Eric's Beijing Diary

A couple weeks ago, 160 members of Shouwang Church were arrested as they approached the outside meeting area they had chosen for their assembly after they were not allowed to occupy the meeting place they had purchased. In one sense, this is not really news, because churches in China are required to register, and this church was not registered. So it is not surprising. What really is news is that they have been allowed to accumulate some 1000 members before they had this kind of trouble.

Actually, that's not quite true. This is not their first brush with the "law." I use the term loosely, because I am not sure whether the policy requiring registration is actually law, or just Party policy. The church leaders insist they are not breaking the law. They may be right in a technical sense, because the National People's Congress is the "highest body of state authority," and I don't know that the Congress have ever passed a law that specifically restricts the size of religious meetings, especially the maximum size for religious meetings that don't need to be registered. But that's kinda irrelevant, because, as as Jiang Jinsong says in his book, The National People's Congress, in China, the party is over the State. So in China, what the party says supercedes law. So I'm not sure whether the policy came from the National People's Congress (law) or directly from the Party (edict). What is clear, though, is that the members of the Shouwang Church knew about the policy, and chose to violate it. Here is what the policy actually says:

There is no registration requirement for, to quote from Chinese Christians, "house services," which are mainly attended by relatives and friends for religious activities such as praying and Bible reading. [Official English version]

House churches take full advantage of this clause to set up home fellowships that are not registered. As long as the fellowship in question can be considered "family and a few friends," the police will not bother them. The problem, of course, is that if the church is successful, pretty soon you will have another family and a few more friends, and before long, the fellowship will exceed the limits of what can be considered a "house service." When this happens, the police will begin to take action to stop this development. Many churches respond to this action by splitting up and becoming two or more churches. In this way, you could argue that the policy actually promotes church growth in China. But other times, the fellowship in question will resist the pressure and just keep on growing and developing. At this point, it is up to the police to decide how they will respond. In some places in the countryside, the police take quite an active role in stopping the growth of these family churches, because they have clearly gone beyond what can be considered "relatives and friends." But in Beijing, and in some other cities, the police will often look the other way, as long as the unregistered fellowship is not too large, and especially as long as the fellowship is not being run by foreigners. I have been to several "family churches" which were actually informal, unregistered groups of Christian believers who had rented a meeting place, and were conducting church meetings on a regular basis. But since these fellowships have clearly grown beyond the limits of the policy, every city seems to have its own unofficial limit to how big a church group will be allowed to grow before the government gets involved. In Beijing, I would gernally say that a group of one hundred to two hundred people would probably not have too much trouble. In Wuhan, unofficial churches are generally allowed to get quite large, and actually have an open relationship with the police. They register in a more or less unofficial way and the police allow them to operate, as long as they comply with basic requirements for public meetings.

My first introduction to Shouwang Church was a couple years ago when I was asked to give a presentation about freedom of religion in China. A young lady came up to me after the presentation and asked me what I thought of this unofficial church that had just been shut down. I told her that they would probably disperse and then reemerge. I turned out to be partly right and partly wrong. They eventually did reemerge, but they had not really dispersed. They just kept getting bigger and bigger. If a church changes their location, they can sometimes elude the authorities, because they have moved to a different police district or something. But again, the Shouwang church as clearly grown beyond what the powers that be will tolerate from a church that is not registered. They have not accepted this yet. They even bought a meeting place. But the police have prevented them from moving into it.

Labels: Church Life, Family Churches

Lush on a Sunday evening. I'm supposed to be studying my Chinese lesson, but I'm sitting here staring into space. It's a database problem. I am setting up a schema for my research at the National Library of China. Ordinarily one would think that the ISBN would be a good unique identifier for each book. But there are many old books at the National Library that do not have ISBN numbers. But they all have library bar codes, and the bar codes are simple and straightforward (not a combination of alpha and numeric values). So it's really easy to use the bar code as an identifier. The column data type can be set to "number," and you don't have to worry about how many characters need to be reserved for the column.

But I also read books that are not at the Natural Library. Almost all of them would have ISBN numbers, but they would not, of course, have National Library bar codes. So at first, I planned to set up two separate schemas. The problem with that is that every time I want to look for something, I have to do two separate searches. Of course, I could write the search code so that it joins the two queries together and searches both schemas at the same time. But since the schemas are identical in every respect except the bar code, it seems that there should be a way to combine them.

The solution I came up with is painfully simple. It goes with out saying that books from outside the library would need to use the ISBN as an identifier, since they don't have a library bar code. But even for books from the library, I want to have a column for the ISBN number, because I want to have access to that information for each book (in case I want to order a used copy online or something). So there will be a column for the bar code and a column for the ISBN number. The fields in the ISBN column can be null for those books in the library that do not have an ISBN, since the ISBN column is not used to join tables. But the fields in the "barcode" column cannot be left null for those books from outside the library that do not have a bar code, because the "barcode" column is the primary key, and a primary key column would not function properly if it contained null values. You would have lots of data anomalies. It would be more accurate to say that if the primary key contains null values, it is not a primary key, because the requirement of a primary key is that it uniquely identifies each record, which means that it cannot have null or non-unique values.

The solution is to use the ISBN as the bar code for those books that do not have a bar code. Solves the problem, and if I ever did want to separate them later, it would be easy to surgically remove those records:

select * from booklist where isbn=barcode;

It never ceases to amaze me how much time and thinking it takes me to come up with the most obvious simple solution.

OK, enough of the musings of a database guy. If you don't understand what you just read, just forget it and use Excel. Excel is not as versatile as a relational database, of course, but it is a good flat file database, and if you don't have too many records, you can live with the inefficiency. My reason for using a relational database comes down to scalability. Years ago, when I was doing a study of the Civil War, I was using an old DOS program called, "Electric Desk." I had accumulated some 1400 records. When you get that many, it's kinda hard to take a look at the whole table (what we call a "full table scan"). Electric Desk worked pretty well, but it did not follow the rules of normalization, and in the process of moving to Arizona, I lost the floppies I had it all stored on. I guess it doesn't matter much, because I don't even have a drive that would read them anymore, and, as far as I know, the software that would implement the data is now obsolete. I don't want that to happen again, so this time I determined to set up a relational database that would be both scalable, as to size and adaptable to future changes in software. Got the job done, thanks to God and E. F. Codd.

Spring is coming to the Western Hills, now. I took the picture on the left on Valentine's Day, and the one on the right on my morning prayer walk early today. The seasons come and the seasons go, and how swiftly time time passes! It isn't all green yet, by any means. Lots of scrub left. But the buds are on the trees. It won't be long.

It's interesting, you know--in the fall of the year, there are times when I find myself wishing that the leaves would never fall from the trees. But when spring comes, I am always reminded that in my heart of hearts, I do prefer a four season climate. I think it keeps one more through all the unpredictable changes of life. The times they are always changing, and in ways we can seldom anticipate. But seedtime and harvest always come in their season.

旧的不去, 新的不来. If the old doesn't go, the new can't come. That's the colloquial expression that was quoted to me when my laptop was stolen.

Downloaded the new e-sword software today. I have had e-sword on my computer for several years, but alas, my laptop was stolen. Fortunately, I had backed up my e-sword files. Actually, I wrote a batch file that backs them up for me. Then I went to the Task Scheduler in the Control Panel and created a task that executes the batch file once a day. The files are backed up to my Drop Box, which is backed up automatically online, so fortunately I didn't lose any data.

E-sword was designed by a software engineer by the name of Rick Myers. He created the application, made it available free of charge, with the only restriction being that it cannot be sold. I really respect people like him. They are doing something I would like to see a lot more of--presenting premium software as a public service.

With e-sword, all relevant data (study notes, topic notes, underlining, etc.) is stored in files in the e-sword directory. If you have taken the trouble to back up those files, restoration from a disaster is pretty simple. Just reinstall the software, open e-sword and make sure everything is working, then close it down again, go to the e-sword folder, paste the old backed up files in over the new, and when you open it up again, all your information will be there.

My problem was that I had neglected to save a copy of the software. Not a problem, ordinarily, except that e-sword has gone through a major upgrade, so the database is completely new, and all the file extensions have changed. You can't paste in the files from an old installation over files with new file extensions, because the new software will just ignore them. The files are useless by themselves. But when they are properly incorporated into the software, every verse you have underlined before is underlined in the new version. And every note you have taken magically appears whenever you click on the verse to which it refers. Fortunately, I was able to find a copy of the old software that I had burned on a CD to give to someone, so I installed that, put in my old files, and then installed the new update over the old.

I am not a fanatic about always having the latest software. New software often has glitches, and sometimes the new stuff is much more problematic than the old. This is especially true with Microsoft operating systems, but the principle applies to other stuff, too. To tell the truth, I was not that impressed with the previous upgrade of e-sword. In fact, at times I found myself wishing I hadn't upgraded. But this new version is really nice. It has a download manager, which is important, because there are plug-ins that you really need to install. None are required, but some are very important. Albert Barnes' commentaries used to be a shelf full of expensive books. Now it's a 20 minute plug-in for e-sword. I also like Clarke and I usually install J. N. Darby's commentaries as well. Matthew Henry is a little wordy, but he's a really nice guy, so I always install at least the Concise Commentary. Click on a verse, and you have your choice. Thayer's dictionary is useful for the New Testament, especially since you can reference the entries directly from the Strong's Numbers. You used to have to look up the words individually in Greek. Myers has also started incorporating old classics as e-books which can be installed as topic notes. Really handy. He's got Calvin's Institutes, which is an old classic of course, and I was happy to see that he also has Edersheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah.

And I didn't mention the new Bible versions. The King James is the default, of course, because of Strong's Concordance. But I have always installed the old ASV (American Standard Version from 1901, not the New American Standard, which came out in the Seventies), as well as the Chinese Version, and the English Standard Version, all of which are free plug-ins. Now he has added the old Geneva Bible (the Bible used by the Mayflower Pilgrims), as well as the Latin Vulgate, and he even has the Septuagint (ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, which predates the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we have available).