‘Dare to Be Different’: A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Diasporic Chinese Protestant Ministries of Chinese International Students in the Netherlands in the 2010s

Dare to be different: A sociolinguistic perspective on diasporic Chinese Protestant ministries of Chinese international students in the Netherlands in the 2010s

Since the 2010s, the Netherlands has seen an increasing number of local and transnational migrant Chinese Protestant institutes operating across the country. Many of them organise or once organised particular religious services for Chinese international students in Dutch universities. These services meet with a mixed reception as they seek religious conversion, preach conservative social values, and have a significant impact on the student participants’ language practices.

The Chinese student religious services in the Netherlands provide a window into thriving non-Western Christianity in the Western world, further cultural diversification of the Chinese diaspora, and the interplay between language and religion. However, the dynamics of the services and of the broader Dutch Chinese Protestant community in the 2010s are largely unknown to both Dutch society and academia. Thus, drawing on an ethnographic approach, this study aims to shed a light on the very religious activities and interpret their implications for disciplines in migrant studies, religious studies and sociolinguistics.

With regard to non-western Christianity, there has been a proliferation of churches and adherents in the Dutch Chinese Protestant community; the migrant Chinese religious institutes exhibit hues of religious fundamentalism. In the meantime, somewhat uniquely, the local Dutch Chinese churches have a strong occupational background of the catering industry whereas the transnational religious institutes have several new features of religious fundamentalism. As an arrival infrastructure in the Dutch Chinese community, the Chinese student services function like cram schools in China and attract some student participants for religious as well as secular benefits. However, the services are discarded by the other because of various socio-cultural and socio-political differences between the service providers and the (former) student participants. In addition to religious conversion, the student religious services exert considerable influence upon the remaining student participants’ Mandarin Chinese speeches. The religiously influenced Chinese variety is based on the Chinese Union Version Bible and considered a by-product of the religious service providers’ fundamentalist doctrines.

Taking the Chinese student religious services in the Netherlands as an example, this study appeals for further academic works on migrant Chinese Protestant communities, transnationalism, and the religiously influenced Mandarin Chinese variety given their potential impact on non-Western Christianity, the Western host societies, the Chinese diaspora and China.