Diversity Reigns in China's Guangxi Province

by Wesley Kawato

Guangxi Province, on the border of China and Vietnam, is a land of contrasts and diversity. The province has fertile plains along its southeastern seacoast. This region has a warm climate that allows two crops to be grown each year. In the west are rugged mountains where the soil is poor and the people struggle to grow enough to eat. People living in river valleys live in constant fear of deadly floods, but to those living on the high mountaintops, floods are the last thing to worry about.

The ethnic make-up of Guangxi is equally diverse. Han Chinese are the majority on the eastern lowlands. Numerous minority groups, such as the Zhuang, make up the majority in the western highlands. The diversity affects other aspects of Guangxi as well. Fast growing cities, such as Nanning, with 1.6 million people, stand next to rural farming villages. The cities have modern factories, but many rural villages have hardly been touched by the inventions of the last century.

Guangxi's response to the gospel is also diverse. The Han Chinese and the Zhuang have eagerly responded. The number of Christians in the province has jumped from 7,000 in 1949 to 70,000 today. Half of these believers are Han Chinese and the rest are mostly from the Zhuang peoples. This figure counts only those involved in the state sponsored church. Estimates vary on how many people are involved in unregistered house churches.

By contrast, the six Bunu people groups in western Guangxi have proven to be resistant to the gospel. There are only 10,000 Christians among these people groups, despite years of outreach by foreign and local missionaries. Christian missionaries have yet to contact Guangxi's unreached people groups, often distracted by the work that still needs to be done among those that are already reached.

There is diversity in how the government in Beijing has treated the various people groups. The Han Chinese have been subjected to strict family planning. Among the Han, China's one child per family law has been strictly enforced. Many of Guangxi's ethnic minorities have been exempted from that law in years past, and are only now being asked to limit the size of their families.

Guangxi's Challenges for the 21st Century
The one child law has already had a negative effect on the gender balance in Guangxi. Some areas have had as many as 140 boys born for every 100 girls, according to an article in the Washington Post last year. The gender imbalance became severe when some hospitals received ultrasound machines that made it easy to determine the sex of an unborn child. Abortions have been easy to obtain in China. The imbalance, however, became so bad through gender selection of males that the Chinese government has recently banned abortions for that purpose. But the damage has already been done. "Bachelor villages" dot China's poorer regions. Crime thrives in these areas. Parents in Guangxi often worry that there will be no wives for their sons. Desperate parents will sometimes buy a kidnapped Vietnamese girl for their sons to marry. In recent years the Chinese police have had trouble dealing with gangs that kidnap or buy Vietnamese women for sale in Guangxi and other southern Chinese provinces like neighboring Yunnan. Police crackdown efforts have been hampered by corruption, a problem in many Chinese provinces.

Both west and east Guangxi have a problem with AIDS, but for different reasons. In the affluent east, AIDS is an urban problem. Most of the victims are heroin addicts who get the disease by sharing infected needles. The Chinese government is trying to stop the AIDS epidemic before it infects the prostitutes in Guangxi's cities.

In the rural west, most cases of AIDS are the result of contaminated blood gathering and transfusion practices. In years past, poor villagers often sold their blood to government sponsored medical groups. Many of these people contracted AIDS through the use of contaminated medical instruments. In some villages half of the adults have been infected.

Even worse, government officials have tried to suppress news about the spread of AIDS in Guangxi Province and other parts of Southern China. There is growing evidence that some local officials had invested in companies involved in collecting contaminated blood and are now covering up the resulting AIDS epidemic in order to save the value of their investments. Recently, the national government has shut down one such company.

Pray for Guangxi Province
Guangxi Province presents interesting challenges for missionaries trying to bring the gospel to the peoples of southern China. A strategy that works well in the affluent and urban east probably will produce few converts in the poor and rural west.

In the past, missionary agencies had assumed that a strategy that works well with one Guangxi people group would work well with all of the others. Newly gathered statistics have shown that this is not the case. A new strategy will have to be developed to reach the various unreached people groups in Guangxi. Pray that God will raise up Christian workers who have the wisdom to do so.

The growing number of believers among the Zhuang peoples also opens up some exciting possibilities. Pray that God will use Zhuang believers to reach unreached people groups in this diverse region.

Pray also for the end to persecution in Guangxi. The communist government enforces anti-religious laws unevenly. The enforcement of such laws has been especially strict in Guangxi Province. Even the state-supported church has suffered as a result. There are 250 registered churches in the province, but only 22 ordained ministers. The provincial government has hindered the ordination of new Christian ministers in an effort to weaken the Church in Guangxi. The underground house church movement has suffered even more. Government crackdowns during the early months of 2002 have led to the arrest of many church leaders. Some of them now face the death penalty.

But there are opportunities for reaching people for the Lord despite the persecution in Guangxi. The AIDS epidemic opens the door for medical missionaries to serve in that province. Pray that God will inspire Christian doctors with a heart to minister to AIDS patients, and that such doctors won't be discouraged by a provincial bureaucracy that has often tried to hinder Christian outreach.

Pray also that God will show Christian leaders how to use Guangxi's gender imbalance as a means for reaching the youth of that province for the Lord. Today's young boys will soon grow up to become tomorrow's lonely teenagers. May God raise up youth workers with innovative strategies to reach these people in the years to come.

Guangxi Province faces many serious problems in its future. May God's Church see these problems as opportunities for outreach. Pray that the Lord will raise up Christian leaders, full of His love and wisdom, to reach the peoples of this province.