talk. Except that she steered it, gently and with great precision, to a subject that in her country had been dangerous within living memory and was barely less dangerous now.

She did not ask about me directly, not at first. She asked about my people, held safely at arm’s length — a question about foreigners that no report could object to. In the West, she said, your people believe in this Jesus Christ. Is that so?

I said it was so.

And are you a believer?

There it was: the question pointed at one man, asked by a woman whose job was watching me. In her country, the answer to that question, asked in the other direction, could reorder a life. I could answer honestly at no cost at all. I was a visitor. I would fly home. I said yes. At the time I was a believer, and I said so, in the open air, at a normal volume, the way a man answers a question when the answer has never once cost him anything.

She looked at me.

And she nodded.

That was all. That was the whole of it. She never said the words. There was nothing to write down, nothing to repeat to a superior, nothing that had technically been confessed. A question about the customs of the West, a visitor’s answer, and a young woman nodding along politely, the way translators nod a hundred times a day to keep a conversation moving. Anyone watching saw nothing. Anyone listening heard nothing. But the two of us inside that small exchange understood it perfectly, the way people under pressure have always understood each other: in the part of the conversation that doesn’t survive transcription.

She had told me. Without telling me. She was a Christian, in China, in 1980, employed by the state to watch people like me, and she had found the one sentence she could afford: a nod, spent on a stranger who would carry it out of the country with him, where it could do her no harm.

Here is the interesting ending. By every official measure taken of that country, that woman did not exist.

No census form ever recorded her faith. No church registry held her name — the churches had been closed for most of her life, and the ones reopening in 1980 kept lists for the state, which was precisely the problem. No survey interviewer ever got her answer, because survey answers are given out loud, and she had already demonstrated, to me, exactly how much of herself she was willing to say out loud: none of it. Whatever number anyone has ever published for the Christians of China — and the numbers are a fight all by themselves — she is not in it. She is underneath it.

The fight goes like this, and every figure in it belongs to somebody. China’s government, in its 2018 white paper, counted over 44 million Christians — the registered kind, the counted kind. The Pew Research Center, working from 2010 data, estimated 67 million. Independent estimates that try to include the unregistered house churches run to 100 million, 130 million, higher. Pew’s more recent work found that only about 2% of Chinese adults — roughly 20 million people — will formally tell a survey they are Christian, while several times that number will say they believe in Jesus Christ, a gap Pew attributes in part to the political sensitivity of the question and the reluctance of house-church members to identify themselves. Each of those numbers is a different answer to a different question, and none of them is the count of the believers. They are counts of the believers who could afford to be counted.

Somewhere under all of them is a young translator in 1980, and millions like her across the decades — in China, and in every country where belief has had to be silent to survive — people whose faith was real enough to risk a nod over, and invisible to every instrument built to measure it.

Statistics count what can be said out loud. She said nothing out loud, on the record, about the thing that mattered most to her. She just nodded, once, at exactly the right moment, to exactly the right person.

Once was enough. I hadn’t thought about that nod in over forty years.

I’m thinking about it now.

Read more

The thaw of 1979–80

The counting problem

Leave a Reply