The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas

22. The Role of the True Jesus Church in the Communal Development of the Chinese People in Elgin, Scotland

22 The Role of the True Jesus Church in the Communal Development of the Chinese People in Elgin, Scotland Garland liu INTRODUCTION This chapter was part of a study of the Chinese in Britain starting in the second half of the 1980s. The target group of the study was constituted of Chinese migrants who were dispersed outside the metropolitan areas in Britain. Little research has been done on these Chinese because of their dispersal, often in small numbers. However, together they made up almost half of the Chinese population in Britain. l The Chinese group in Elgin with a total number of one hundred and five people, who originated from Ap Chau in Hong Kong, fell within the target group.2 Elgin is a small town located in the northeast of Scotland with a population of around twenty thousand in the late 1980s. When I refer to the Ap Chau Chinese in Elgin, I really mean Chinese who worked and/or lived in Elgin and the surrounding cluster of small towns including Buckie, Nairn, Forres, Lossiemourh and Kinloss at the time of the study. All, except a famil y of seven of these Chinese,.! came from Ap Chau and all including the non-Ap Chau family were members of the True Jesus Church. For the sake of convenience, I shall refer to this group of people as {he Ap Chau Chinese in Elgin. Ap Chau, the homeland of the Elgin Chinese is a small isolated island in the northeast coastal waters of the Kowloon Peninsula. The name is a direct transliteration of Chinese into English which means ' Duck Island'. On the island was a fishing village which consisted of nine surname 426 Carland till groups (Chan, Cheung, Ho, Lai, Lam, Leung, Liu, Shek and Tang). The single primary school on the island only opened in 1958. Therefore, many of the Ap Chau Chinese I encountered in Britain never achieved an education beyond the primary level and some of them were even illiterate. Intermarriage was a general practice until industrialization and economic development in Hong Kong disrupted this practice. One specific feature of the islanders was that they were all members of the True Jesus Church. This featu re will be highlighted in the following discussion because it was one of the bases on which the social reconstitution of the Ap Chau Chinese was achieved in Elgin. THE TRUE JESUS CHURCH: ITS TENETS AND SIGNIFICANCE TO THE AP CHAU PEOPLE The True Jesus Church began to develop in the second decade of this century when fore ign missionary work was still thriving in China. It was founded in Heiping (which is called Bei jing nowadays) in 19 17 by a certain Wei Po-en who renamed himself Wei Bao-Iuo after Paul the Apostle in the New Tesmmcllt. Since then its founding members had been zealous in preaching the true faith, especially towards the south of China. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, branches of the True Jesus Church had been set up in southeastern China which included Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Fujian, Taiwan and overseas which included the United States, Malaya, Singapore Indonesia and Sahah. After the communist takeover in 1949, the True Jesus Church esrablished in Taiwan became the leadi ng organization of the Church in other partS of the world. It was then responsible for calling the World Assembly in which representatives from different countries came together [Q discuss and make decisions on strategies and targets of evangelization, the teaching needs in different parts of the world and the allocation of human and financial resources to achieve such purposes. Since the I950s, rhe various developments in reaching and evangelism made it in the real sense rhe ' mother' organization of the different branches of the True Jesus Church in mher parts of the world. For instance, its theological seminary has been training preachers and evangelists to be sent to different parts of the world including Nigeria, India in the 1980s and Russia in the 1990s. The True Jesus Church also set aside some support funds for the establishment of new churches both inside and outside Taiwan as one of the items for their charitable work. Finally, the publication of religious literature by the Taiwan True Jesus Church was essential in providing spiritual 'food' for its members especially The Role uf (he True jesus Church in Elgin 427 those in Japan, South Korea, India, Nigeria, America and Britain...