2016-05-04
基督教材料的中、英文模式的搜尋，如中英文聖經、神學辭典、基督教英漢辭典、基督教圖書、詩歌、靈修材料等
sourcr: http://www.cdn.org.tw/News.aspx?key=8132
立即體驗「基督教複合式搜尋引擎」：www.biblesearch.tw/aio/index.jsp
2015-02-28
如果把人家當成外人，最後對方真的就會在別的地方找歸屬感。
Jihadi John本來是一個溫柔的人。出生地科威特已經有未婚妻和工作等著他，不過，因為被懷疑是恐怖份子而一再被英國當局騷擾，而且只能被留在倫敦。雖然住英國，他覺得自己身處一個大型監獄。久而久之，他最後變成伊斯蘭國公關斬首各國人士影片的屠夫。
這種不被當作人對待，長期下來，最後變成想要與對方玉石俱焚的態度，也出現在以色列佔領區的許多巴勒斯坦人當中。
我不是說他這樣做正確與否。我是在了解他遭遇過什麼。要瞭解別人的感受，才不會不自覺當中，成為激發別人走向傷害他人道路的人。
以下為新聞網站的報導原文CAGE quoted an email Emwazi had sent saying, “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started. But now I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London.”
Qureshi accused British authorities of alienating and radicalizing young British Muslims with heavy-handed policies.
“When we treat people as if they are outsiders, they will inevitably feel like outsiders, and they will look for belonging elsewhere,” he said.
原文網址
First picture showing face of 'Jihadi John' revealed | The Times of Israel
http://www.timesofisrael.com/first-picture-of-jihadi-john-revealed/
2015-02-25
被斬首的埃及基督徒教派公開的原諒恐怖份子。
被斬首的埃及基督徒教派公開的原諒恐怖份子。The martyrdoms have also allowed Copts a platform to witness to the realities of their faith, as they publicly forgave the terrorists.
原文網址
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/february-web-only/how-libyas-martyrs-are-evangelizing-egypt.html
2014-05-28
「宣教愛不怕」節目::::: FM90.9 佳音廣播電台 :::::
http://www.goodnews.org.tw/content.php?view_group=1&view_type=122&view_mode=all
短宣者要學的功課：參與服侍並不是施捨與給予，而是更多的感激與犧牲。短宣者的檢討點與改善自己的部份。檢討點：內心深處隱約的「文化剝削感」，檢討團隊、個人屬靈和物質的優越感會不會帶來傷害。從最基本的生活條件反省，譬如帶去原始地區的衛生紙紙漿成分不見溶於在地土壤條件，通通無法使用（難怪當地人用樹葉！）；帶了蛋糕、布丁、果凍的素材教鄉下育幼院的女孩子做甜點，卻沒有想到離開之後，若是沒有了這些原料，她們學這有甚麼用？還是加深了失落感？或如另一隊受訪者發現他們是這婦女援助機構一個月來接待的第四個單位，原本一個關心家暴或性侵女孩子的中途之家，好像變成了一個「觀光勝地」，孩子的感受呢？一方面反省自己當年是否也犯過同樣有心無心的錯誤，一方面也真誠的希望短宣的經驗可以讓我們謙卑，更多的認識神愛世人的心，更深的付上禱告的代價，更積極的支持在跨文化的族群中長期委身的宣教士。那這樣看似淺碟的短宣經驗，就真值得了。透過短期宣教體驗，與不熟悉的團隊一起服侍，也許能發覺自己的軟弱或驕傲，打破自己既有的刻板印象。一個暑假，也許會成為你我人生的轉捩點。
出處:http://www.cccowe.org/content_pub.php?id=cct201404-19
短宣淺碟經驗的再思
彭書睿
中華基督教聯合差傳事工促進會祕書長
2014-04-22
中共在澳洲著名大學內建置祕密間諜網路，以監控中國留學生和當地華人社群的言論，中共主導的學生會蒐集情報和宣傳的政治目標，其功能與中共外交使節團操控的其他情報網路並行。用學生歡迎到訪的中共領導人、阻擋抗議團體和蒐集情報。學生特務滲透異議團體，特別是與西藏和法輪功有關的團體。
http://www.epochtimes.com.tw/n89007
2014-04-17
繪畫當為所有藝術型式中最能成功聯結來自兩種不同文化的橋樑
http://www.cdnews.com.tw/cdnews_site/docDetail.jsp?coluid=121&docid=102722427
駐外工作的挑戰之一，在於開創足以融合東－西方文化及背景差異的交流議題，經考量共通的技巧、創作性和描述性，繪畫當為所有藝術型式中最能成功聯結來自兩種不同文化的橋樑。
2014-04-08
在 NPO 工作常被視為「較沒有競爭力」的一群，這是目前仍難以逆轉的現實。很多雇主覺得在 NPO 工作就是輕鬆無壓力，雖然在 NPO 工作過的人都知道事實並非如此，但這個社會的（莫名）認定卻不是隻身便可以扭轉。未來若真的想轉換工作跑道，從 NPO 到非NPO，肯定必須面對相當多質疑，客氣一點的人可能詢問工作能力；難聽一點，直接批評是否競爭力不足才會「淪落」到 NPO 上班的人也有，如何面對這些疑問（或者一生都要走 NPO、不用再面對這種疑問）也要列入考慮。
在 NPO 工作常被視為「較沒有競爭力」的一群，這是目前仍難以逆轉的現實。很多雇主覺得在 NPO 工作就是輕鬆無壓力，雖然在 NPO 工作過的人都知道事實並非如此，但這個社會的（莫名）認定卻不是隻身便可以扭轉。未來若真的想轉換工作跑道，從 NPO 到非NPO，肯定必須面對相當多質疑，客氣一點的人可能詢問工作能力；難聽一點，直接批評是否競爭力不足才會「淪落」到 NPO 上班的人也有，如何面對這些疑問（或者一生都要走 NPO、不用再面對這種疑問）也要列入考慮。
2014-04-07
如果企業的生產力和產值增加，老闆想不加薪都不行，因為同行會來挖角。普設大學抹煞「創造差異」和「獨特價值」。應該好好地教育和引導新一代。年長的人要扮演年輕人的領導者，同時也是企業無法推卸的責任。
http://udn.com/NEWS/FINANCE/FIN11/8588975.shtml
2014-03-27
社會企業公關術：如何贏得媒體報導
http://www.seinsights.asia/story/614/794/1315#s2t
2013/08/26 Allen Lai
編譯：賴菘偉
編按：原文為Thomson Reuters Foundation的經理Daniel Rostrup整理座談會討論內容，該組織為全球的NGO和社會創業家提供免費的法律諮詢，報導世界上被忽略的故事，推廣新聞業的最高標準。
身為一個社會創業家，將創業故事放到媒體上是相當有益的。不但可以引起群眾注意、將你的創業緣由散播給更多人知道，甚至可以得到資金援助或有新的投資注入。然而，小型社會企業應如何與大型非政府組織及大公司的公關部門競爭媒體露出機會呢？
在2013年，Thomson Reuters Foundation舉辦了一個小型座談，針對如何讓社會企業的故事進入主流媒體進行討論。三個社會組織各花六十秒的時間講述自己的故事，然後由專家給予回饋及建議。
Pioneers Post的創辦人Tim West強調社會創業家所講述的故事需要與組織的策略吻合。不要單單只為了進入主流媒體，而是要再三確認這樣做在長遠策略上是有意義的。他同時也建議，針對每一位記者的不同專長給與相對應的內容，例如寫財經新聞的記者需要的訊息與社會或環境議題的記者截然不同。
Thomson Reuters Foundation的氣候變遷編輯Laurie Goering則強調，新聞就是要「新穎」及「有趣」，故事要帶領讀者經歷初創、中間經過、最終解答的旅程。敘述時不要使用難懂的術語，而是要像跟鄰居聊天一般容易理解。另外，故事要令人出乎意料，因為記者總是喜歡與直覺相反的故事。
以下是座談會總結出來的最佳建議：
從「微觀」的角度開始談論重要議題，就如同發生在眼前的某個人身上，接著再用「宏觀」的角度來詮釋。例如：述說一個有關蘇丹饑荒的故事可以從詳細描述一個家庭的困境開始，然後再談論造成這個情況的宏觀因素。
記者想要獨特且即時的事物。給他們想要的資訊，會讓他們工作比較輕鬆。你能提供一個「獨家」嗎？
你鎖定的是哪方面的記者？應該與他們建立長期的夥伴關係，需要的時候他們比較可能會幫你。
面對不同族群的觀眾時，清楚描述你的「需要」，並準確定位你的故事。儘量讓故事視覺化，例如：直接將實物呈現在觀眾面前，可以製造引人注目的視覺效果。
為什麼這是一個值得報導的故事，又為什麼現在要報導它？
新聞就是要「新」且「有趣」，你的故事是如此嗎？
避免使用難懂的術語，想像你是在跟鄰居聊天。
如果你是針對特定社會問題，請講述你的社會企業如何解決它，且你的成效如何？你的獨特影響力在哪？
如果用你的主要競爭者取代你在故事中的角色，這故事還會有趣嗎？
這是行銷導向還是新聞導向的故事？
記者喜歡與直覺相反的故事。
每個故事都有開始、中間、結尾。你的故事有嗎？
資料來源：
Thomson Reuters Foundation：How can social entrepreneurs get their stories into the mainstream media？
2014-02-25
台大國際生相關社團、國際處與宿舍舉辦的活動多是文化介紹或玩樂為主，較難聚集後續交流。交換生流動率快，學位生畢業後各奔東西。既然人會離去，因此更要留住經驗
原文網址http://www.peopo.org/news/232721
2014-01-27
若要接近新住民，要按照新移民的母語、文化和意願，否則達不到心坎裡。
原文網址http://www.appledaily.com.tw/appledaily/article/headline/20140127/35605670/
2014-01-20
投身 NPO、NGO 全職工作前的 5 個策略性思考
http://careher.net/?p=6933
October 19, 2013 8165 view(s)
Jill Chang 學位從俄文到社會，最後以美國的運動管理作收。曾是職業棒球經紀人、美國州政府亞洲辦事處經理，目前在從非營利組織走向社會企業的路上。喜歡週末的brunch、喜歡閱讀和搖滾樂、喜歡棒球、喜歡和平。
In addition to her degrees in Russian and Sociology, Jill ended up as a master in sports management. She was an agent for professional baseball players, manager of the US State government in Asia, now she is on her way from NPO to social enterprise. She enjoys Sunday brunch, reading, and rock’n’roll. An amateur baseball fan & a full-time peace-lover. Jill now lives in Taipei, Taiwan with her family.
想像好久不見的同學會，大家免不了討論的話題：
「你現在在哪裡上班?」
「我在非營利組織工作。」
「ㄏㄚˊ?」 連產業名稱講出來都要解釋很久，再加上遞出名片後別人的疑惑眼神，這就是我常面對的情況。
NPO、NGO 不一樣嗎？？
NPO (非營利組織)、NGO (非政府組織) 這兩個詞其實大家不陌生，但真要來個說文解字，免不了各種版本還得先吵一架。最白話的方法來說：非營利組織就是不以營利為目的的單位 (像是學校、協會等)；非政府組織就是政府以外的組織 (例如宗教團體、醫院等)。
越來越分不清楚了，對吧?
其實現在越來越多人接受 NPO、NGO 是通用的概念，畢竟現在大家認定的非營利組織，大部分都不是政府；而非政府組織，也很少以營利為目的。大體來說，無論是 NPO 或 NGO，都有社會公益的性質。為了方便，就先以 NPO 統稱吧。
住在海邊、管很寬
根據政府登記，全台灣有超過 6 萬個 NPO，包括社團法人（社會團體）、財團法人、職業團體、宗教組織。工作內容包羅萬象，從推動司法改造、搶救森林、推廣衝浪、支持病友家屬、到聯繫校友感情，都有非營利組織進行。
我所在的 NPO，做的既不賺人熱淚、也不熱血澎湃，我們倡導提升老人、病人照護品質。就某種層面來說，真需要點對抗社會現狀的毅力。因為這種議題，受重視程度不會像讓偏鄉小朋友有早餐吃、或拯救狗狗免於安樂死；一般人不會覺得這是立即要做的事、說改變世界其實也還好、更少收到直接的感謝或回饋。 身邊女生常問我在 NPO 工作的可能性，她們溫暖、有活力、真心想讓世界變更好的。然而，從我個人的經驗來說，從企業跨入非營利這一步需要格外勇敢有決心。NPO 可能不會給妳太多年假、旁人稱羨的眼光、或滿滿的荷包；甚至在投履歷或宣布要開始上班時，家人親戚就會先來段排山倒海的冷水攻勢。
做好準備，才能讓妳的 NPO 之路開心、自在。在把自己產業類別設為「社會公益」之前，有些事情妳可以先思考：
1. 熱情所在：
因為其他方面可能不如營利組織，所以更要確認這是不是妳的熱情所在。
知道自己想讓社會更好、希望世界和平絕對不夠，請盡量具體找到自己想做的事：是讓原住民小朋友有更多打棒球的機會、或是保護野生老虎免於絕跡。這對妳來說一定是很有意義的事，我曾上過課的哈佛大學公共敘事教授 Marshall Ganz 認為更重要的是：WHY 為什麼。
只有找到內心最深處的原因，才能確保妳的動力源源不絕。NPO 求職顧問 Joanna Fritz 建議針對自己有興趣領域的所有 NPO，先做完整的研究：訂電子報、和工作人員成為臉書/Linkedin 好友、擔任長期志工，這些都是確認組織價值是否和自己熱情相符的好方法。
2. 收入：
NPO 跟企業一樣，也有規模大小、經營績效優劣的不同。
根據 SimplyHired.com 統計：在美國，NPO 的執行長平均年薪約 97000 美金(約 291 萬台幣)，雖然低於營利組織的執行長，但依消費水準等因素算換後，還是夠讓我們口水流滿地。甚至許多 NPO 辦公室設在高檔商業中心、執行長年收高達 25 萬美金(約 750 萬台幣)，讓人捶心肝捶到穿。
在台灣，很不幸的，除了背後有企業支持的財團法人基金會之外（成立全國性基金會的門檻為 3000 萬），大多數 NPO 還是處於勒緊褲帶、燃燒熱血的狀態。一方面因為發展沒有國外成熟，另有一個可能原因，是 NPO 的經營績效、及社會對「募用分離」的接受度還要提升。
上海智行基金會主席杜聰這樣跟我說：「吃三杯雞的時候，大部分的人只願意花雞的錢，沒人想把錢用在醬油、酒、薑片、瓦斯、廚師上。」沒有光鮮亮麗的辦公室不說，若妳是個有 5-7 年工作經驗的專業人士，從營利組織跳槽到 NPO，要做好薪水被打折的心理準備(目前聽到最極端的是只剩三分之一)。
3. 社會壓力：
不可否認，在NPO工作有助創造道德高度，會常聽到「哇，妳在做公益呀，真了不起」之類的話 (或許妳也可以當做薪水被打折的補償)。
但更常碰到的狀況，是妳被長輩暗示該找個正常的工作、或信用卡申請表上的任職單位和年收入讓妳覺得矮人一截。認識新網友、參加聯誼、碰到國小同學時，無法在三言兩語內解釋自己的工作。看著他們不解的表情(或是約會對象狐疑的眼神)，妳會覺得如果在貿易公司或郵局上班會方便很多。
4. 選個正派的NPO：
NPO 的服務內容有些從網站、甚至從名稱就顯而易見。但挑選工作的 NPO 時，妳需要的不只是這些資訊。與許多 NGO 有合作經驗的美國攝影師 John Harrington 提供簡單 3 招:
A. 這個 NPO 的經費從哪裡來?
B. 行政費用（薪水、租金、獎金等）佔經費的百分比，有多少經費最後會真的到受益人手上?
C. 這個NPO是否透明、可信任?
5. 自身狀況與能力：
有些 NPO 幫助的對象在偏鄉、國外山區、甚至第三世界，光到達工作的地方就很辛苦，當地衛生和治安條件可能也和台灣差一大截。
和當義工不同，妳不是只去一次、每次可能也不只待個 3-5 天，這時妳的健康狀況就很重要了。有些 NPO 跟公關公司一樣，常要在週末辦活動、講座、教育訓練，妳的家庭與個人生活是否可以調適? 許多 NPO 常需要多重工的能力，譬如一個人同時要可以静下來寫申請政府經費的企劃案、在募款餐會上跟企業家談笑、也要能在園遊會上跟妳服務的群眾打成一片。這跟妳的個性是否符合?
跟隨妳的心吧
人本心理學家 Maslow 主張生理、安全、情感、尊重、自我實現的需求有層次之分，但也說次序並非完全固定。在決定自己的職涯時，比理論更重要的應該是：妳怎麼覺得?
身為上班族，我們當然在意加班費、補休、獎金；但當妳很累的時候，或許比薪資和休假更能激勵人的，是了解自己工作價值的那份充實。因為在倡議型機構工作，我有機會在各種場合演講。有次演講過後，某銀行副總裁跑來說「好希望我女兒長大也像妳一樣」。
也曾遇過知名企業家說「如果我早點遇見妳，我跟我爸爸或許會舒服一點，可惜他去年走了。請妳也繼續加油，不要讓其他人像我們這麼辛苦。」
知道有人得到幫助、世界可能因妳而變的好一點點，對我來說是難以取代的滿足。在營利企業賺錢，然後捐錢、當義工也是很棒的方式；但對我來說，可以每天用8個小時以上付出、名正言順的發揮影響力、用自己的眼睛確保資源用在最對的地方，無疑是更美好的特權。
October 19, 2013 8165 view(s)
Jill Chang 學位從俄文到社會，最後以美國的運動管理作收。曾是職業棒球經紀人、美國州政府亞洲辦事處經理，目前在從非營利組織走向社會企業的路上。喜歡週末的brunch、喜歡閱讀和搖滾樂、喜歡棒球、喜歡和平。
In addition to her degrees in Russian and Sociology, Jill ended up as a master in sports management. She was an agent for professional baseball players, manager of the US State government in Asia, now she is on her way from NPO to social enterprise. She enjoys Sunday brunch, reading, and rock’n’roll. An amateur baseball fan & a full-time peace-lover. Jill now lives in Taipei, Taiwan with her family.
想像好久不見的同學會，大家免不了討論的話題：
「你現在在哪裡上班?」
「我在非營利組織工作。」
「ㄏㄚˊ?」 連產業名稱講出來都要解釋很久，再加上遞出名片後別人的疑惑眼神，這就是我常面對的情況。
NPO、NGO 不一樣嗎？？
NPO (非營利組織)、NGO (非政府組織) 這兩個詞其實大家不陌生，但真要來個說文解字，免不了各種版本還得先吵一架。最白話的方法來說：非營利組織就是不以營利為目的的單位 (像是學校、協會等)；非政府組織就是政府以外的組織 (例如宗教團體、醫院等)。
越來越分不清楚了，對吧?
其實現在越來越多人接受 NPO、NGO 是通用的概念，畢竟現在大家認定的非營利組織，大部分都不是政府；而非政府組織，也很少以營利為目的。大體來說，無論是 NPO 或 NGO，都有社會公益的性質。為了方便，就先以 NPO 統稱吧。
住在海邊、管很寬
根據政府登記，全台灣有超過 6 萬個 NPO，包括社團法人（社會團體）、財團法人、職業團體、宗教組織。工作內容包羅萬象，從推動司法改造、搶救森林、推廣衝浪、支持病友家屬、到聯繫校友感情，都有非營利組織進行。
我所在的 NPO，做的既不賺人熱淚、也不熱血澎湃，我們倡導提升老人、病人照護品質。就某種層面來說，真需要點對抗社會現狀的毅力。因為這種議題，受重視程度不會像讓偏鄉小朋友有早餐吃、或拯救狗狗免於安樂死；一般人不會覺得這是立即要做的事、說改變世界其實也還好、更少收到直接的感謝或回饋。 身邊女生常問我在 NPO 工作的可能性，她們溫暖、有活力、真心想讓世界變更好的。然而，從我個人的經驗來說，從企業跨入非營利這一步需要格外勇敢有決心。NPO 可能不會給妳太多年假、旁人稱羨的眼光、或滿滿的荷包；甚至在投履歷或宣布要開始上班時，家人親戚就會先來段排山倒海的冷水攻勢。
做好準備，才能讓妳的 NPO 之路開心、自在。在把自己產業類別設為「社會公益」之前，有些事情妳可以先思考：
1. 熱情所在：
因為其他方面可能不如營利組織，所以更要確認這是不是妳的熱情所在。
知道自己想讓社會更好、希望世界和平絕對不夠，請盡量具體找到自己想做的事：是讓原住民小朋友有更多打棒球的機會、或是保護野生老虎免於絕跡。這對妳來說一定是很有意義的事，我曾上過課的哈佛大學公共敘事教授 Marshall Ganz 認為更重要的是：WHY 為什麼。
只有找到內心最深處的原因，才能確保妳的動力源源不絕。NPO 求職顧問 Joanna Fritz 建議針對自己有興趣領域的所有 NPO，先做完整的研究：訂電子報、和工作人員成為臉書/Linkedin 好友、擔任長期志工，這些都是確認組織價值是否和自己熱情相符的好方法。
2. 收入：
NPO 跟企業一樣，也有規模大小、經營績效優劣的不同。
根據 SimplyHired.com 統計：在美國，NPO 的執行長平均年薪約 97000 美金(約 291 萬台幣)，雖然低於營利組織的執行長，但依消費水準等因素算換後，還是夠讓我們口水流滿地。甚至許多 NPO 辦公室設在高檔商業中心、執行長年收高達 25 萬美金(約 750 萬台幣)，讓人捶心肝捶到穿。
在台灣，很不幸的，除了背後有企業支持的財團法人基金會之外（成立全國性基金會的門檻為 3000 萬），大多數 NPO 還是處於勒緊褲帶、燃燒熱血的狀態。一方面因為發展沒有國外成熟，另有一個可能原因，是 NPO 的經營績效、及社會對「募用分離」的接受度還要提升。
上海智行基金會主席杜聰這樣跟我說：「吃三杯雞的時候，大部分的人只願意花雞的錢，沒人想把錢用在醬油、酒、薑片、瓦斯、廚師上。」沒有光鮮亮麗的辦公室不說，若妳是個有 5-7 年工作經驗的專業人士，從營利組織跳槽到 NPO，要做好薪水被打折的心理準備(目前聽到最極端的是只剩三分之一)。
3. 社會壓力：
不可否認，在NPO工作有助創造道德高度，會常聽到「哇，妳在做公益呀，真了不起」之類的話 (或許妳也可以當做薪水被打折的補償)。
但更常碰到的狀況，是妳被長輩暗示該找個正常的工作、或信用卡申請表上的任職單位和年收入讓妳覺得矮人一截。認識新網友、參加聯誼、碰到國小同學時，無法在三言兩語內解釋自己的工作。看著他們不解的表情(或是約會對象狐疑的眼神)，妳會覺得如果在貿易公司或郵局上班會方便很多。
4. 選個正派的NPO：
NPO 的服務內容有些從網站、甚至從名稱就顯而易見。但挑選工作的 NPO 時，妳需要的不只是這些資訊。與許多 NGO 有合作經驗的美國攝影師 John Harrington 提供簡單 3 招:
A. 這個 NPO 的經費從哪裡來?
B. 行政費用（薪水、租金、獎金等）佔經費的百分比，有多少經費最後會真的到受益人手上?
C. 這個NPO是否透明、可信任?
5. 自身狀況與能力：
有些 NPO 幫助的對象在偏鄉、國外山區、甚至第三世界，光到達工作的地方就很辛苦，當地衛生和治安條件可能也和台灣差一大截。
和當義工不同，妳不是只去一次、每次可能也不只待個 3-5 天，這時妳的健康狀況就很重要了。有些 NPO 跟公關公司一樣，常要在週末辦活動、講座、教育訓練，妳的家庭與個人生活是否可以調適? 許多 NPO 常需要多重工的能力，譬如一個人同時要可以静下來寫申請政府經費的企劃案、在募款餐會上跟企業家談笑、也要能在園遊會上跟妳服務的群眾打成一片。這跟妳的個性是否符合?
跟隨妳的心吧
人本心理學家 Maslow 主張生理、安全、情感、尊重、自我實現的需求有層次之分，但也說次序並非完全固定。在決定自己的職涯時，比理論更重要的應該是：妳怎麼覺得?
身為上班族，我們當然在意加班費、補休、獎金；但當妳很累的時候，或許比薪資和休假更能激勵人的，是了解自己工作價值的那份充實。因為在倡議型機構工作，我有機會在各種場合演講。有次演講過後，某銀行副總裁跑來說「好希望我女兒長大也像妳一樣」。
也曾遇過知名企業家說「如果我早點遇見妳，我跟我爸爸或許會舒服一點，可惜他去年走了。請妳也繼續加油，不要讓其他人像我們這麼辛苦。」
知道有人得到幫助、世界可能因妳而變的好一點點，對我來說是難以取代的滿足。在營利企業賺錢，然後捐錢、當義工也是很棒的方式；但對我來說，可以每天用8個小時以上付出、名正言順的發揮影響力、用自己的眼睛確保資源用在最對的地方，無疑是更美好的特權。
2013-11-19
社論：投入海外宣教當注意的幾件事 （by 國度復興報）
http://www.krtnews.com.tw/editorial/item/6097-%E7%A4%BE%E8%AB%96%EF%BC%9A%E6%8A%95%E5%85%A5%E6%B5%B7%E5%A4%96%E5%AE%A3%E6%95%99%E7%95%B6%E6%B3%A8%E6%84%8F%E7%9A%84%E5%B9%BE%E4%BB%B6%E4%BA%8B
社論：投入海外宣教當注意的幾件事
發佈者 krtnews3 2013-07-09, 週二 14:2
說是「投入海外宣教當注意的幾件事」，也是「投入海外宣教當小心處理的幾件事」，但，卻不如「投入海外宣教很難不落入陷阱的幾件事」來得更寫實。
這幾件事就是「人的問題」、「錢的問題」、「異象確定問題」，還有就是「平行宣教團體互被蒙蔽的問題」。以上所提諸事都是自宣教肇始以來，就已層出不窮、屢見不鮮的事。因為，近代宣教事工欣欣向榮的景象，都很明顯地源於「已開發國家走向未開發國家」、「高經濟所得向低經濟所得地區移動」。的確，宣教需要「人」、「錢」及「異象」。
「人」包括帶頭的人、奉差遣的人、持續不斷以財力和禱告支持，甚至也將自己獻身宣教的人，有人就有人可能會出的問題，並且若是到國外宣教出了問題，可能更難收拾，甚至還會敗壞主的名聲。「人」也包括在宣教地能否找到合適配搭、可以完全信任的人。倘若一開始就差錯人、再加上在宣教地所託非人，那麼後果是可以預期的必以悲劇收場。
「錢」包括往返的旅費如機票、車票、食宿費，還包括宣教當地合作伙伴們的開辦費、生活費等。有錢走遍天下，無錢寸步難行，在現代宣教史上也已成了鐵律。但是怎麼個用錢？或是如何籌錢？錢多了怎麼花用？錢少了怎麼過難關？經手錢的當地合作伙伴，如何確保不成為「猶大」？或是因為錢源在手，差傳團體成了當地領導的「金主」、「財神爺」而不自知，甚至成為當地領袖「轄制」當地同工的卑劣手段。更有因海外幾個差傳團體與當地同一系統連結或結盟後，養大了他們的胃口，在「左右逢源」的光景下，幾乎是挖到了好幾座金礦！這種宣教團體因互不熟稔，沒有溝通管道而被蒙蔽的情況，大概是自有差傳、培訓以來，就已是永遠不會停止的陷阱。
「異象」指的是「確定宣教族群是誰的異象」。一但清楚主所賜的，也是聖靈感動下帶領宣教領袖前往傳福音的宣教受眾確定後，就要持續不斷地在他們族群中間建立灘頭堡、發展事工、建立教會、開辦神學培訓、門徒訓練事工。「異象」是從神而來的，一如愛是從神來的一樣。「沒有異象，民就放肆」；「沒有愛，教會就分裂」。「異象」是聖靈所賜的，絕不是出於個人的感動或衝動，因此，聖靈不會讓幾個宣教團體在同一地區使資源重疊，甚至養虎遺患。聖靈應不會輕易叫一個真有心志的差傳團體不斷地更換差傳領域與領地的。
或許，現代的宣教差傳團體該再回到聖經，思索、研究祂的宣教策略與宣教哲學。當年主耶穌差派門徒的模式，是否今天仍該循為圭臬？他們當年並非是「有錢的、已開發的，向沒錢的、未開發的傳福音！」而是單純地「已得著福音的人向未得福音的人，傳播神愛世人的好消息」而已。
主曾對門徒說：「我差你們出去的時候，沒有錢囊，沒有口袋，沒有鞋，你們缺少什麼沒有？」他們說：「沒有。」（路廿二35）
發佈者 krtnews3 2013-07-09, 週二 14:2
說是「投入海外宣教當注意的幾件事」，也是「投入海外宣教當小心處理的幾件事」，但，卻不如「投入海外宣教很難不落入陷阱的幾件事」來得更寫實。
這幾件事就是「人的問題」、「錢的問題」、「異象確定問題」，還有就是「平行宣教團體互被蒙蔽的問題」。以上所提諸事都是自宣教肇始以來，就已層出不窮、屢見不鮮的事。因為，近代宣教事工欣欣向榮的景象，都很明顯地源於「已開發國家走向未開發國家」、「高經濟所得向低經濟所得地區移動」。的確，宣教需要「人」、「錢」及「異象」。
「人」包括帶頭的人、奉差遣的人、持續不斷以財力和禱告支持，甚至也將自己獻身宣教的人，有人就有人可能會出的問題，並且若是到國外宣教出了問題，可能更難收拾，甚至還會敗壞主的名聲。「人」也包括在宣教地能否找到合適配搭、可以完全信任的人。倘若一開始就差錯人、再加上在宣教地所託非人，那麼後果是可以預期的必以悲劇收場。
「錢」包括往返的旅費如機票、車票、食宿費，還包括宣教當地合作伙伴們的開辦費、生活費等。有錢走遍天下，無錢寸步難行，在現代宣教史上也已成了鐵律。但是怎麼個用錢？或是如何籌錢？錢多了怎麼花用？錢少了怎麼過難關？經手錢的當地合作伙伴，如何確保不成為「猶大」？或是因為錢源在手，差傳團體成了當地領導的「金主」、「財神爺」而不自知，甚至成為當地領袖「轄制」當地同工的卑劣手段。更有因海外幾個差傳團體與當地同一系統連結或結盟後，養大了他們的胃口，在「左右逢源」的光景下，幾乎是挖到了好幾座金礦！這種宣教團體因互不熟稔，沒有溝通管道而被蒙蔽的情況，大概是自有差傳、培訓以來，就已是永遠不會停止的陷阱。
「異象」指的是「確定宣教族群是誰的異象」。一但清楚主所賜的，也是聖靈感動下帶領宣教領袖前往傳福音的宣教受眾確定後，就要持續不斷地在他們族群中間建立灘頭堡、發展事工、建立教會、開辦神學培訓、門徒訓練事工。「異象」是從神而來的，一如愛是從神來的一樣。「沒有異象，民就放肆」；「沒有愛，教會就分裂」。「異象」是聖靈所賜的，絕不是出於個人的感動或衝動，因此，聖靈不會讓幾個宣教團體在同一地區使資源重疊，甚至養虎遺患。聖靈應不會輕易叫一個真有心志的差傳團體不斷地更換差傳領域與領地的。
或許，現代的宣教差傳團體該再回到聖經，思索、研究祂的宣教策略與宣教哲學。當年主耶穌差派門徒的模式，是否今天仍該循為圭臬？他們當年並非是「有錢的、已開發的，向沒錢的、未開發的傳福音！」而是單純地「已得著福音的人向未得福音的人，傳播神愛世人的好消息」而已。
主曾對門徒說：「我差你們出去的時候，沒有錢囊，沒有口袋，沒有鞋，你們缺少什麼沒有？」他們說：「沒有。」（路廿二35）
2013-11-14
想想，海外宣教跟「國際志工與人類學家....By Reb」有何不同呢？
評論：海外宣教，固然有一套價值觀要推廣，但是如何適合當地人的特性來作，那又是一番很大的努力了。這篇有很多細節，海外宣教人可以好好預備和 ready for impact!
原文網址http://rutagraveolens.blogspot.tw/2013/11/blog-post.html
原作者： Reb
2013年11月13日星期三 國際志工與人類學家....
一直到現在，我其實還是無法自稱自己是個人類學家，就算我受過一點點的訓練，花了很多時間寫了一本論文，但慚愧的是我依然懷疑自己有多少人類學的視野，在學理上也只是略知皮毛而已。念人類學的初衷，其實是模糊地希望能做一些事情，而我相信「人類學」對那些事情大概是有益的。不過就像我一直到了大四，才知道原來自己有興趣的那些東西範疇上有個名字叫做「人類學」，我在碩班後期，也才知道我想做的事情可能有個名字，叫做「人道援助」。這個模糊地概念在當了國合會志工後開始變得清晰了些......或許是終於認識了一些這條路上的人，也開始接觸到了這方面的資料，「人道援助」對我來說再也不是網路上才會出現的名詞，而「志工」到底是什麼，在人道援助中到底背負著怎樣的腳色，也隨著國合會的行前訓練以及協調人的駐地訓練，開始被我們進行反思與質疑。
事實上，我覺得 「人類學家」與國合會的「國際志工」存在著一些非常可愛的相似性：
1. 文化衝擊(或驚嚇)：
不管是人類學家或是國際志工，長時間在異地的跨文化相處都是我們的工作。跨文化經驗曾經是人類學這門科學最重要的傳統，長時間、細膩和質化的研究方法，在人類學中稱為「參與觀察」，我們也一直相信外來者的身分，能將我們在觀察當地的文化時處於一個抽離的位置，此時發生在我們身上的 culture shock 有助於我們看到事物的其他觀點，並找出不同的脈絡。也就是說，所有在地 (local) 所認為習以為常、不值得大驚小怪的事情，在人類學家的眼中，可能都是解讀這個社會/群體的關鍵。當然，現在也有很多人類學家在研究自己的社會，但是從既有框架抽離，對現象進行抽象思考及分析的過程仍然是必要的。
一樣是遭受文化衝擊，但對國際志工而言，文化衝擊預言著工作場域上會面臨的困難，而這些困難最後可能影響到計畫的成效。最常見的錯誤是以自己原有的做事方式套到受援單位 / 國的脈絡裡，例如時間習慣、效率要求、工作態度等、行政程序等等，許多的受援國對這些工作上的倫理與態度與我們完全不同，在他者的工作系統裡以原有的工作習慣去推斷、估測和要求，挫折和不如預期的回饋就是可以想見的了。
2. 不確定性與質疑
在文化衝擊和真正身處田野地/駐地之後，我們在行前所擬的論文proposal/田野可行性計畫/ 駐地專案計畫可能看起來根本就是廢紙一疊。人類學家可能很恐慌的發現自己對當地的掌握完全不對盤，就算讀過再多的民族誌 (當然也有跟我一樣，出去前只讀過一兩本民族誌這麼混的人類學家，然後他之後的路途就會很艱辛)，到田野地裡好像又是另一回事，因為紙上的材料往往是爬梳、整理過後的結果，但真實生活卻是飄忽、朝令夕改、糾結交纏和曖昧模糊的。我們可能知道這社會將哪些人認定為親屬、哪些人不能與哪些人結婚、他們如何看待錢財、他們覺得人會生病是因為靈魂出了問題......但是文化的層面包羅萬象，層層疊疊那麼多，我們又怎麼能在千頭萬緒中捉住一個大概的印象呢? 像是，誰會答應我的訪談這件事，就可能牽扯到性別、階級、政治立場、所屬組織群性....等，如此一來，我收集的資訊代表的是哪一群人呢? 我們又真的能夠從這一些見解中推論一個社會的全貌嗎? 一直到現在這個問題依然令我疑惑。
同樣的，在志工場域中，如我目前所感受到的，古蹟保存是一個政府、非營利組織、人民、外資、觀光客、各樣專家都參與其中的議題(管理上叫做利害關係人steak holder)，但更隱而不見的細微層面還有政黨間的政治角力、組織與其他組織的關係、組織內部的人際關係及運作、民眾與官方組織的關係、民眾對於財產、文物的觀念及期待、民眾對於生活的想像、各方對於古蹟的想像..........在搞清楚這些local關係前，在搞清楚這些網絡與權力關係前，我真的可能做我的業務嗎?
最後，此時語言也成為一個重要的問題---當我們去的國家書的是我們的第三、第四語言或根本沒學過的語言時，我們要如何溝通，如何抓住言談裡微妙的細節呢? 工作進度表可能會朝一個全然開放的方向進行，但或許那也不一定是件壞事.....峰迴路轉之下，我們可能會一再翻修我們對田野/駐地的理解和想法，並演伸出更多概念。
3. 孤單
這應該是所有海外生活的共病，看似與工作無關，但其實私人場域往往是最影響工作的關鍵。在這個存在浮動的時刻，關鍵報導人/ 同事、主管和夥伴的出現是最好的運氣。處理孤單的重要性說不定在種種問題中居冠，但如何處理其實與人格特質有關，也或許是如此，出田野才會成為人類學家的成年禮，海外志工也會成為許多人「找自己」以及「與自己相處」的選項和功課吧。
(題外話，在搜尋圖片時，不管打西語、葡語、英/法語顯示出的都是一個人看海的圖片....莫非一個人看海是孤寂的意符？)
4. 身分定位模糊
相信有出過田野的人應該都不陌生，那種「我到底在這裡幹嘛」、「我到底要做什麼?」、「阿現在咧?」的感覺，還有找到報導人以後那種「對不起可是我又來煩你了」，覺得在地人一定覺得你是個煩人的腦包，什麼都搞不清楚又愛問、永遠都進入不了狀況、還有「他到底在這裡幹嘛?」這樣的大哉問。(別問我們，我們後來也不太知道自己為什麼會在這裡，來幹嘛，要做什麼)
身為一個外來者，我們如同浮萍，在田野中往往沒有身分、沒有角色、也沒有類別，無法被分類對當地人還有對自己來說都是一項焦慮，而且代表你與在地深具鴻溝，這也是為什麼人類學家對獲致一個身分(被納入親屬、被編入年齡組、被「誇讚」比哥倫比亞更哥倫比亞)會這麼欣喜若狂，因為能成功被分類就代表被接受獲認同，成為這個社群中的一員之後，便更可以貼近的觀察這個社會。(當然也不是每個人都想成為「社群之中的一員」，並認為只有如此才能做研究。關於此學界有許多辯論，在此略過不提。)
而國際志工，特別是國合會志工，身分定位模糊也是幾乎每都會遇到的issue: 首先這與國合會這個組織的模糊性有關。作為一個資金來自政府的非政府組織，國合會到底是官方還是非官方組織? 我們要的援助發展最終目標是外交還是人道? 這關係著志工業務的priority 是外交目的(文化交流與提升台灣形象、穩固雙邊關係)或是援助發展(但什麼是援助發展，我其實還不知道)。ICDF駐地志工常有的疑問，有一個便是志工在自己的業務之外常會被要求支援大使館和技術團的活動，這些到底算不算是志工業務的一部分呢? 志工有這個責任嗎? 但就算沒有，志工可以不理會這個人情嗎? 我所知道的是，目前國合會也處於一個轉型的階段，許多的規章、制度和定位都尚未完備，也都在改變，國合會志工到底是什麼，可能還要一些時間國合會才可以回答得出來。
二來就是志工自己要什麼的問題，志工想要成為怎樣的志工?想做什麼事?有什麼理念? 為什麼來? 這關乎志工對於自己的定位。看似簡單，但實則最難，我覺得探索自己一直都是件很玄的事。
最後當然就是駐國這邊對志工的期待，這也是海外志工微妙的地方。理想上，每個組織都希望前來的外國志工是一個具有不同思維、有著先進技術、觀念、甚至裝備，具有更多資源的夥伴，可以幫卡死停滯的組織找出問題並解決問題，還留下完善的規劃，甚至帶來資金與資源，但這樣的白日夢大都不可能成真。但無論如何，志工總是個免費的人力(雖然不一定總是好用)，因此就算不確定志工來之後可以做什麼，大多數的合作組織還是會申請。基於媒合的過程只能看到志工的簡歷，組織對志工的個性、長才、態度等等幾乎一無所知，於是很常出現的狀況，就是志工到了辦公室以後發覺自己成了冗員，不知道要做什麼、沒事做、或是主管交付的任務與你的專業其實有距離，比方說看到你是擅長IT的就叫你去做圖書館軟體系統、或是看到你曾經研究文化商品(正確說來，是從「文化商品」的形塑來探討「文化詮釋」之研究)就要你去做觀光行銷等。
發生這種狀況怎辦? 只能與主管溝通了。這時認清自己是誰、想做什麼，就是溝通的地基。唯有定位好自己才會知道什麼可以做、什麼不能做、怎麼做比較好。不過，剛抵達都會有一陣定位模糊的日子，摸索可能需要把個月的時間，只能耐心等待，萬事莫急，先好好與自己和外在環境溝通。
5. 反思
在慢慢熟悉我們的田野地後，慢慢的我們終於開始看到民族誌中描述的一些現象、一些價值觀或是態度，原先模糊、抽象而遙遠的民族誌開始變得清晰，我們開始以自己的經驗對照檢視作者的敘述：真的是這樣嗎？ 他提出的論述和我所看到的現象一樣嗎？如果Taussig 在1970年代就開始書寫哥倫比亞的暴力，我在2010看到的哥倫比亞社會依然是這個樣子嗎？如果人類學家在七零和八零年代亞馬遜醫療民族誌重的是社群、巫醫與醫藥三者的社會關係，2010的今天，在大多數社群已經無法與外在社會脫離關係、亞馬遜流域走向觀光化、原住民意識發展、傳統醫學經歷打壓又開始復興之後，亞馬遜的傳統醫療的現況又是如何？我們該將它放在社會的哪個位置？
我們開始反思、修正自己原有的架構、田野方法、理論取向，甚至整個推翻歸零，重新思考。我認為這是田野最迷人之處，能夠開始修正，代表已經進入了正軌，或許擁有很多迷惑，大多時候不知道自己所掌握的證據是否足夠、推論是否和邏輯、是否真正瞭解當地人的想法，或許更接近真實，或許沒有(抑或，真實或客觀根本不存在)，但至少此時，我們已經走在路上。
國際志工也是一樣的，我們抱著一些理想抱負來這裡，想著可以做一些事，但我們可以完成什麼呢？我們的存在對在地真的有幫助嗎？或是造成在地的麻煩呢？我們所做的事情會留下來嗎？會改變當地人的某些觀念嗎？改變對當地人真的有益嗎？我們所做的真的能解決某些問題嗎？增進的是大家的福祉或是某群人的福祉？在嘗試做一些小事情並開始遇到重重困難、做的事情好像並沒有太大的效用、當地人對我們所提出的計畫興趣缺缺時，我們開始反思。
當然國際志工和人類學家的目標不同，一個是「和當地人一起做一些事情」，一個是研究當地並整理出一套系統與邏輯；一個有著明確的行動目標，一個則是學理目 標。但外來者的身分以及對在地性的掌握，都是兩者最無法避免，也一直需要反省的課題， 台灣人道援助的歷史並不長，對人道援助的認知不停地在調整，相較之下也少有相關的教育來反思人道援助的定位，因此一直以來，就我的感覺，總是難以看清自己 的權力來源以及倫理定位，而人道援助又是這麼一個「高尚」的議題，是「幫」，是「援助」，這樣根本於權力位階上的不平等可能發展成「給」、「同情」、甚至 「施捨」，而當受援一方不願意接受時，就產生了狗咬呂洞賓，不識好人心等等的挫折與焦慮。人類學(至少是台灣的人類學)一直避免的介入，正好就是發展援助 的基本核心，但如何「援助」，該做什麼，做了又會造成什麼後果，我認為還是需要有在地知識的支持才能去做正確的評估。
並且，無論是人類學知識的累積或是發展援助的成效，不過十年二十年幾乎是看不出來的，只能謹記我們是不停地累積、修正、嘗試可能和散播種子，才能面對一事無成的挫折。
6. 認同危機
不是每個人都會走到這步，但還是有某些人會。田野/ 駐地裡總是有許多狀況，我們可能會因為這些狀況發現一個討厭的自己、一個自己無法接受的形象或面貌，有些人決定放棄田野/ 解約，有些人決定留下來與自己的破碎奮戰，所以有些人類學家田野做到最後放棄學位改行當巫師、有人改宗信了別的教、有人再也不想回田野地；所以聖露西亞的志工解約率高於50%......這些都沒什麼好或不好，說真的保住自己的健康(無論身心) 最重要，不過真誠面對，總是會留下些什麼。這部分牽涉到心理學，不在我可以唬爛的範圍，有修為的各位就自己體會了。
這是來駐地一個月的一些心得，摻雜著我過去的田野經驗。說實在我在駐地的這個月真的就是一片空白，因為腳傷也沒有做到任何田野(其實我連田野題目都沒想好)，寫這篇東西大概就是安慰自己用的吧....
原作者： Reb
原作者： Reb
2013年11月13日星期三 國際志工與人類學家....
一直到現在，我其實還是無法自稱自己是個人類學家，就算我受過一點點的訓練，花了很多時間寫了一本論文，但慚愧的是我依然懷疑自己有多少人類學的視野，在學理上也只是略知皮毛而已。念人類學的初衷，其實是模糊地希望能做一些事情，而我相信「人類學」對那些事情大概是有益的。不過就像我一直到了大四，才知道原來自己有興趣的那些東西範疇上有個名字叫做「人類學」，我在碩班後期，也才知道我想做的事情可能有個名字，叫做「人道援助」。這個模糊地概念在當了國合會志工後開始變得清晰了些......或許是終於認識了一些這條路上的人，也開始接觸到了這方面的資料，「人道援助」對我來說再也不是網路上才會出現的名詞，而「志工」到底是什麼，在人道援助中到底背負著怎樣的腳色，也隨著國合會的行前訓練以及協調人的駐地訓練，開始被我們進行反思與質疑。
事實上，我覺得 「人類學家」與國合會的「國際志工」存在著一些非常可愛的相似性：
1. 文化衝擊(或驚嚇)：
不管是人類學家或是國際志工，長時間在異地的跨文化相處都是我們的工作。跨文化經驗曾經是人類學這門科學最重要的傳統，長時間、細膩和質化的研究方法，在人類學中稱為「參與觀察」，我們也一直相信外來者的身分，能將我們在觀察當地的文化時處於一個抽離的位置，此時發生在我們身上的 culture shock 有助於我們看到事物的其他觀點，並找出不同的脈絡。也就是說，所有在地 (local) 所認為習以為常、不值得大驚小怪的事情，在人類學家的眼中，可能都是解讀這個社會/群體的關鍵。當然，現在也有很多人類學家在研究自己的社會，但是從既有框架抽離，對現象進行抽象思考及分析的過程仍然是必要的。
一樣是遭受文化衝擊，但對國際志工而言，文化衝擊預言著工作場域上會面臨的困難，而這些困難最後可能影響到計畫的成效。最常見的錯誤是以自己原有的做事方式套到受援單位 / 國的脈絡裡，例如時間習慣、效率要求、工作態度等、行政程序等等，許多的受援國對這些工作上的倫理與態度與我們完全不同，在他者的工作系統裡以原有的工作習慣去推斷、估測和要求，挫折和不如預期的回饋就是可以想見的了。
2. 不確定性與質疑
在文化衝擊和真正身處田野地/駐地之後，我們在行前所擬的論文proposal/田野可行性計畫/ 駐地專案計畫可能看起來根本就是廢紙一疊。人類學家可能很恐慌的發現自己對當地的掌握完全不對盤，就算讀過再多的民族誌 (當然也有跟我一樣，出去前只讀過一兩本民族誌這麼混的人類學家，然後他之後的路途就會很艱辛)，到田野地裡好像又是另一回事，因為紙上的材料往往是爬梳、整理過後的結果，但真實生活卻是飄忽、朝令夕改、糾結交纏和曖昧模糊的。我們可能知道這社會將哪些人認定為親屬、哪些人不能與哪些人結婚、他們如何看待錢財、他們覺得人會生病是因為靈魂出了問題......但是文化的層面包羅萬象，層層疊疊那麼多，我們又怎麼能在千頭萬緒中捉住一個大概的印象呢? 像是，誰會答應我的訪談這件事，就可能牽扯到性別、階級、政治立場、所屬組織群性....等，如此一來，我收集的資訊代表的是哪一群人呢? 我們又真的能夠從這一些見解中推論一個社會的全貌嗎? 一直到現在這個問題依然令我疑惑。
同樣的，在志工場域中，如我目前所感受到的，古蹟保存是一個政府、非營利組織、人民、外資、觀光客、各樣專家都參與其中的議題(管理上叫做利害關係人steak holder)，但更隱而不見的細微層面還有政黨間的政治角力、組織與其他組織的關係、組織內部的人際關係及運作、民眾與官方組織的關係、民眾對於財產、文物的觀念及期待、民眾對於生活的想像、各方對於古蹟的想像..........在搞清楚這些local關係前，在搞清楚這些網絡與權力關係前，我真的可能做我的業務嗎?
最後，此時語言也成為一個重要的問題---當我們去的國家書的是我們的第三、第四語言或根本沒學過的語言時，我們要如何溝通，如何抓住言談裡微妙的細節呢? 工作進度表可能會朝一個全然開放的方向進行，但或許那也不一定是件壞事.....峰迴路轉之下，我們可能會一再翻修我們對田野/駐地的理解和想法，並演伸出更多概念。
3. 孤單
這應該是所有海外生活的共病，看似與工作無關，但其實私人場域往往是最影響工作的關鍵。在這個存在浮動的時刻，關鍵報導人/ 同事、主管和夥伴的出現是最好的運氣。處理孤單的重要性說不定在種種問題中居冠，但如何處理其實與人格特質有關，也或許是如此，出田野才會成為人類學家的成年禮，海外志工也會成為許多人「找自己」以及「與自己相處」的選項和功課吧。
(題外話，在搜尋圖片時，不管打西語、葡語、英/法語顯示出的都是一個人看海的圖片....莫非一個人看海是孤寂的意符？)
4. 身分定位模糊
相信有出過田野的人應該都不陌生，那種「我到底在這裡幹嘛」、「我到底要做什麼?」、「阿現在咧?」的感覺，還有找到報導人以後那種「對不起可是我又來煩你了」，覺得在地人一定覺得你是個煩人的腦包，什麼都搞不清楚又愛問、永遠都進入不了狀況、還有「他到底在這裡幹嘛?」這樣的大哉問。(別問我們，我們後來也不太知道自己為什麼會在這裡，來幹嘛，要做什麼)
身為一個外來者，我們如同浮萍，在田野中往往沒有身分、沒有角色、也沒有類別，無法被分類對當地人還有對自己來說都是一項焦慮，而且代表你與在地深具鴻溝，這也是為什麼人類學家對獲致一個身分(被納入親屬、被編入年齡組、被「誇讚」比哥倫比亞更哥倫比亞)會這麼欣喜若狂，因為能成功被分類就代表被接受獲認同，成為這個社群中的一員之後，便更可以貼近的觀察這個社會。(當然也不是每個人都想成為「社群之中的一員」，並認為只有如此才能做研究。關於此學界有許多辯論，在此略過不提。)
而國際志工，特別是國合會志工，身分定位模糊也是幾乎每都會遇到的issue: 首先這與國合會這個組織的模糊性有關。作為一個資金來自政府的非政府組織，國合會到底是官方還是非官方組織? 我們要的援助發展最終目標是外交還是人道? 這關係著志工業務的priority 是外交目的(文化交流與提升台灣形象、穩固雙邊關係)或是援助發展(但什麼是援助發展，我其實還不知道)。ICDF駐地志工常有的疑問，有一個便是志工在自己的業務之外常會被要求支援大使館和技術團的活動，這些到底算不算是志工業務的一部分呢? 志工有這個責任嗎? 但就算沒有，志工可以不理會這個人情嗎? 我所知道的是，目前國合會也處於一個轉型的階段，許多的規章、制度和定位都尚未完備，也都在改變，國合會志工到底是什麼，可能還要一些時間國合會才可以回答得出來。
二來就是志工自己要什麼的問題，志工想要成為怎樣的志工?想做什麼事?有什麼理念? 為什麼來? 這關乎志工對於自己的定位。看似簡單，但實則最難，我覺得探索自己一直都是件很玄的事。
最後當然就是駐國這邊對志工的期待，這也是海外志工微妙的地方。理想上，每個組織都希望前來的外國志工是一個具有不同思維、有著先進技術、觀念、甚至裝備，具有更多資源的夥伴，可以幫卡死停滯的組織找出問題並解決問題，還留下完善的規劃，甚至帶來資金與資源，但這樣的白日夢大都不可能成真。但無論如何，志工總是個免費的人力(雖然不一定總是好用)，因此就算不確定志工來之後可以做什麼，大多數的合作組織還是會申請。基於媒合的過程只能看到志工的簡歷，組織對志工的個性、長才、態度等等幾乎一無所知，於是很常出現的狀況，就是志工到了辦公室以後發覺自己成了冗員，不知道要做什麼、沒事做、或是主管交付的任務與你的專業其實有距離，比方說看到你是擅長IT的就叫你去做圖書館軟體系統、或是看到你曾經研究文化商品(正確說來，是從「文化商品」的形塑來探討「文化詮釋」之研究)就要你去做觀光行銷等。
發生這種狀況怎辦? 只能與主管溝通了。這時認清自己是誰、想做什麼，就是溝通的地基。唯有定位好自己才會知道什麼可以做、什麼不能做、怎麼做比較好。不過，剛抵達都會有一陣定位模糊的日子，摸索可能需要把個月的時間，只能耐心等待，萬事莫急，先好好與自己和外在環境溝通。
5. 反思
在慢慢熟悉我們的田野地後，慢慢的我們終於開始看到民族誌中描述的一些現象、一些價值觀或是態度，原先模糊、抽象而遙遠的民族誌開始變得清晰，我們開始以自己的經驗對照檢視作者的敘述：真的是這樣嗎？ 他提出的論述和我所看到的現象一樣嗎？如果Taussig 在1970年代就開始書寫哥倫比亞的暴力，我在2010看到的哥倫比亞社會依然是這個樣子嗎？如果人類學家在七零和八零年代亞馬遜醫療民族誌重的是社群、巫醫與醫藥三者的社會關係，2010的今天，在大多數社群已經無法與外在社會脫離關係、亞馬遜流域走向觀光化、原住民意識發展、傳統醫學經歷打壓又開始復興之後，亞馬遜的傳統醫療的現況又是如何？我們該將它放在社會的哪個位置？
我們開始反思、修正自己原有的架構、田野方法、理論取向，甚至整個推翻歸零，重新思考。我認為這是田野最迷人之處，能夠開始修正，代表已經進入了正軌，或許擁有很多迷惑，大多時候不知道自己所掌握的證據是否足夠、推論是否和邏輯、是否真正瞭解當地人的想法，或許更接近真實，或許沒有(抑或，真實或客觀根本不存在)，但至少此時，我們已經走在路上。
國際志工也是一樣的，我們抱著一些理想抱負來這裡，想著可以做一些事，但我們可以完成什麼呢？我們的存在對在地真的有幫助嗎？或是造成在地的麻煩呢？我們所做的事情會留下來嗎？會改變當地人的某些觀念嗎？改變對當地人真的有益嗎？我們所做的真的能解決某些問題嗎？增進的是大家的福祉或是某群人的福祉？在嘗試做一些小事情並開始遇到重重困難、做的事情好像並沒有太大的效用、當地人對我們所提出的計畫興趣缺缺時，我們開始反思。
當然國際志工和人類學家的目標不同，一個是「和當地人一起做一些事情」，一個是研究當地並整理出一套系統與邏輯；一個有著明確的行動目標，一個則是學理目 標。但外來者的身分以及對在地性的掌握，都是兩者最無法避免，也一直需要反省的課題， 台灣人道援助的歷史並不長，對人道援助的認知不停地在調整，相較之下也少有相關的教育來反思人道援助的定位，因此一直以來，就我的感覺，總是難以看清自己 的權力來源以及倫理定位，而人道援助又是這麼一個「高尚」的議題，是「幫」，是「援助」，這樣根本於權力位階上的不平等可能發展成「給」、「同情」、甚至 「施捨」，而當受援一方不願意接受時，就產生了狗咬呂洞賓，不識好人心等等的挫折與焦慮。人類學(至少是台灣的人類學)一直避免的介入，正好就是發展援助 的基本核心，但如何「援助」，該做什麼，做了又會造成什麼後果，我認為還是需要有在地知識的支持才能去做正確的評估。
並且，無論是人類學知識的累積或是發展援助的成效，不過十年二十年幾乎是看不出來的，只能謹記我們是不停地累積、修正、嘗試可能和散播種子，才能面對一事無成的挫折。
6. 認同危機
不是每個人都會走到這步，但還是有某些人會。田野/ 駐地裡總是有許多狀況，我們可能會因為這些狀況發現一個討厭的自己、一個自己無法接受的形象或面貌，有些人決定放棄田野/ 解約，有些人決定留下來與自己的破碎奮戰，所以有些人類學家田野做到最後放棄學位改行當巫師、有人改宗信了別的教、有人再也不想回田野地；所以聖露西亞的志工解約率高於50%......這些都沒什麼好或不好，說真的保住自己的健康(無論身心) 最重要，不過真誠面對，總是會留下些什麼。這部分牽涉到心理學，不在我可以唬爛的範圍，有修為的各位就自己體會了。
這是來駐地一個月的一些心得，摻雜著我過去的田野經驗。說實在我在駐地的這個月真的就是一片空白，因為腳傷也沒有做到任何田野(其實我連田野題目都沒想好)，寫這篇東西大概就是安慰自己用的吧....
原作者： Reb
2013-09-19
海外帶職宣教如何預備? 宣教導師提十建議
原文網址http://chinese.gospelherald.com/news/mis-22786-0/#.UjqwMNIwrlM
帶職宣教如何預備? 宣教導師提十建議
田偉 / 基督日報記者
2013年09月18日12時50分 (PST)
能解決經濟與人力問題的帶職宣教異軍突起，不少專業及從商的華人信徒有意加入帶職宣教大軍。面對跨界挑戰，信徒要如何自我預備？有資深宣教導師提出十大中肯建議。
前神州華傳國際總主任林安國牧師在最新一期《華傳》發表文章，有鑒於帶職宣教備受華人教會推崇，他為有志投身帶職宣教的信徒提出十點寶貴建議，盼成為大家的幫助。
工場：同文化或跨文化工場環境
林牧師表示，帶職宣教原則上是考慮去福音未達之地，因此跨文化的工場比較需求大。例如北非穆民群體、山區少數民族、回教國家…，或正在開放的緬甸及巴基斯坦等地。
「若在跨文化的環境，你是否能適應或有心理的預備？有這方面的經驗或否？家人是否也認同及願意去適應？」他用這一系列問題來檢驗是否有跨文化宣教心志。
若無這種心志，林牧師建議就到中國大陸或海外華人群體中服事。目前在非洲的三百萬華人，歐洲的二百萬華人及中東地區也有很大的華人植堂呼聲及需要，但在這些地區帶職也一樣需要跨文化的心志及裝備。
身份：原居地身份或工場需求身份
林牧師又提及簽證的問題，需要深入調查研究，「帶職宣教士在宣教地的正式身份是什麼？如何取得？若你在原居地已有一個專業，是否可以用這身份申請入境？當地是否一定會需要你的專業？」
從他的經驗來看，有些信徒發現自己的專業與簽證需求不對口後，就改用學生身份申請入大學學習，有些卻以作老師教英文、中文；年紀稍長的或可考慮以退休身份申請居留。
此外，帶職者若擁有不同國籍，也要考慮用什麼國籍申請較能被接納。
呼召：帶職宣教與全職宣教的呼召
林牧師強調無論何種形式的宣教都離不開神的呼召，若清楚神的呼召與帶領，宣教士便不容易因以後的環境及人事變遷所遇到的挫折而灰心或埋怨。
參與：正職或借橋
林牧師還提醒說，用工作簽證到異國他鄉後，帶職宣教士不能完全不參與該職業的操作，以免吃移民官司或成為不好的見證。
為此，帶職宣教士要根據自身情況做好時間分配。例如，是否要用最少的時間作「專業」的工作？或是全時間工作，然後用其他時間才作福音的服事？
經濟：工場自足或海外支援
有些專業在海外甚為吃香，薪酬也理想，甚至提供優厚的福利。但在大部份發展中國家，帶職宣教士也未必靠工作能賺取足夠的生活費。
因此林牧師建議考慮籌募的問題及百份比如何安排，即多少生活費從工場職業所得，多少生活費從原居地籌募等。所幸華人教會對支持帶職宣教士越來越認同及普遍。
後防：參加差會或獨立運作
林牧師又建議所有宣教士加入差會，或者有母會及肢體認同支持及成為後防的禱告關懷力量。
加入差會的好處很多，在工場上有隊工及支援，事工有督導及指導，遇到困難有人扶助及支援，心靈需要有人分擔互勉，不少經濟能獨立的宣教士也覺得參加差會利多於弊。
隊工：本地隊工或宣教隊工
若選擇在本地與當地人組成隊工，帶職宣教士當物色當地教會或本地同工組成合作的隊伍。有一個獨立帶職宣教士起初只有一個人，數年後該地已建立了教會及訓練了一些領袖，隊工漸漸建立起來，但不是每一個帶職者都有這恩賜能在短期內建立起工作或訓練到當地工人，多數人可能需要與當地的教會合作。
差派：教會差派或差會差派
帶職宣教士若自己並非正規宣教士，經濟也不一定由教會籌募，因此不考慮差不差派的事；但也有人選擇直接由教會差派有教會作後防的支援。
林牧師指出教會直接差派的問題是領袖們對工場的認識及支援有不足之處，但差會的人事架構較能在工場產生有效的支援作用；因此帶職宣教士最理想是由母會及差會聯合差派。
訓練：神學訓練或專業訓練
帶職宣教士需要加強基本事工與神學訓練，但正規神學訓練的學科及訓練多數不是針對宣教工場而設，也未必適合。
因此，林牧師建議帶職宣教士揀選一些實用聖經課程及事工訓練，再加上差會提供的宣教及職前訓練便足夠；待到了工場服事一期後，才決定哪一方面的訓練更需要加強。
語言：正規學習或邊做邊學
在外語方面，林牧師表示，帶職宣教士可進入正規語言學校學習一年，然後才開始工作；或是在工作上找機會接觸人群，邊做邊學。
兩種方式都各有千秋，但林牧師更推薦正規學習語言。因為邊做邊學的學習模式往往學到的詞彙只是市場語言或交際語言，對傳福音或更深的心靈接觸，真理分享等都是不足夠的。
若有機會進入語言學校學習一年打好基礎，他相信以後開始帶職事奉更有果效。
林牧師最後總結說，帶職宣教是華人教會目前最好的動員參與宣教策略，華人教會及差會若能在這方面提供更多管道及輔導，即是解決目前工人荒的上上策。
帶職宣教如何預備? 宣教導師提十建議
田偉 / 基督日報記者
2013年09月18日12時50分 (PST)
能解決經濟與人力問題的帶職宣教異軍突起，不少專業及從商的華人信徒有意加入帶職宣教大軍。面對跨界挑戰，信徒要如何自我預備？有資深宣教導師提出十大中肯建議。
前神州華傳國際總主任林安國牧師在最新一期《華傳》發表文章，有鑒於帶職宣教備受華人教會推崇，他為有志投身帶職宣教的信徒提出十點寶貴建議，盼成為大家的幫助。
工場：同文化或跨文化工場環境
林牧師表示，帶職宣教原則上是考慮去福音未達之地，因此跨文化的工場比較需求大。例如北非穆民群體、山區少數民族、回教國家…，或正在開放的緬甸及巴基斯坦等地。
「若在跨文化的環境，你是否能適應或有心理的預備？有這方面的經驗或否？家人是否也認同及願意去適應？」他用這一系列問題來檢驗是否有跨文化宣教心志。
若無這種心志，林牧師建議就到中國大陸或海外華人群體中服事。目前在非洲的三百萬華人，歐洲的二百萬華人及中東地區也有很大的華人植堂呼聲及需要，但在這些地區帶職也一樣需要跨文化的心志及裝備。
身份：原居地身份或工場需求身份
林牧師又提及簽證的問題，需要深入調查研究，「帶職宣教士在宣教地的正式身份是什麼？如何取得？若你在原居地已有一個專業，是否可以用這身份申請入境？當地是否一定會需要你的專業？」
從他的經驗來看，有些信徒發現自己的專業與簽證需求不對口後，就改用學生身份申請入大學學習，有些卻以作老師教英文、中文；年紀稍長的或可考慮以退休身份申請居留。
此外，帶職者若擁有不同國籍，也要考慮用什麼國籍申請較能被接納。
呼召：帶職宣教與全職宣教的呼召
林牧師強調無論何種形式的宣教都離不開神的呼召，若清楚神的呼召與帶領，宣教士便不容易因以後的環境及人事變遷所遇到的挫折而灰心或埋怨。
參與：正職或借橋
林牧師還提醒說，用工作簽證到異國他鄉後，帶職宣教士不能完全不參與該職業的操作，以免吃移民官司或成為不好的見證。
為此，帶職宣教士要根據自身情況做好時間分配。例如，是否要用最少的時間作「專業」的工作？或是全時間工作，然後用其他時間才作福音的服事？
經濟：工場自足或海外支援
有些專業在海外甚為吃香，薪酬也理想，甚至提供優厚的福利。但在大部份發展中國家，帶職宣教士也未必靠工作能賺取足夠的生活費。
因此林牧師建議考慮籌募的問題及百份比如何安排，即多少生活費從工場職業所得，多少生活費從原居地籌募等。所幸華人教會對支持帶職宣教士越來越認同及普遍。
後防：參加差會或獨立運作
林牧師又建議所有宣教士加入差會，或者有母會及肢體認同支持及成為後防的禱告關懷力量。
加入差會的好處很多，在工場上有隊工及支援，事工有督導及指導，遇到困難有人扶助及支援，心靈需要有人分擔互勉，不少經濟能獨立的宣教士也覺得參加差會利多於弊。
隊工：本地隊工或宣教隊工
若選擇在本地與當地人組成隊工，帶職宣教士當物色當地教會或本地同工組成合作的隊伍。有一個獨立帶職宣教士起初只有一個人，數年後該地已建立了教會及訓練了一些領袖，隊工漸漸建立起來，但不是每一個帶職者都有這恩賜能在短期內建立起工作或訓練到當地工人，多數人可能需要與當地的教會合作。
差派：教會差派或差會差派
帶職宣教士若自己並非正規宣教士，經濟也不一定由教會籌募，因此不考慮差不差派的事；但也有人選擇直接由教會差派有教會作後防的支援。
林牧師指出教會直接差派的問題是領袖們對工場的認識及支援有不足之處，但差會的人事架構較能在工場產生有效的支援作用；因此帶職宣教士最理想是由母會及差會聯合差派。
訓練：神學訓練或專業訓練
帶職宣教士需要加強基本事工與神學訓練，但正規神學訓練的學科及訓練多數不是針對宣教工場而設，也未必適合。
因此，林牧師建議帶職宣教士揀選一些實用聖經課程及事工訓練，再加上差會提供的宣教及職前訓練便足夠；待到了工場服事一期後，才決定哪一方面的訓練更需要加強。
語言：正規學習或邊做邊學
在外語方面，林牧師表示，帶職宣教士可進入正規語言學校學習一年，然後才開始工作；或是在工作上找機會接觸人群，邊做邊學。
兩種方式都各有千秋，但林牧師更推薦正規學習語言。因為邊做邊學的學習模式往往學到的詞彙只是市場語言或交際語言，對傳福音或更深的心靈接觸，真理分享等都是不足夠的。
若有機會進入語言學校學習一年打好基礎，他相信以後開始帶職事奉更有果效。
林牧師最後總結說，帶職宣教是華人教會目前最好的動員參與宣教策略，華人教會及差會若能在這方面提供更多管道及輔導，即是解決目前工人荒的上上策。
2013-08-04
作為員警，不執行上級命令是有罪的，但是打不准是無罪的。作為一個心智健全的人，此時此刻，你有把槍口抬高一釐米的主權，這是你應主動承擔的良心義務。
引用：http://www.igotmail.com.tw/top/week/37947
這個故事發生在柏林牆倒塌之後的德國。1991年9月，統一後的柏林法庭上，舉世矚目的柏林圍牆守衛案將要開庭宣判。這次接受審判的是4個年輕人，30歲都不到，他們曾經是柏林牆的東德守衛。
兩年前一個冬夜裡，剛滿20歲的克利斯和一個好朋友，名叫高定，一起偷偷攀爬柏林牆企圖逃向自由。幾聲槍聲響，一顆子彈由克利斯前胸穿入，高定的腳踝被另一顆子彈擊中。克利斯很快就斷了氣。他不知道，他是這堵牆下最後一個遇難者。那個射殺他的東德衛兵，叫英格·亨堜_。當然他也絕沒想到，短短九個月之後，圍牆被柏林人推倒，而自己最終會站在法庭上因為殺人罪而接受審判。
柏林法庭最終的判決是：判處開槍射殺克利斯的衛兵英格·亨堜_三年半徒刑，不予假釋。他的律師辯稱，他們僅僅是執行命令的人，根本沒有選擇的權利，罪不在己。法官當庭指出：“東德的法律要你殺人，可是你明明知道這些唾棄XX而逃亡的人是無辜的，明知他無辜而殺他，就是有罪。作為員警，不執行上級命令是有罪的，但是打不准是無罪的。作為一個心智健全的人，此時此刻，你有把槍口抬高一釐米的主權，這是你應主動承擔的良心義務。
評論：在這個世界上，良知是最高的準則，是不允許用任何藉口來無視的。自然法永遠高於社會法。
2013-07-06
寇紹恩：曾侵華的八國屬靈代表向華人認罪
原文網址
http://chinese.gospelherald.com/news/gen-22335-0/%E6%95%99%E6%9C%83-%E5%85%B6%E4%BB%96-%E5%AF%87%E7%B4%B9%E6%81%A9%EF%BC%9A%E6%9B%BE%E4%BE%B5%E8%8F%AF%E7%9A%84%E5%85%AB%E5%9C%8B%E5%B1%AC%E9%9D%88%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8%E5%90%91%E8%8F%AF%E4%BA%BA%E8%AA%8D%E7%BD%AA-%E5%9F%BA%E7%9D%A3%E6%97%A5%E5%A0%B1#.UdeNFTv7BQN
寇紹恩：曾侵華的八國屬靈代表向華人認罪
李沁欣 / 基督日報記者
2013年07月05日05時01分 (PST)
2013香港「回家」特會有來自全球33個國家的兒女同來聚會，寇紹恩牧師見證了在4日發生的一件大事：特會上華人代表接受了曾侵華的八國屬靈代表的認罪。當他們謙卑的跪在台上、流泪向華人弟兄姐妹承認祖先犯下的罪過時，會場一片哭嚎聲，神重新將他兒女們的心意奪回。
寇紹恩牧師分享說：「7月4日早上，一大群來自英，美，法，德，意，日，俄，奧當年八國聯軍諸國的弟兄姐妹，因著神的感動，來參加回家聚會，謙卑的跪在台上，為170年前，他們的祖先因著經濟利益，發動一次次戰爭，藉著洋槍大砲，把福音和鴉片一起送回中國，使得至今在華人心中，基督教就是洋教，是帝國主義的侵略品，他們為此誠心認罪悔改。」
華人領袖團接受道歉，並為祖先曾殺害多名西方宣教士而認罪，呼求神醫治這歷史傷痕。
寇紹恩牧師對此說：「對在場超過萬人華人而言，雖有震撼，但更多的應該是感動，感動他們謙卑的重提舊事，到底，這是近兩世紀前，歷史上的事了。」
另外4日晚上，另一群日本的基督徒，同樣因著聖靈的感動，為著二次大戰時，對華人的燒殺擄掠，流泪認罪道歉時，會場也有很不一樣的回應，感同身受的錐心之痛，使得彼此起落的哭嚎聲，迴盪整個會場！
寇紹恩牧師還見證現場一位屬靈父老含泪宣告饒恕日本曾經的罪行時，帶出的不只感動，這個宣告中充滿震撼。寇牧師感慨說：「這一代華人，與日本人的恩怨情仇，像一出演不完的連續劇！...為什麼饒恕呢？憑什麼饒恕呢？饒恕，因為看清楚撒旦的詭計！」
寇紹恩牧師對此也說：「我們的仇敵不是人，在那许多殘暴，淫惡，非人性的行徑背後其實是魔鬼的作為。饒恕，因為耶穌已經附上代價。那许多的受害人，耶穌一個一個把他們抱在懷中，因耶穌受的鞭傷，他們一點點被醫治，人欠我們的，耶穌加倍都還了。」
看到因著八國代表的謙卑，聖靈降下的工作，寇牧師把榮耀歸給神：「感謝主，今天，神釋放華人生命中累代苦毒的轄制！這又大又難的事，十字架做成了！哈利路亞！」
http://chinese.gospelherald.com/news/gen-22335-0/%E6%95%99%E6%9C%83-%E5%85%B6%E4%BB%96-%E5%AF%87%E7%B4%B9%E6%81%A9%EF%BC%9A%E6%9B%BE%E4%BE%B5%E8%8F%AF%E7%9A%84%E5%85%AB%E5%9C%8B%E5%B1%AC%E9%9D%88%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8%E5%90%91%E8%8F%AF%E4%BA%BA%E8%AA%8D%E7%BD%AA-%E5%9F%BA%E7%9D%A3%E6%97%A5%E5%A0%B1#.UdeNFTv7BQN
寇紹恩：曾侵華的八國屬靈代表向華人認罪
李沁欣 / 基督日報記者
2013年07月05日05時01分 (PST)
2013香港「回家」特會有來自全球33個國家的兒女同來聚會，寇紹恩牧師見證了在4日發生的一件大事：特會上華人代表接受了曾侵華的八國屬靈代表的認罪。當他們謙卑的跪在台上、流泪向華人弟兄姐妹承認祖先犯下的罪過時，會場一片哭嚎聲，神重新將他兒女們的心意奪回。
寇紹恩牧師分享說：「7月4日早上，一大群來自英，美，法，德，意，日，俄，奧當年八國聯軍諸國的弟兄姐妹，因著神的感動，來參加回家聚會，謙卑的跪在台上，為170年前，他們的祖先因著經濟利益，發動一次次戰爭，藉著洋槍大砲，把福音和鴉片一起送回中國，使得至今在華人心中，基督教就是洋教，是帝國主義的侵略品，他們為此誠心認罪悔改。」
華人領袖團接受道歉，並為祖先曾殺害多名西方宣教士而認罪，呼求神醫治這歷史傷痕。
寇紹恩牧師對此說：「對在場超過萬人華人而言，雖有震撼，但更多的應該是感動，感動他們謙卑的重提舊事，到底，這是近兩世紀前，歷史上的事了。」
另外4日晚上，另一群日本的基督徒，同樣因著聖靈的感動，為著二次大戰時，對華人的燒殺擄掠，流泪認罪道歉時，會場也有很不一樣的回應，感同身受的錐心之痛，使得彼此起落的哭嚎聲，迴盪整個會場！
寇紹恩牧師還見證現場一位屬靈父老含泪宣告饒恕日本曾經的罪行時，帶出的不只感動，這個宣告中充滿震撼。寇牧師感慨說：「這一代華人，與日本人的恩怨情仇，像一出演不完的連續劇！...為什麼饒恕呢？憑什麼饒恕呢？饒恕，因為看清楚撒旦的詭計！」
寇紹恩牧師對此也說：「我們的仇敵不是人，在那许多殘暴，淫惡，非人性的行徑背後其實是魔鬼的作為。饒恕，因為耶穌已經附上代價。那许多的受害人，耶穌一個一個把他們抱在懷中，因耶穌受的鞭傷，他們一點點被醫治，人欠我們的，耶穌加倍都還了。」
看到因著八國代表的謙卑，聖靈降下的工作，寇牧師把榮耀歸給神：「感謝主，今天，神釋放華人生命中累代苦毒的轄制！這又大又難的事，十字架做成了！哈利路亞！」
2013-06-17
外國人很難成為真正的中國人（難以適應）You’ll never be Chinese
評論：中國是：把在中國的外國魚養大，再把外國魚吃掉。
Original source http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china/#.Ub54fOf7BQN
You’ll never be Chinese
by Mark Kitto / AUGUST 8, 2012 / 794 COMMENTS
Why I’m leaving the country I loved.
Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving.
I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream. “But China is an economic miracle: record number of people lifted out of poverty in record time… year on year ten per cent growth… exports… imports… infrastructure… investment…saved the world during the 2008 financial crisis…” The superlatives roll on. We all know them, roughly.
Don’t you think, with all the growth and infrastructure, the material wealth, let alone saving the world like some kind of financial whizz James Bond, that China would be a happier and healthier country? At least better than the country emerging from decades of stultifying state control that I met and fell in love with in 1986 when I first came here as a student? I don’t think it is.
When I arrived in Beijing for the second year of my Chinese degree course, from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), China was communist. Compared to the west, it was backward. There were few cars on the streets, thousands of bicycles, scant streetlights, and countless donkey carts that moved at the ideal speed for students to clamber on board for a ride back to our dormitories. My “responsible teacher” (a cross between a housemistress and a parole officer) was a fearsome former Red Guard nicknamed Dragon Hou. The basic necessities of daily life: food, drink, clothes and a bicycle, cost peanuts. We lived like kings—or we would have if there had been anything regal to spend our money on. But there wasn’t. One shop, the downtown Friendship Store, sold coffee in tins.
We had the time of our lives, as students do, but it isn’t the pranks and adventures I remember most fondly, not from my current viewpoint, the top of a mountain called Moganshan, 100 miles west of Shanghai, where I have lived for the past seven years.
If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come. Underscoring the optimism was a sense of social obligation for which communism was at least in part responsible, generating either the fantasy that one really could be a selfless socialist, or unity in the face of the reality that there was no such thing.
In 1949 Mao had declared from the top of Tiananmen gate in Beijing: “The Chinese people have stood up.” In the mid-1980s, at long last, they were learning to walk and talk.
One night in January 1987 I watched them, chanting and singing as they marched along snow-covered streets from the university quarter towards Tiananmen Square. It was the first of many student demonstrations that would lead to the infamous “incident” in June 1989.
One man was largely responsible for the optimism of those heady days: Deng Xiaoping, rightly known as the architect of modern China. Deng made China what it is today. He also ordered the tanks into Beijing in 1989, of course, and there left a legacy that will haunt the Chinese Communist Party to its dying day. That “incident,” as the Chinese call it—when they have to, which is seldom since the Party has done such a thorough job of deleting it from public memory—coincided with my final exams. My classmates and I wondered if we had spent four years of our lives learning a language for nothing.
It did not take long for Deng to put his country back on the road he had chosen. He persuaded the world that it would be beneficial to forgive him for the Tiananmen “incident” and engage with China, rather than treating her like a pariah. He also came up with a plan to ensure nothing similar happened again, at least on his watch. The world obliged and the Chinese people took what he offered. Both have benefited financially.
When I returned to China in 1996, to begin the life and career I had long dreamed about, I found the familiar air of optimism, but there was a subtle difference: a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community. The excitement was more like the eager anticipation I felt once I had signed a deal (I began my China career as a metals trader), sure that I was going to bank a profit, rather than the thrill that something truly big was about to happen.
A deal had been struck. Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”
Twenty years later, everything is not all right.
I must stress that this indictment has nothing to do with the trajectory of my own China career, which went from metal trading to building a multi-million dollar magazine publishing business that was seized by the government in 2004, followed by retreat to this mountain hideaway of Moganshan where my Chinese wife and I have built a small business centred on a coffee shop and three guesthouses, which in turn has given me enough anecdotes and gossip to fill half a page of Prospect every month for several years. That our current business could suffer the same fate as my magazines if the local government decides not to renew our short-term leases (for which we have to beg every three years) does, however, contribute to my decision not to remain in China.
During the course of my magazine business, my state-owned competitor (enemy is more accurate) told me in private that they studied every issue I produced so they could learn from me. They appreciated my contribution to Chinese media. They proceeded to do everything in their power to destroy me. In Moganshan our local government masters send messages of private thanks for my contribution to the resurrection of the village as a tourist destination, but also clearly state that I am an exception to their unwritten rule that foreigners (who originally built the village in the early 1900s) are not welcome back to live in it, and are only allowed to stay for weekends.
But this article is not personal. I want to give you my opinion of the state of China, based on my time living here, in the three biggest cities and one tiny rural community, and explain why I am leaving it.
* * *
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof. The politically correct term in China is “economic benefit.” The country and its people, on average, are far wealthier than they were 25 years ago. Traditional family culture, thanks to 60 years of self-serving socialism followed by another 30 of the “one child policy,” has become a “me” culture. Except where there is economic benefit to be had, communities do not act together, and when they do it is only to ensure equal financial compensation for the pollution, or the government-sponsored illegal land grab, or the poisoned children. Social status, so important in Chinese culture and more so thanks to those 60 years of communism, is defined by the display of wealth. Cars, apartments, personal jewellery, clothing, pets: all must be new and shiny, and carry a famous foreign brand name. In the small rural village where we live I am not asked about my health or that of my family, I am asked how much money our small business is making, how much our car cost, our dog.
The trouble with money of course, and showing off how much you have, is that you upset the people who have very little. Hence the Party’s campaign to promote a “harmonious society,” its vast spending on urban and rural beautification projects, and reliance on the sale of “land rights” more than personal taxes.
Once you’ve purchased the necessary baubles, you’ll want to invest the rest somewhere safe, preferably with a decent return—all the more important because one day you will have to pay your own medical bills and pension, besides overseas school and college fees. But there is nowhere to put it except into property or under the mattress. The stock markets are rigged, the banks operate in a way that is non-commercial, and the yuan is still strictly non-convertible. While the privileged, powerful and well-connected transfer their wealth overseas via legally questionable channels, the remainder can only buy yet more apartments or thicker mattresses. The result is the biggest property bubble in history, which when it pops will sound like a thousand firework accidents.
In brief, Chinese property prices have rocketed; owning a home has become unaffordable for the young urban workers; and vast residential developments continue to be built across the country whose units are primarily sold as investments, not homes. If you own a property you are more than likely to own at least three. Many of our friends do. If you don’t own a property, you are stuck.
When the bubble pops, or in the remote chance that it deflates gradually, the wealth the Party gave the people will deflate too. The promise will have been broken. And there’ll still be the medical bills, pensions and school fees. The people will want their money back, or a say in their future, which amounts to a political voice. If they are denied, they will cease to be harmonious.
Meanwhile, what of the ethnic minorities and the factory workers, the people on whom it is more convenient for the government to dispense overwhelming force rather than largesse? If an outburst of ethnic or labour discontent coincides with the collapse of the property market, and you throw in a scandal like the melamine tainted milk of 2008, or a fatal train crash that shows up massive, high level corruption, as in Wenzhou in 2011, and suddenly the harmonious society is likely to become a chorus of discontent.
How will the Party deal with that? How will it lead?
Unfortunately it has forgotten. The government is so scared of the people it prefers not to lead them.
In rural China, village level decisions that require higher authorisation are passed up the chain of command, sometimes all the way to Beijing, and returned with the note attached: “You decide.” The Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat. The country is ruled from behind closed doors, a building without an address or a telephone number. The people in that building do not allow the leaders they appoint to actually lead. Witness Grandpa Wen, the nickname for the current, soon to be outgoing, prime minister. He is either a puppet and a clever bluff, or a man who genuinely wants to do the right thing. His proposals for reform (aired in a 2010 interview on CNN, censored within China) are good, but he will never be able to enact them, and he knows it.
To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible. As a publisher I used to deal with officials who listened to the people in one of the wings of that building. They always spoke as if there was a monster in the next room, one that cannot be named. It was “them” or “our leaders.” Once or twice they called it the “China Publishing Group.” No such thing exists. I searched hard for it. It is a chimera.
In that building are the people who, according to pundits, will be in charge of what they call the Chinese Century. “China is the next superpower,” we’re told. “Accept it. Deal with it.” How do you deal with a faceless leader, who when called upon to adjudicate in an international dispute sends the message: “You decide”?
It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear. As the Chinese like to say, they only want to “regain their rightful position.” While there is no dispute that China was once the major world superpower, there are two fundamental problems with the idea that it should therefore regain that “rightful position.”
A key reason China achieved primacy was its size. As it is today, China was, and always will be, big. (China loves “big.” “Big” is good. If a Chinese person ever asks you what you think of China, just say “It’s big,” and they will be delighted.) If you are the biggest, and physical size matters as it did in the days before microchips, you tend to dominate. Once in charge the Chinese sat back and accepted tribute from their suzerain and vassal states, such as Tibet. If trouble was brewing beyond its borders that might threaten the security or interests of China itself, the troublemakers were set against each other or paid off.
The second reason the rightful position idea is misguided is that the world in which China was the superpower did not include the Americas, an enlightened Europe or a modern Africa. The world does not want to live in a Chinese century, just as much of it doesn’t like living in an American one. China, politically, culturally and as a society, is inward looking. It does not welcome intruders—unless they happen to be militarily superior and invade from the north, as did two imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911), who became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien. All non-Chinese are, to the Chinese, aliens, in a mildly derogatory sense. The polite word is “Outsider.” The Chinese are on “The Inside.” Like anyone who does not like what is going on outside—the weather, a loud argument, a natural disaster—the Chinese can shut the door on it. Maybe they’ll stick up a note: “Knock when you’ve decided how to deal with it.”
Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise. Controlled by people with conflicting interests, China’s government struggles to be decisive in domestic issues, let alone foreign ones. Witness the postponement of the leadership handover thanks to the Bo Xilai scandal. And the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken. (I know that sounds crazy. It is meant to. It is true.)
A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe.
A China that leads the world will not offer the chance to be Chinese, because it is impossible to become Chinese. Nor is the Chinese Communist Party entirely averse to condoning slavery. It has encouraged its own people to work like slaves to produce goods for western companies, to earn the foreign currency that has fed its economic boom. (How ironic that the Party manifesto promised to kick the slave-driving foreigners out of China.) And the Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose. (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed.) As for resources extracted from Africa, they go to China.
There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones. The Party’s propaganda arm created the term “one hundred years of humiliation” to define the period from the Opium Wars to the Liberation, when foreign powers did indeed abuse and coerce a weak imperial Qing government. The second world war is called the War of Resistance Against Japan. To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.
The alternative scenario to a world dominated by an aggrieved China is hardly less bleak and illustrates how China already dominates the world and its economy. That is the increasing likelihood that there will be upheaval in China within the next few years, sparked by that property crash. When it happens it will be sudden, like all such events. Sun Yat Sen’s 1911 revolution began when someone set off a bomb by accident. Some commentators say it will lead to revolution, or a collapse of the state. There are good grounds. Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again. Take the recent cut in interest rates, which was done to boost domestic consumption, which won’t boost itself until the Party sorts out the healthcare system, which it hasn’t the money for because it has been invested in American debt, which it can’t sell without hurting the dollar, which would raise the value of the yuan and harm exports, which will shut factories and put people out of work and threaten social stability.
I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines. Whatever form it takes, it will bring to an end China’s record-breaking run of economic growth that has supposedly driven the world’s economy and today is seen as our only hope of salvation from recession.
* * *
Fear of violent revolution or domestic upheaval, with a significant proportion of that violence sure to be directed at foreigners, is not the main reason I am leaving China, though I shan’t deny it is one of them.
Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.
The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.
The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.
An option is to move back to a major Chinese city and send our children to an expensive international school—none of which offer boarding—but I would be worried about pollution, and have to get a proper job, most likely something to do with foreign business to China, which my conscience would find hard.
I pity the youth of China that cannot attend the international schools in the cities (which have to set limits on how many Chinese children they accept) and whose parents cannot afford to send them to school overseas, or do not have access to the special schools for the Party privileged. China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible.
The Party does include millions of enlightened officials who understand that something must be done to avert a crisis. I have met some of them. If China is to avoid upheaval then it is up to them to change the Party from within, but they face a long uphill struggle, and time is short.
I have also encountered hundreds of well-rounded, wise Chinese people with a modern world view, people who could, and would willingly, help their motherland face the issues that are growing into state-shaking problems. It is unlikely they will be given the chance. I fear for some of them who might ask for it, just as my classmates and I feared for our Chinese friends while we took our final exams at SOAS in 1989.
I read about Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangchen and Liu Xiaobo on Weibo, the closely monitored Chinese equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, where a post only has to be up for a few minutes to go viral. My wife had never heard of them until she started using the site. The censors will never completely master it. (The day my wife began reading Weibo was also the day she told me she had overcome her concerns about leaving China for the UK.) There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese who “follow” such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail. That’ll be a good time to become Chinese. It might even be possible.
You’ll never be Chinese
by Mark Kitto / AUGUST 8, 2012 / 794 COMMENTS
Why I’m leaving the country I loved.
Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving.
I won’t be rushing back either. I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream. “But China is an economic miracle: record number of people lifted out of poverty in record time… year on year ten per cent growth… exports… imports… infrastructure… investment…saved the world during the 2008 financial crisis…” The superlatives roll on. We all know them, roughly.
Don’t you think, with all the growth and infrastructure, the material wealth, let alone saving the world like some kind of financial whizz James Bond, that China would be a happier and healthier country? At least better than the country emerging from decades of stultifying state control that I met and fell in love with in 1986 when I first came here as a student? I don’t think it is.
When I arrived in Beijing for the second year of my Chinese degree course, from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), China was communist. Compared to the west, it was backward. There were few cars on the streets, thousands of bicycles, scant streetlights, and countless donkey carts that moved at the ideal speed for students to clamber on board for a ride back to our dormitories. My “responsible teacher” (a cross between a housemistress and a parole officer) was a fearsome former Red Guard nicknamed Dragon Hou. The basic necessities of daily life: food, drink, clothes and a bicycle, cost peanuts. We lived like kings—or we would have if there had been anything regal to spend our money on. But there wasn’t. One shop, the downtown Friendship Store, sold coffee in tins.
We had the time of our lives, as students do, but it isn’t the pranks and adventures I remember most fondly, not from my current viewpoint, the top of a mountain called Moganshan, 100 miles west of Shanghai, where I have lived for the past seven years.
If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come. Underscoring the optimism was a sense of social obligation for which communism was at least in part responsible, generating either the fantasy that one really could be a selfless socialist, or unity in the face of the reality that there was no such thing.
In 1949 Mao had declared from the top of Tiananmen gate in Beijing: “The Chinese people have stood up.” In the mid-1980s, at long last, they were learning to walk and talk.
One night in January 1987 I watched them, chanting and singing as they marched along snow-covered streets from the university quarter towards Tiananmen Square. It was the first of many student demonstrations that would lead to the infamous “incident” in June 1989.
One man was largely responsible for the optimism of those heady days: Deng Xiaoping, rightly known as the architect of modern China. Deng made China what it is today. He also ordered the tanks into Beijing in 1989, of course, and there left a legacy that will haunt the Chinese Communist Party to its dying day. That “incident,” as the Chinese call it—when they have to, which is seldom since the Party has done such a thorough job of deleting it from public memory—coincided with my final exams. My classmates and I wondered if we had spent four years of our lives learning a language for nothing.
It did not take long for Deng to put his country back on the road he had chosen. He persuaded the world that it would be beneficial to forgive him for the Tiananmen “incident” and engage with China, rather than treating her like a pariah. He also came up with a plan to ensure nothing similar happened again, at least on his watch. The world obliged and the Chinese people took what he offered. Both have benefited financially.
When I returned to China in 1996, to begin the life and career I had long dreamed about, I found the familiar air of optimism, but there was a subtle difference: a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community. The excitement was more like the eager anticipation I felt once I had signed a deal (I began my China career as a metals trader), sure that I was going to bank a profit, rather than the thrill that something truly big was about to happen.
A deal had been struck. Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”
Twenty years later, everything is not all right.
I must stress that this indictment has nothing to do with the trajectory of my own China career, which went from metal trading to building a multi-million dollar magazine publishing business that was seized by the government in 2004, followed by retreat to this mountain hideaway of Moganshan where my Chinese wife and I have built a small business centred on a coffee shop and three guesthouses, which in turn has given me enough anecdotes and gossip to fill half a page of Prospect every month for several years. That our current business could suffer the same fate as my magazines if the local government decides not to renew our short-term leases (for which we have to beg every three years) does, however, contribute to my decision not to remain in China.
During the course of my magazine business, my state-owned competitor (enemy is more accurate) told me in private that they studied every issue I produced so they could learn from me. They appreciated my contribution to Chinese media. They proceeded to do everything in their power to destroy me. In Moganshan our local government masters send messages of private thanks for my contribution to the resurrection of the village as a tourist destination, but also clearly state that I am an exception to their unwritten rule that foreigners (who originally built the village in the early 1900s) are not welcome back to live in it, and are only allowed to stay for weekends.
But this article is not personal. I want to give you my opinion of the state of China, based on my time living here, in the three biggest cities and one tiny rural community, and explain why I am leaving it.
* * *
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof. The politically correct term in China is “economic benefit.” The country and its people, on average, are far wealthier than they were 25 years ago. Traditional family culture, thanks to 60 years of self-serving socialism followed by another 30 of the “one child policy,” has become a “me” culture. Except where there is economic benefit to be had, communities do not act together, and when they do it is only to ensure equal financial compensation for the pollution, or the government-sponsored illegal land grab, or the poisoned children. Social status, so important in Chinese culture and more so thanks to those 60 years of communism, is defined by the display of wealth. Cars, apartments, personal jewellery, clothing, pets: all must be new and shiny, and carry a famous foreign brand name. In the small rural village where we live I am not asked about my health or that of my family, I am asked how much money our small business is making, how much our car cost, our dog.
The trouble with money of course, and showing off how much you have, is that you upset the people who have very little. Hence the Party’s campaign to promote a “harmonious society,” its vast spending on urban and rural beautification projects, and reliance on the sale of “land rights” more than personal taxes.
Once you’ve purchased the necessary baubles, you’ll want to invest the rest somewhere safe, preferably with a decent return—all the more important because one day you will have to pay your own medical bills and pension, besides overseas school and college fees. But there is nowhere to put it except into property or under the mattress. The stock markets are rigged, the banks operate in a way that is non-commercial, and the yuan is still strictly non-convertible. While the privileged, powerful and well-connected transfer their wealth overseas via legally questionable channels, the remainder can only buy yet more apartments or thicker mattresses. The result is the biggest property bubble in history, which when it pops will sound like a thousand firework accidents.
In brief, Chinese property prices have rocketed; owning a home has become unaffordable for the young urban workers; and vast residential developments continue to be built across the country whose units are primarily sold as investments, not homes. If you own a property you are more than likely to own at least three. Many of our friends do. If you don’t own a property, you are stuck.
When the bubble pops, or in the remote chance that it deflates gradually, the wealth the Party gave the people will deflate too. The promise will have been broken. And there’ll still be the medical bills, pensions and school fees. The people will want their money back, or a say in their future, which amounts to a political voice. If they are denied, they will cease to be harmonious.
Meanwhile, what of the ethnic minorities and the factory workers, the people on whom it is more convenient for the government to dispense overwhelming force rather than largesse? If an outburst of ethnic or labour discontent coincides with the collapse of the property market, and you throw in a scandal like the melamine tainted milk of 2008, or a fatal train crash that shows up massive, high level corruption, as in Wenzhou in 2011, and suddenly the harmonious society is likely to become a chorus of discontent.
How will the Party deal with that? How will it lead?
Unfortunately it has forgotten. The government is so scared of the people it prefers not to lead them.
In rural China, village level decisions that require higher authorisation are passed up the chain of command, sometimes all the way to Beijing, and returned with the note attached: “You decide.” The Party only steps to the fore where its power or personal wealth is under direct threat. The country is ruled from behind closed doors, a building without an address or a telephone number. The people in that building do not allow the leaders they appoint to actually lead. Witness Grandpa Wen, the nickname for the current, soon to be outgoing, prime minister. He is either a puppet and a clever bluff, or a man who genuinely wants to do the right thing. His proposals for reform (aired in a 2010 interview on CNN, censored within China) are good, but he will never be able to enact them, and he knows it.
To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible. As a publisher I used to deal with officials who listened to the people in one of the wings of that building. They always spoke as if there was a monster in the next room, one that cannot be named. It was “them” or “our leaders.” Once or twice they called it the “China Publishing Group.” No such thing exists. I searched hard for it. It is a chimera.
In that building are the people who, according to pundits, will be in charge of what they call the Chinese Century. “China is the next superpower,” we’re told. “Accept it. Deal with it.” How do you deal with a faceless leader, who when called upon to adjudicate in an international dispute sends the message: “You decide”?
It is often argued that China led the world once before, so we have nothing to fear. As the Chinese like to say, they only want to “regain their rightful position.” While there is no dispute that China was once the major world superpower, there are two fundamental problems with the idea that it should therefore regain that “rightful position.”
A key reason China achieved primacy was its size. As it is today, China was, and always will be, big. (China loves “big.” “Big” is good. If a Chinese person ever asks you what you think of China, just say “It’s big,” and they will be delighted.) If you are the biggest, and physical size matters as it did in the days before microchips, you tend to dominate. Once in charge the Chinese sat back and accepted tribute from their suzerain and vassal states, such as Tibet. If trouble was brewing beyond its borders that might threaten the security or interests of China itself, the troublemakers were set against each other or paid off.
The second reason the rightful position idea is misguided is that the world in which China was the superpower did not include the Americas, an enlightened Europe or a modern Africa. The world does not want to live in a Chinese century, just as much of it doesn’t like living in an American one. China, politically, culturally and as a society, is inward looking. It does not welcome intruders—unless they happen to be militarily superior and invade from the north, as did two imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Qing (1644-1911), who became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. Moreover, the fates of the Mongols, who became the Yuan, and Manchu, who became the Qing, provide the ultimate deterrent: “Invade us and be consumed from the inside,” rather like the movie Alien. All non-Chinese are, to the Chinese, aliens, in a mildly derogatory sense. The polite word is “Outsider.” The Chinese are on “The Inside.” Like anyone who does not like what is going on outside—the weather, a loud argument, a natural disaster—the Chinese can shut the door on it. Maybe they’ll stick up a note: “Knock when you’ve decided how to deal with it.”
Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise. Controlled by people with conflicting interests, China’s government struggles to be decisive in domestic issues, let alone foreign ones. Witness the postponement of the leadership handover thanks to the Bo Xilai scandal. And the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken. (I know that sounds crazy. It is meant to. It is true.)
A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe.
A China that leads the world will not offer the chance to be Chinese, because it is impossible to become Chinese. Nor is the Chinese Communist Party entirely averse to condoning slavery. It has encouraged its own people to work like slaves to produce goods for western companies, to earn the foreign currency that has fed its economic boom. (How ironic that the Party manifesto promised to kick the slave-driving foreigners out of China.) And the Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose. (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed.) As for resources extracted from Africa, they go to China.
There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment. Fevered nationalism is one of its cornerstones. The Party’s propaganda arm created the term “one hundred years of humiliation” to define the period from the Opium Wars to the Liberation, when foreign powers did indeed abuse and coerce a weak imperial Qing government. The second world war is called the War of Resistance Against Japan. To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf.
The alternative scenario to a world dominated by an aggrieved China is hardly less bleak and illustrates how China already dominates the world and its economy. That is the increasing likelihood that there will be upheaval in China within the next few years, sparked by that property crash. When it happens it will be sudden, like all such events. Sun Yat Sen’s 1911 revolution began when someone set off a bomb by accident. Some commentators say it will lead to revolution, or a collapse of the state. There are good grounds. Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again. Take the recent cut in interest rates, which was done to boost domestic consumption, which won’t boost itself until the Party sorts out the healthcare system, which it hasn’t the money for because it has been invested in American debt, which it can’t sell without hurting the dollar, which would raise the value of the yuan and harm exports, which will shut factories and put people out of work and threaten social stability.
I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines. Whatever form it takes, it will bring to an end China’s record-breaking run of economic growth that has supposedly driven the world’s economy and today is seen as our only hope of salvation from recession.
* * *
Fear of violent revolution or domestic upheaval, with a significant proportion of that violence sure to be directed at foreigners, is not the main reason I am leaving China, though I shan’t deny it is one of them.
Apart from what I hope is a justifiable human desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider, to run my own business in a regulated environment and not live in fear of it being taken away from me, and not to concern myself unduly that the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm, there is one overriding reason I must leave China. I want to give my children a decent education.
The domestic Chinese lower education system does not educate. It is a test centre. The curriculum is designed to teach children how to pass them. In rural China, where we have lived for seven years, it is also an elevation system. Success in exams offers a passport to a better life in the big city. Schools do not produce well-rounded, sociable, self-reliant young people with inquiring minds. They produce winners and losers. Winners go on to college or university to take “business studies.” Losers go back to the farm or the local factory their parents were hoping they could escape.
There is little if any sport or extracurricular activity. Sporty children are extracted and sent to special schools to learn how to win Olympic gold medals. Musically gifted children are rammed into the conservatories and have all enthusiasm and joy in their talent drilled out of them. (My wife was one of the latter.)
And then there is the propaganda. Our daughter’s very first day at school was spent watching a movie called, roughly, “How the Chinese people, under the firm and correct leadership of the Party and with the help of the heroic People’s Liberation Army, successfully defeated the Beichuan Earthquake.” Moral guidance is provided by mythical heroes from communist China’s recent past, such as Lei Feng, the selfless soldier who achieved more in his short lifetime than humanly possible, and managed to write it all down in a diary that was miraculously “discovered” on his death.
The pressure makes children sick. I speak from personal experience. To score under 95 per cent is considered failure. Bad performance is punished. Homework, which consists mostly of practice test papers, takes up at least one day of every weekend. Many children go to school to do it in the classroom. I have seen them trooping in at 6am on Sundays. In the holidays they attend special schools for extra tuition, and must do their own school’s homework for at least a couple of hours every day to complete it before term starts again. Many of my local friends abhor the system as much as I do, but they have no choice. I do. I am lucky.
An option is to move back to a major Chinese city and send our children to an expensive international school—none of which offer boarding—but I would be worried about pollution, and have to get a proper job, most likely something to do with foreign business to China, which my conscience would find hard.
I pity the youth of China that cannot attend the international schools in the cities (which have to set limits on how many Chinese children they accept) and whose parents cannot afford to send them to school overseas, or do not have access to the special schools for the Party privileged. China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible.
The Party does include millions of enlightened officials who understand that something must be done to avert a crisis. I have met some of them. If China is to avoid upheaval then it is up to them to change the Party from within, but they face a long uphill struggle, and time is short.
I have also encountered hundreds of well-rounded, wise Chinese people with a modern world view, people who could, and would willingly, help their motherland face the issues that are growing into state-shaking problems. It is unlikely they will be given the chance. I fear for some of them who might ask for it, just as my classmates and I feared for our Chinese friends while we took our final exams at SOAS in 1989.
I read about Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangchen and Liu Xiaobo on Weibo, the closely monitored Chinese equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, where a post only has to be up for a few minutes to go viral. My wife had never heard of them until she started using the site. The censors will never completely master it. (The day my wife began reading Weibo was also the day she told me she had overcome her concerns about leaving China for the UK.) There are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of mainland Chinese who “follow” such people too, and there must be countless more like them in person, trying in their small way to make China a better place. One day they will prevail. That’ll be a good time to become Chinese. It might even be possible.
2013-06-09
LINE app會過濾你的手機簡訊，如果你是大陸用戶的話
針對中國大陸手機門號 或者被認為是中國大陸用戶 就會過濾關鍵字 也就是寫了被封鎖的字就會發不出訊息
除了微信之外，LINE也會監控使用者輸入內容？
http://www.cool3c.com/article/67751
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LINE並無監控一事，廠商聲明提到關鍵字庫僅限於大陸用戶，是為了符合當地法規
http://www.cool3c.com/article/67767
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