What has China to do postmodernity? Is contemporary China a premodern, modern or postmodern society? What has Chinese Christianity to do with postmodernity?
China, as the largest developing country in the world, great part (not minority, of it is not majority) of the population is emigrating from rural area to urban society. Rapid urbanization, over-industrialization and modernization is turning hundreds and thousands of peasant villages into cities and towns. The migration process also challenges the Chinese people and society, encountering forms of life that range from the premodern, modern to the postmodern.
In this essay, the author argues that postmodernity shall be viewed as a cultural phenomenon, a social experience and an ethos or spirit which challenges people and society to explore something new and unknown in an uneven means. In current context of China, postmodernity should not be understood as a coherent response to the decline of modernity, but rather as a range of responses to all sorts of phenomenon of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity. Therefore, Chinese postmodernity should not be limited to ideological and academic discourse of postmodernists, but life experience of people. How does the Chinese church respond to this shifting mood and changing mode of thought in this postmodern era?
The theme of this essay is around “mission and postmodernity in China” dealing with missiological issues raised by postmodern phenomenon in contemporary Chinese church and society, and their significance for mission. The author attempts to take on the issue of spiritual diversity raised by Chinese Protestant Christianity during the so-called “Reform and Openness” era (1979-2009), its impact and significance for the concept of mission in the contemporary Chinese society in which is shifting from the premodern and modern to the postmodern. The descriptive analysis will focus on three major forms of Christianity (namely institutional, autonomous, and intellectual Christianity), and mission obligations of the Chinese Protestant church in a society of mixture of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity.