Christian Zionism Has Come for the Chinese Mind
Will China take seriously the psychological theater of the imperial war being waged against it?
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I have lived in China for sixteen years. It is not a sojourn. It is not an assignment. It is a home — more deeply, more truly, more permanently home than the country that issued me my passport. The Netherlands gave me my language, my schooling, my early life experiences. China gave me my belonging. And I do not say this in the sentimental register of the foreign expatriate immigrant who has fallen in love with a postcard; I say it as a man who has watched, year after year, what the West has become — or rather, what it has always been, and what our blinders kept us from seeing — and what China has refused to become; and who has understood that the difference between them is the difference between a civilization that still remembers what it is and one that has forgotten.
What makes China great is not that it has surpassed the West. It is that it is not the West — and, equally, that it is not dominated by the West. It has carved out something rarer than power: an identity. It has refused to accept, however imperfectly, that the categories of European modernity are the only categories available to a serious civilization. It has refused to let Washington and Brussels write the dictionary in which it must define itself. That refusal — quiet, often inarticulate, sometimes contradictory — is the most precious thing a nation can possess in this century. And it is precisely the thing that empire most desperately wants to take from it.
I have watched, from the outside and from the inside, the Zionist takeover of the West. I have watched how it has corrupted an already corrupt society — how it has hollowed out what little remained of the Western pretense to law, to truth, to the dignity of the human person. I have watched the press surrender. I have watched the universities surrender. I have watched politicians genuflect before a foreign flag while children are pulled in pieces from the rubble of Gaza. And I have watched it with the particular clarity of a man no longer standing inside the burning house, but close enough to feel the heat on his face.
And yes. I have been accused, on occasion, of being a Western supremacist, a bourgeois leftist for daring to critique China’s foreign policy. For saying, plainly, that on Palestine, Venezuela, Iran and on other matters, Beijing has at times moved with a caution that betrays its own stated principles.
But that accusation is a category error. Critique is not contempt. Critique is the highest form of belief. One does not bother to criticize what one does not love. One does not raise one’s voice for a country one does not believe is capable of better.
My critique has always come from the conviction that China is not the West, and therefore it is better — that it does not need to imitate the West’s amorality, that it does not need to abide by Western dictates and Western standards, that it can and must carve its own way. The blind cheerleader and the blind critic are mirror images of the same intellectual cowardice. I refuse to be a MAGA-style worshipper of any state, including the one that has given me my home.
Those who know me well never make the accusation. They know how deep the affection runs. They know it is the reason my Chinese students love my classes — not because I flatter them, but because they sense, correctly, that I respect their country, their history, their culture, and their right to remain unreduced to a Western caricature. They sense that I see China as it is — magnificent and flawed, ancient and improvising, scarred by its colonial century and still finding its voice — and that I love it not despite its imperfections but with full and unflinching knowledge of them.
It is from this love that I write what follows. Not against China. But for China. And against what is coming for it.
“On its current growth trajectory, China may within current lifetimes have the numerically largest Christian population of any nation”
Imperialism Wants the Chinese Mind
Empire never arrives only with gunboats. It arrives, more devastatingly, with hymns. It arrives in the cassock of the missionary, in the polished shoe of the philanthropist, in the soft voice of the foreign professor, in the smile of the pastor who tells you that your suffering is sacred and your subjugation is divine. The bayonet bloodies the body. The indoctrination bloodies the soul. And it is the second wound that lasts for generations.
This is the secret history of imperialism that the Western corporate state media and Ivy league universities refuse to teach. The Dutch did not rule Indonesia for three centuries because their soldiers were many. They ruled because the maids in Batavia came to believe it was a privilege to be exploited by a white man. The plantations of the Americas did not run on whips alone. They ran on the spectacle of enslaved women dreaming of being chosen by their masters. The mission churches of Africa did not flourish because Africans wanted European theology. They flourished because choirboys learned to believe that the hand of the priest assaulting them in the sacristy was the hand of God. Colonialism is a knife. It cuts twice. It carves the territory and then it carves the mind. And it is the mind that bleeds long after the flag has been lowered.
Christian Zionism is the latest blade.
It is the newest costume worn by the oldest racket — the supremacist project of European modernity dressed up in the borrowed garments of a wounded ancient people. It is, in its own theology, a deeply antisemitic ideology, rooted in the expectation that the Jewish people must be gathered to Israel so that the majority of them can be killed or converted at the return of Christ. The Jews are not its protagonists. They are its instruments — a fact often overlooked by the antisemites who imagine the imperial endeavors of the United States as steered by "Jewish power" rather than authored in Washington.
And like every preceding instrument of empire, it spreads most ferociously not where it is imposed at gunpoint, but where it is welcomed at the threshold. It finds its most enthusiastic disciples not in Tel Aviv but in the megachurches of São Paulo, the prayer halls of Lagos, the auditoriums of Seoul — and now, with terrifying acceleration, in the crowded sanctuaries of the Asia-Pacific.
A growing body of scholarship documents the rise of Christian Zionism across the Global South, movements that exert a transformative influence on both international politics and the fabric of global Christianity. As academic researchers have begun to chart, the new Christian Zionism in countries like Brazil, Nigeria, and China is no longer a peripheral curiosity but a geopolitical force in formation.
